Liver qi stagnation: east and west
Item
Title
Liver qi stagnation: east and west
Description
EJOM (2020), Wells, Kim.
Abstract
This article is a critical examination of current understandings of and applications of the concept of Liver qi stagnation or constraint, largely from a cross-cultural perspective. In particular, it looks at the way its meaning has changed in the course of its transposition to the West. It claims Western practitioners of Chinese medicine have tended to more closely identify this concept with emotional suppression than clinicians in China, who have traditionally been more inclined to focus on the somatic manifestations of stagnation (often sidestepping the emotional realm and even colluding with patients to gloss over signs of socially unacceptable psychological disorders). It relates this to radical differences in the ways Westerners and Chinese view the emotions and the self, with the former influenced by Freudian-derived notions such as repression and stressing the therapeutic benefits of expressing and exploring feelings; and the latter much more inclined to see emotions as potential pathogenic factors, which need to be contained and 'rectified'. It also claims that the concept of Liver qi stagnation has been Westernized in another sense, by being over-simplistically and too readily equated with Western biomedical categories such as depression and anxiety as well as popular conceptions like stress, and that this tendency has been encouraged in China as well as the West by the TCM orthodoxy that ha promoted it as the favoured diagnostic option for emotion-related disorders.
Alternative Title
EJOM
Creator
Date
Language
English
Subject
issn
13516647
issue
5
page end
47
page start
38
volume
9