How Individuals in Collectivist Cultures Overcome Crisis of Self-Development: A Psychobiographical Exploration of Li Qingzhao and Her Female Self-Awakening

In order to explore the insufficient research on how women achieve self realization and promote their own development in the context of familism, we conducted a psychobiographical study on Li Qingzhao, a famous independent woman in China. We used evaluative qualitative content analysis to process the data, focusing on the two themes of individual self and familial self as expressed in Li Qingzhao's works. Familialism influenced the development of Li Qingzhao's self through the intergenerational implicit transmission of paternal family cultural values. Li Qingzhao achieved 'alternative self-actualization' through an indirect process, focusing her personal ambitions on her partner and literary works. Her personal development trajectory demonstrates that the exploration of self-concept should combine macro factors such as history and culture with micro factors such as identity background, and reexamine the applicability of self-concept theories based on different cultural backgrounds. At the methodological level, we adopted evaluative qualitative content analysis to expand the data extraction method of psychological biography research. At the theoretical level, we proposed the concepts of "self-tide effect", expanding the research perspective of dialogic self theory. At the application level, Li Qingzhao's experience provides feasible experience on how to overcome self-development crisis.