Li Xintian

Introduction

Li Xintian (李心天, 1924–2019) was the physician who made psychology a medical specialty in China. Trained as an internist at the Xiangya Medical College — the institution that had also shaped Gong Yaoxian — he joined the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1958 and, with his team, created that same year the treatment known as Wujian therapy (悟践疗法, "comprehensive rapid therapy"), a synthesis of physiological, psychological and social intervention that cured large numbers of neurosis patients in 1950s China and earned a national award. He went on to found the Institute's medical psychology research office, pioneer Chinese neuropsychology with studies of cooperation between the cerebral hemispheres, and edit Medical Psychology, the reference work on which the field's professionalization was built. He was also, as obituaries noted with pride, the son of Li Da, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party.

Early Life and Education

Li was born in 1924 in Lingling (now Yongzhou), Hunan. He graduated from Xiangya Medical College in 1948 — its six-year program then conferred an MD-equivalent — and practiced internal medicine at the college for the following decade.

Academic and Professional Career

In 1958 he moved to the CAS Institute of Psychology, working alongside the psychologist Ding Zan and soon heading its medical psychology research office, later the Institute's office of medical and physiological psychology. His Wujian therapy teams treated neuroses in the late 1950s with results rewarded at the National Conference of Heroes; his neuropsychology program produced award-winning work on hemispheric cooperation and established clinical neuropsychology as a Chinese specialty. He edited Medical Psychology — the multi-author reference that standardized the field's teaching — and organized the discipline's committees within the Chinese Psychological Society and the China Mental Health Association. He died in Beijing on May 2, 2019, aged ninety-five, with a farewell ceremony at Babaoshan.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Therapy as total intervention

Wujian therapy refused the split between body and mind before Chinese medicine or psychology had institutional vocabulary for it: drugs, physiological regulation, exercise, and structured psychological work together. It was one of the first original Chinese contributions to psychotherapy, and its descendants remain visible in Chinese integrative approaches to clinical practice.

The medical wing of Chinese psychology

Between the medical psychology office at the Institute, the national reference book, and the committee structures he organized, Li turned "psychology in the hospital" from scattered practice into a profession — the counterpart, in the clinic, of what Gong Yaoxian built in assessment and Zhu Ying's generation built in the laboratory.