Women’s Images of the Mother Complex in the Context of Chinese Culture: A Perspective of Analytical Psychology

Despite more than a century of social changes that have brought Chinese women out of their traditional submission to unquestioned gender inferiority all the way into a willingness to voice their desires for equality and relative independence in ways that compare to women’s liberation in the West, the psychological lives of women living in China today remain full of contradictions. In analysis (which has become more available in the last ten years), contemporary Chinese women freely voice their resistance to the old cultural complex that “prefers sons to daughters,” and their independent incomes often speak to their desire to be able to compete with men for equal power in families, corporations, and government jobs. Nevertheless, a Chinese analyst quickly learns that these are the same women as their mothers who were neglected, belittled, and abandoned by their original family, for being born female into a that felt it needed to produce a boy to maintain its productivity and social standing. As Susan Rowland has noted, “Patriarchal ideology depends upon the suppression of the feminine as inferiority” (Rowland, 2002, p.77), and this has continued in subtle and not so subtle ways in contemporary China. In the following discussion, I will further illustrate through specific cases how this enduring cultural complex continues to impact women’s self-esteem and capacity for genuine self realization.