It’s quite by accident that I have this link with France. After I finished my history degree at Chengdu University I was sent by the government to work at the Museum of the Imperial Palace in Beijing, in the Forbidden City. At the time, in 1977, choosing where you wanted to work wasn’t it wasn’t an option. You were sent where you were needed. It was called fenpei. During that time I met a lot of people, including Dai Sijie, who was later to become a well-known film-maker and writer, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Mr Muo's Traveling Couch. I had a friend from Sichuan who had also fallen in love with France and who had a longstanding dream of going to study there. We used to meet up every Sunday in my studio apartment, just outside the Forbidden City. Together we discovered Western philosophers like Hegel, Kant and Plato, and we asked ourselves difficult questions about Marxism and Leninism, the historical and universal Truth that we had been brought up on since we were children. We talked of France and the Revolution. We changed the world until dawn broke… We were young, rebellious and idealistic.

After spending five years in Beijing, I went back to my birthplace, Chengdu. At university I had met a student with whom I had fallen madly in love. Like millions of young Chinese people, my life appeared to be planned out in the smallest detail: love, marriage, family, obligatory studies. But a letter from Alexandre Kojève, a disciple of Hegel, claiming that communism was not the inevitable path for Asian countries to take, was to turn my life upside down. I was deeply shocked by this unexpected revelation which put my entire education into question. I decided to give up my lover and my life to answer what had become the central question for me: if Marxism wasn’t the answer for China, what was the alternative? With a handful of yuan in my pocket and a university grant I left for Paris in1986 and started to undergo psychoanalysis. It was both obvious and necessary. Both personal and philosophical. I needed some answers.

China is a hundred years behind the West in the area of psychoanalysis. I first read the basic texts under the bedclothes, as it were. First was the shock of discovering Freudian thought and the discovery of the Interpretation of Dreams. The unconscious was an erotic impulse? Our suffering is caused by the repression of desire? Get rid of repression and you will be happy! I believed it all back then. But it was with the discovery of Lacan, of his claim that the unconscious is structured like language, that I was able to apply psychoanalysis to the ‘Chinese model’ specifically by the study of character. Lacan was incontestably a master. It is he who gave psychoanalysis, the foundation of all human sciences, its credentials. From a personal point of view, he allowed me to think of myself as I am, with all my imperfections and failings. It was he who gave me the courage to accept, without fear, the idea of love and death. With this sharpened and acute awareness, he made me into a happy man.

Today in China people seem lost: ‘Where do I come from? Where am I heading? What matters to me?’ are questions which Chinese people, for all their diversity, don’t ask themselves. For Chinese people problems fall into two categories. There are the jiating xiaoshi, the small issues that one sorts out in private, whether they are with parents or between couples. These are deeply personal issues: sexual freedom, suicide, abortion… And then, alongside these issues, there are the guojia dashi, national problems, which are dealt with by the Party at a national level, which are never challenged: politics, freedom of speech, the right to demonstrate, religion… Psychoanalysis, considered for so long a decadent way of thinking, influenced by Marxist semantics, for many years fell into the second category. But things are changing.

China only started to take an interest in psychotherapy in 1990. It was no longer something to be afraid of. The reason was simple. We were living through enormous, dizzying changes in all areas: social, economic, geographic. These problems used to be treated as moral issues. People were told that their thought patterns were corrupt and and they were asked to commit to the official ideology. Leisure activities were considered to be capitalist. Tea houses were banned. Since the events of Tian’anmen the government has found it harder and harder to control this cultural development. The government has come to recognise that the psychoanalytic and psychological way of thinking can help answer certain issues. It remains to be seen if it will accept these answers… And if I am still alive to witness the ‘consciousness revolution’.