In a new article in the Review of General Psychology, anthropologist Jie Yang of Simon Fraser University argues that modern psychology’s reliance on the “psyche” leaves out something essential. Instead of focusing on the brain or mind as the seat of distress, her research turns to the indigenous concepts of xin in Chinese and kokoro in Japanese, both usually translated as “heart” or “heart-mind.”
“Our shared interest lies in the potential for heart, rather than the psyche, to be the ground for developing a new template of psychological care,” they write.
She describes this heart-based template as both “affective, that is, embodied, sensitive to intensities of feeling emanating from heart-related distress” and “aesthetic, meaning artful and intuitive, because xin, the Chinese term for the heart, which is also the origin of kokoro in Japan, is both body and mind.”
Concepts of xin and kokoro, they note, “suggest an interdependent self, rather than a bounded, individual self, such as the one we associate with tenets of Euro-American psychology and the psyche.”
The study documents how these traditions frame the heart not only as a physical organ but as the ground of cognition, emotion, virtue, and social life. Yang and collaborators describe this approach as “aesthetic attunement”: an artful, embodied way of aligning the self with others, society, and the cosmos. They argue that heart-based care provides healing potential where psychiatric categories like depression and anxiety fall short.
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