Reifying the individual self through social cohesion: a study of extracurricular programmes for self-improvement in urban China

Gil Hizi

Extracurricular programmes for psychotherapeutic personal development in China demonstrate an intriguing combination of hyper individualism and group identity. Workshop activities herald slogans of individual uniqueness and omnipotence, while producing communitas through shared laughter, weeping and touch. This discrepancy exists party due to the capacity of individual-centred discourse to destabilize for participants perception of social structure and fixed roles, thereby opening imagined paths for self-fashioning. Widespread essentialist perceptions that identify the dominance of interdependency in Chinese social life further underline this process. At another level, group cohesion instantiates the mutual recognition of the seeming individualized “skills” that are fostered om these workshops, thereby enabling participants to experience accomplishment as they exercise emotional disclosure, public speaking and other pedagogical tasks. 

This presentation is based on thirteen months of fieldwork in programmes for personal development for young adults in a second-tier city in northern China. These workshops draw on various expertise in psychology, management and public speaking. I analyse the duality of individual-centred perceptions with the permeation of participants through the interactive pedagogical space. In particular, I juxtapose this duality with tenets of globalized positive psychology. Several scholarly works have documented the appeal of positive psychology in China due to its focus on behaviourist agenda that resonates with Maoist practices, as well as the fact that positive psychology promotes proactive self-improvement that evades the pathologies imposed by more psychoanalytical approaches. At the same time, pedagogical interactions in China involve dynamics of interpersonal emotional resonance that are more unique to local forms of sociality. This paper expands this discussion by dissecting popular literature and curricula of positive psychology. I explore positive psychology’s emphases on bodily awareness and the flow of contagious “positive energy,” and how it shapes self-improvement in complex dynamics of individualization and relationality. By engaging with phenomenological accounts on social interaction and anthropological commentaries on “non-dualism,” I discuss how the self-mastering individual re-emerges both in Chinese workshops and literature of positive psychology, and what are the attributes of this individual in relation everyday social life.