Che Wenbo

Introduction

Che Wenbo (车文博, 1931–2023) gave Chinese readers Freud entire. Over three decades he organized, edited and drove to publication the Chinese collected works of Freud (《弗洛伊德文集》) — first issued in 2004 and expanded in 2014 to twelve volumes, some 2.6 million characters produced with more than forty translators — a project so complete that colleagues called him "China's Freud." Around that monument he built two more fields: he was China's leading early scholar of humanistic psychology (Maslow and Rogers, at a time when both were ideologically awkward), and, after Pan Shu and Gao Juefu, the central figure of theoretical psychology and the history of the discipline in China. His collected output — two hundred papers, seventy-odd books — made him one of the discipline's most prolific institution-men.

Early Life and Education

Che was born in February 1931 in Fuyu County, Jilin (now part of Songyuan), on the Songhua River. He entered higher education in the late 1940s, completed graduate study in the education department of Beijing Normal University in 1952 under the psychologist Yang Qing, and spent over a year at a medical university studying physiology and anatomy — a combination of pedagogy, theory and biology that prefigured the breadth of his later work.

Academic and Professional Career

After teaching stints at Northeast Normal University and then Northeast People's University (the predecessor of Jilin University), he settled at Jilin University's philosophy department, where he was professor of psychology and doctoral supervisor for more than four decades. Within the Chinese Psychological Society he rose to direct its committee on basic theory — a post he is said to have taken up on the recommendations of Pan Shu and Gao Juefu themselves — and served as a standing director of the Society and on the editorial board of Acta Psychologica Sinica. He died on January 4, 2023, at ninety-three, in Changchun.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Freud in full

Gao Juefu had introduced Freud to China in 1930 through a single translated volume; Che's collected works delivered the entire corpus, newly translated and systematically edited. The project doubled as rehabilitation: it returned psychoanalysis — and with it a serious literature on unconscious motivation — to the center of Chinese theoretical debate after decades in which it could barely be discussed.

Humanistic psychology as a field

His books on Maslow, Rogers and third-force psychology (including Humanistic Psychology, 2003, in the "Century Psychology" series) founded the Chinese literature on the tradition that fed positive psychology — an act of translation in the broadest sense, carried out while the ideas were still politically delicate.

The discipline's theorist

As editor of the Encyclopedia of Psychological Counseling and deputy editor of the standard Modern History of Western Psychology, and as the Society's basic-theory chairman, he shaped how Chinese psychologists think about what psychology is — the unglamorous work of definitions, systems and schools on which every empirical field quietly depends.