Zhang Congzheng's 'Psychotherapy'
TCM holds the human being to be the head of the ten thousand spirits — a higher creature with complex mental and intellectual activity. Open the medical works of China's ancient physicians and one finds that the early sages, from an integral macro view, took up the physiological-and-pathological relation of form and spirit — body and mind — and built a plain mind-body medical system. They formed the theory of the storehouses harboring spirit and the seven emotions injuring within, with its native technique of emotion subduing emotion, leaving behind classic case-records full of meaning.
Zhang Congzheng (1156–1228), one of the Four Great Physicians of the Jin-Yuan, was the representative figure of the Attacking-and-Purging School of Chinese medicine. He was skilled at TCM psychological treatment. Drawing out the theory of "emotion subduing emotion" from the Huangdi Neijing, he said: "Grief can treat anger — move him with words of mournful, painful sorrow. Fear can treat joy — frighten him with words of death and ruin. Anger can treat brooding — strike him with words of insult and deceit. Brooding can treat … — seize him with words that pull his will from there to here. Always, these five must be done with cunning and the strange, sparing no means — only then can ears and eyes be moved, hearing and seeing changed."
In Rumen Shiqin, the following case of Zhang's is recorded.
The wife of Wei Dexin, frightened by night by robbers, fell from her bed. From then on she dreaded sound — even the footsteps of her own household made her fall in fright and lose consciousness. After long thought Zhang Congzheng had two maidservants press her hands onto a high chair; he set a bamboo table before her and struck it repeatedly with a wooden stick. At the first sounds the woman trembled in dread; but as the striking went on she grew used to it.
Zhang Congzheng held: "Fright comes from not knowing the cause; fear comes from knowing it. The ordinary is the constant; what is constantly seen brings no fright." To treat by frightening a fright-induced palpitation was an ingenious extension of TCM's emotion-subduing-emotion theory. From the angle of clinical psychology, the case belongs to "phobia" among the neuroses. Under a particular mind-body state, an originally harmless or irrelevant experience — the conduct of the robbers — produced fear in the woman; this stressor was negatively reinforced and generalized, so that she feared any sound. Zhang's striking the bamboo table with the stick kept the patient for a long time inside the most-feared, pressing situation, achieving to shift essence and change qi, transforming the inner long-standing scene.
Excerpted from Health News, 12 February