Beyond Psyche: Aesthetic Attunement and Alternative Psychological Care Through the Heart

Putting aside the idea of psyche as the universal basis of personhood in Euro-American psychology, this special issue charts new ground, engaging hybrid and alternative therapies in Japan and China that center the indigenous notion of the heart— xin in Chinese and kokoro in Japanese — as the basis for developing a novel, alternative template for psychological care. Xin is both body and mind, the ground for cognition, emotion, virtue, and bodily sensation. It is less concerned with being than with living and life, and thereby troubling ontological debates. Since xin is the means by which people experience culture, a xin -based approach to mental health care brings a new vision of inclusion. It is key to the aesthetic order associated with Confucianism. Aesthetic order requires people to tune in, artfully, to yin-yang dynamism in themselves, society, and the cosmos. Optimally, this aesthetic attunement brings about a fuller, holistic relationality. Yet, cultivating aesthetic attunement at all levels of individual and social life can become a source of distress for the heart. Heart-related distress of varying intensities eludes psychiatric diagnostic categories. Contributors to this special issue explore the possibility of establishing an embodied, felt (affective), and artful (aesthetic) template of psychological care anchored in the heart.