Narrations of Personality Disorders in a Famous Chinese Novel of the Eighteenth Century - A Dream of Red Mansions

Abstract

Journal of Psychiatry AbstractBackground: Traditional Chinese culture, such as the paternalism, male dominance and collectivism, contribute to normal and disordered personality traits, and the influence might be traced back to an ancient epoch. As a compendium of Chinese culture, the novel, A Dream of Red Mansions (up to first 80 chapters) written in the 18th century, might be a vector of these traces.

Cultural Psychiatry: A Promising Area for Research and Practice

“…The cultural influence is emic, and can be traced back to documentations or fictions written many years ago. Bearing this in mind, a group of investigators have studied culture and its related psychiatric disorders in the late imperial China [6]. They selected and voted on the personalitydescriptive terms (adjective)/ phrases, and sentences/ paragraphs in a Chinese novel well-reflecting Chinese traditional culture, A Dream of Red Mansions, and compared them with the classification criteria of the contemporary documentation, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder-Version 5 [1].…”