Asia Pacific
Q. and A.: Tomas Plänkers on the Psychic Legacy of the Cultural Revolution
Fifty years after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Mao Zedong
and the Communist Party called on young people to “beat, smash, loot
and burn” in a rebellion against authority and tradition that left
millions dead, Chinese today are living with the psychic consequences of
that tumultuous decade, says Tomas Plänkers, a psychoanalyst at the
Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt.
For unlike in Germany after World War II or Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, free public debate is impossible. The party that unleashed the Cultural Revolution continues to rule China,
leaving many people with buried personal and intergenerational trauma,
and an “inner totalitarian object,” said Dr. Plänkers, who with Western
and Chinese colleagues conducted a multiyear research project in the
1990s on the psychological legacy of those years. One result of that
research is his edited volume, “Landscapes of the Chinese Soul: The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution.” In an interview, he discussed his findings.
Q. It’s
been half a century since the Cultural Revolution began. Many of the
perpetrators are elderly or have died. Is it really still important?
A.
Indeed, the topic really could disappear from individual memory and
public discourse. Which doesn’t change the fact that it will carry on in
the unconscious. These are themes that aren’t tied to time. It has been
well demonstrated with the Holocaust in Germany that the psychic
consequences don’t stop with one generation. They go into the second,
third, fourth. They stay around somewhere in the culture.
Dr. Tomas Plänkers
Credit
Dr. Tomas Plänkers
Q. In 1981, the Communist Party’s Central Committee issued the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China.” Didn’t that put an end to the question by admitting that Mao and the party made mistakes?
A.
The resolution also offered defense mechanisms for the people. “Don’t
continue to look into this. It’s over. Let’s look to the future.” It
calls it a great catastrophe but doesn’t deal with the causes of it. But
we know — not only from German history — that abandoning effective
controls on the public enables a small group of people to commit
atrocities.
Q. What is your experience discussing this in China?
A.
Cultures have intensive denial mechanisms to deal with such things,
something we also know from Germany. Fortunately in Germany today we
have a very vigorous intellectual culture and can say what we want in
order to resist this affective moment of denial. But the culture of the
critical intellectual is not very vigorous in China. And that has to do
with the political situation. Such commentary is unwelcome. Under such
conditions people think three times about saying anything.
Q. What about Chinese psychologists?
A.
In Shanghai last year I talked to about 200 Chinese mental health
professionals about the Mitscherlichs’ book [Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich, “The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior”] about Germany’s experiences with trauma after World War II.
I
only talked about Germany, but afterwards there was stormy discussion
of the Chinese situation. It’s amazing to see the reactions even when
the topic was only discussed indirectly. Many people were very critical
about China’s media and politics. So I asked them, “Do you talk about
this honestly in your own families?” And silence fell.
It’s
very similar to us in Germany. Children didn’t ask their parents about
their experiences during the Nazi time. They could feel that it was a
difficult subject. I didn’t ask my father what he did in the army. But
we should be asking, “Do you talk about it in your family? What do you
know? Do you have questions?”
Q. What are some of the consequences?
A. Michael Sebek
[a Czech psychoanalyst] wrote about the “internal totalitarian object”
in Eastern European Communist societies. There’s a diffuse feeling, a
sense that there is an inner totalitarian power that can threaten one,
and one has to submit to it. And it produces an intellectual atmosphere
that orders people not to ask questions. I think something very similar
is going on in China.
Q. What are some results of this?
A.
You can sense the hang-ups people have internalized. For example, the
pressure to succeed is enormously high. They hope that with success they
can protect themselves from the arbitrariness of the rulers. They
strive like this to avoid becoming helpless objects. Basically this
obsession with success is a fearful way to live.
Q. Is there hope for change in China?
A.
Society is starting to be more sensitive to psychology. There’s a
psychology boom in China today. What people don’t quite realize is that
investigating internal psychic conditions also means investigating
social conditions. But all we can do is let fall a few drops in the sea
of silence. Our book is out in German and English, but we still can’t
find a Chinese publisher.
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