Lu Xun’s 狂

This chapter focuses on Lu Xun’s 狂 (“madness,” pronounced kuang) and his ironizing of the psychoanalytic term “persecution complex” in his short story “A Madman’s Diary.” The chapter speculates on the reasons why Lu Xun would reject imported Western psychiatry. I explore the cultural and medical discourses of the mind circulating at the time and focus specifically on two examples that Lu Xun would have been aware and critical of. I present Kang Youwei, an early revolutionary of Westernization and modernization. He advocated to eliminate/extinguish the madmen through Western eugenics in the new Confucian order. I also read Lu Xun alongside the ethnopsychology of Japan that supported the needs of Japanese expansion and colonization of Asia, inspired by French psychologist Gustave Le Bon’s orientalist and primitivist language circulating in Asia. These two instances are the reasons why I argue Lu Xun ironized and deconstructed psychiatry and empiricism. I also adopt the allegory of “eating man” in Lu Xun’s short story to rethink racist psychiatry as a man-eating discourse. In this, I argue that “A Madman’s Diary” presents the impossible predicament of a Chinese thinker living in global imperialisms, being persecuted on both sides, namely the continuation of ancient injustices and modern abuses.