Gao Juefu

Introduction

Gao Juefu (高觉敷, 1896–1993) did for Chinese psychology what a good librarian does for a civilization: he kept its memory. A Zhejiang-born educator who studied at the University of Hong Kong and spent the 1920s and 1930s editing the philosophy-and-psychology list at the Commercial Press, he translated Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis into Chinese in 1930 — the translation through which generations of Chinese readers actually met psychoanalysis — and later rendered E. G. Boring's History of Experimental Psychology. In his seventies and eighties, at Nanjing Normal University, he edited the two works that defined psychology's historiography in China: the standard History of Modern Western Psychology (early 1980s) and the founding History of Chinese Psychology (mid-1980s), the latter the first systematic attempt to reconstruct a psychological tradition inside two millennia of Chinese texts.

Early Life and Education

Gao was born on November 6, 1896, in Wenzhou, Zhejiang (birth name Gao Zhuo; Juefu his courtesy name). He graduated from the University of Hong Kong in 1923, in the era when Hong Kong was the other great conduit — alongside Japan — for Western psychology entering China.

Academic and Professional Career

His early career ran through publishing and teaching together. At the Commercial Press in Shanghai he edited the philosophy and psychology section alongside the scholar-translator Tang Yue, acquiring the editorial habits — care with sources, care with terms — that mark all his later work. He taught at several universities, including Sun Yat-sen University and Central University, before settling after the 1952 reorganization at Nanjing Normal College (later Nanjing Normal University), where he spent the rest of his life and built the discipline's history-of-psychology program. He died in February 1993, at ninety-six, the most senior psychologist in Nanjing.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Freud in Chinese

The 1930 translation of A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (《精神分析引论》) is the work that made Freud a presence in Chinese letters — clinicians, novelists and polemicists alike read Freud through Gao's vocabulary, and the translation has stayed in print for decades. His rendering of the New Introductory Lectures followed.

The discipline's two histories

The History of Modern Western Psychology (《西方近代心理学史》) organized the discipline's Western lineage — from Wundt through the schools — for Chinese classrooms, while the History of Chinese Psychology (《中国心理学史》) undertook the harder, founding task: showing that psychological thinking in China had its own continuous tradition, from ancient debates on human nature through the modern importation of Western science. Together they gave Chinese psychology both an origin abroad and an ancestry at home, which is what a young discipline needs to know it has a future.