Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

Confucian ethical system that constantly reinforced societal norms and the insensitivity of patriarchy; the incapacity of intellectuals to overcome social inertia and sustain efforts to radically reform thinking and norms of behavior; or his more general indictment that society from the top to the bottom exhibited a cascading pattern of behavior that can be characterized at every level as the stronger preying on the weaker. His commitment to unmasking all pretense and hypocrisy, including his own rigorous self-scrutiny, all speak to a ferocious intent to reduce suffering by revealing systems of oppression, of ideology, and by bringing to light the unthought and unsaid cruelties that hide under any pious sounding label, even—or for Lu Xun especially—the revered texts of the Confucian tradition.

The first question, then, is what new insights about the stories emerge from attention to suffering and to the metaphor of healing? Does it help surface an implicit model of the therapeutic process, including the definition of cure?

Innumerable studies of Lu Xun’s fictions that consider his analysis of society and culture demonstrate, even if they do not use the metaphor of healing, that he most certainly had a diagnosis and the etiology for the unprecedented historical situation. Clearly, he labeled major elements of normative Chinese behavior pathological, a disease to be cured, and he attributed significant responsibility for this pathology to the Confucian classics, the worldview that they supported, and the accretion of generations of dysfunctional elements in Chinese culture. The iconoclastic tenor of his attack on major elements of the Chinese tradition is well documented and accounts, in part, for his later embrace by Chairman Mao. Further, his radical turn in the late 1920s and1930s affirmed his dedication to activating a therapeutic process for the nation. Yet in that domain he had only minimal vision of the state of health, and one could easily argue, as some have, that he chose the leftist path not out of conviction of its likely success, but because all other paths seemed closed. Nevertheless, this social/historical focus on the external