Understanding the Notion of Self-Experience and Its Psychoanalytic and Cultural Implications in Working with Chinese Clients

"Self-experience" is a popular phrase among Chinese psychotherapist professional circles. This article provides a historical overview of the development of this term and explores the underlying social, cultural, and historical elements of the dynamics of this unique lexical choice. We argue that the preference for using "self-experience" instead of "personal treatment" implies a tendency of the Chinese collective consciousness to depathologize the inner feelings of traumatic experience, reflecting the Chinese philosophy of life, that is, emphasizing the upward potential to grow and learn to change. On the other hand, we need to be careful in assessing whether psychoanalysis is comprehending patients' cultural and historical contexts so that we are healing the trauma rather than creating new ones.