The psychologizing of Chinese healing practices in the United States

This paper explores ways in which Chinese healing practices have undergone acculturation in the United States since the early 1970s. Reacting to what is perceived as biomedicine's focus on the physiological, those who describ e themselves as favoring a holistic orientation often use the language of " energy blockage" to explain illness, whether thought of as "physical," "emo tional," or "spiritual." Acupuncture in particular has been appropriated as one modality with which to "unblock" such conditions, leading to its being used by some practitioners in conjunction with more psychotherapeutic appr oaches which include valuing the verbalizing of feelings. Some non-Chinese practitioners in the United States, returning to older Chinese texts to dev elop "an American acupuncture," are reinserting diagnoses eliminated from T raditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) by the People's Republic of China as "sup erstition." The assumption has been that many such diagnostic categories re fer to psychological or spiritual conditions, and therefore may be useful i n those American contexts which favor this orientation. Among these categor ies are those drawn from traditions of demonology in Chinese medicine. What was once a religious category in China turns psychological in the American setting. At the same time, many who use these terms have, since the late 1 960s, increasingly conflated the psychological and the religious, the latte r being reframed as "spiritual." Thus, this indigenization of Chinese pract ices is a complex synthesis which can be described as simultaneously medica l, psychotherapeutic, and religious.