Cultural Heritages and Mental Health: Towards the Self-Nature and its Implications for Psychotherapy

The ultimate goal of life of Chinese psychotherapies is to help a client to attain the ideal person, a fully functioning person with full potential and authentic-durable happiness. Generally, the cultural heritages store wisdom for how we can cope with our questions of human existence and become an ideal person with the most optimal self-functioning. The purpose of the chapter is to mention the cultural heritages and mental health aiming at attaining the self-nature states, as well as their implications for psychotherapy. Accordingly, the theories, objectives, and methods of mental health intervention might be profoundly influenced by our cultural wisdom and its origin. However, there are no theoretic models to coherently, systematically, and logically delineate Chinese cultural heritages together in a theoretical way. For this reason, Chinese culture-inclusive theories need to be developed. My epistemological strategy for developing culture-inclusive theories is to use a universal model of the self to analyze three major Chinese cultural traditions. The formal Mandala Model of Self (MMS) was developed to describe the well-functioning self in various cultures. MMS is suitable for elucidating the relationship between cultural heritages and mental health through its four concepts: biology, the ideal person, knowledge or wisdom, and action. MMS is also suitable to analyze the self-structure of the three major Chinese cultural traditions in order to construct their self-enlightenment models, will be addressed in the Chaps. 3– 5. These three self-enlightenment models are used as the theoretic foundations of Chinese psychotherapies. On the basis of Psychodynamic Model of Self-Nature (PMS), the assumption that the psychodynamic process of transitioning from the self to the self-nature exists in all cultures. The self-nature is defined by its own culture, entirely oriented towards the Good of wholeness, the well-functioning self with full potential. MMS and PMS argue that the self possesses the abilities of socialized reflexivity and self-exertion leading to self-enlightenment process from cultivating the self to the self-nature, state which is an ultimate psychotherapeutic goal that will not generate mental disturbances or suffering. The self-enlightenment cultivating process from the self to the self-nature state and psychological functioning of the self-nature in the context of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism and the self are illustrated. The self-nature implications for psychotherapy include the therapeutic goal, the achievement of which has four steps and requirements for a therapist. The first step is to absorb the cultural wisdom. The second step is action. To minimize the desiring self is the third step. The final step is to form a habit of cultivating the self-enlightenment. He or she will make great effort to minimize the discrepancy toward an ideal person, attaining the self-nature state.