Psychic threesomes: madness and psychotherapy in Xu Xu’s novel Elegy of a Psychotic (Jingshenbing huanzhe de beige)

Although Xu Xu’s (1908–1980) writing has garnered increasing attention in scholarly criticism and literary histories, his insightful novella Jingshenbing huanzhe de beige (Elegy for a Psychotic, 1943) has not attracted the same attention as his other writing. Elegy is a rare example of a literary engagement with psychological theories and clinical approaches. Central to the novel is the triangular relationship between a psychiatric assistant, a patient, and the patient’s live-in nurse, framed from beginning to end by the mentoring of the assistant by a famous French psychiatrist. This narrative set-up creates a dynamic that captures the representation of abnormal psychology and the reception of psychological idea. This paper argues that the narrative format and the psycho-ethical engagement of Elegy offer a rare cross-cultural examination of psychological ideas and psychotherapy in literary representation. As a coming of age story that takes place in 1930s Paris rather than in China and draws on Xu Xu’s neo-Romanticism, it points to a universally shared trauma derived from social repression and high idealism. In addition, it is a rare piece of writing that draws extensively on the nexus between medicine and literature and thus offers an interesting contribution to the field of Medical Humanities.