Governing “Officials’ Heartache”: Aesthetic Attunement, Philosophical Counseling, and Psychomoral Training in China

Diverging from care modalities based on psyche, "Confucianized" psychomoral training for Chinese officials who suffer from heartache (mental distress and ethical conflicts) emphasizes the heart/xin as the moral core and its affective and aesthetic attunement in achieving harmony. However, the focus on the heart, while valuable in "indigenizing" or recasting psychology from Chinese precepts, remains tied to state ideologies. Such training moralizes structural issues that have generated heartache. This dual process of "indigenization" and Confucianization highlights contentious roles psychotherapists and moral psychologists play in cultivating a form of therapeutic governance anchored in the heart that straddles party-state and market in the name of care.