Psychoanalytic Literacy
Core Question
The psychoanalytic field has rarely separated "literacy" from "training." Understanding is bound to credentialing, education to qualification — a binding that deserves examination.
This research programme names psychoanalytic literacy as an independent concept and investigates how it develops through multiple forms of practice.
Research Site
何苦开心 (hekukaixin) is a cultural-educational brand founded in 2020. Over six years it has grown into a multi-media ecology with 20,000+ readers: 300+ original articles, courses with 260+ paid subscribers, fiction, games, and AI-generated music and visual art — all exploring how psychoanalytic understanding travels through different channels.
The brand itself is the research site. Each piece of content is both a cultural product and a designed intervention within an iterative research cycle — with the researcher simultaneously acting as designer, practitioner, and subject.
Methodology
Design-Based Research (DBR) + Practice-as-Research (PaR)
Each piece of content — an article, a song, a game, a course module — is a designed experience within an iterative research cycle. The methodology studies both reception (how audiences develop literacy through engagement) and production (how creative practice itself becomes working-through).
DBR provides the iterative design logic. PaR provides the framework for treating creative output as knowledge-generating practice. Psychoanalytic methodology — particularly Britzman's concept of "difficult knowledge" — grounds the theoretical orientation. Multimodality theory (Kress) enables comparison across media forms.
Findings So Far
From coding of 36 reader responses across 3 data batches
Seven dimensions of psychoanalytic literacy have been identified from the data. These dimensions describe distinct cognitive and affective operations — not a single scale from "less" to "more" literate, but a cluster of qualitatively different capacities.
"Loosening" (松动) has emerged as an underlying process across all dimensions. Loosening names the moment when a fixed frame of understanding begins to yield — not toward a correct answer, but toward the capacity to hold more than one thing at a time.
Paid and public spaces cultivate different kinds (not degrees) of literacy. This is a structural finding, not a marketing claim: the containment provided by a paid community produces qualitatively different responses than open-access writing.
Two candidate dimensions are pending verification in the next data batch.
Research Stages
Concept Naming
Research: Name the concept of psychoanalytic literacy. Establish the initial framework and dimensional structure from empirical coding.
Practice: Findings are already informing course design and content strategy within 何苦开心.
Empirical Study Design
Research: Operationalize the literacy dimensions identified in Stage 1. Design a formal empirical study with structured data collection.
Practice: Evaluation framework for courses — a way to assess what different course designs actually cultivate.
Cross-Media Design Research
Research: Compare how psychoanalytic literacy develops across different media — text, music, games, courses. What design principles cultivate what kinds of literacy?
Practice: Content strategy and course module redesign grounded in empirical findings. Crosses with Gentle Structure Lab.
Theory Construction
Research: A full theory of psychoanalytic literacy — how it develops, what cultivates it, and what it means for psychoanalytic education beyond the clinic.
Practice: Teaching matrix systematized. The research programme's findings become the theoretical backbone of 何苦开心's educational design.
Related Publications
Production Side
These publications investigate the production dimension of psychoanalytic literacy — how creative practice becomes working-through.
- production Qiao, X. (2025). From Silence to Song: True Self-Emergence Through Creative Mourning. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 26(4), 318-330.
- production Qiao, X. (2025). Gaming the unconscious: The relational and social unconscious in a contemporary Chinese case study. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China, 8(1-2), 14-24.
- production Qiao, X. (2025). AI Assisted Creation and Narcissistic Predicament. APsaA Committee on AI Report.
Dissertation
- dissertation Qiao, X. (2024). Nurturing the Creative Self: Creative Ambivalence and Narcissistic Vulnerability in a Chinese Online Community. MA Psychoanalytic Research, The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. (Unpublished)
Key References
- Britzman, D. (1998). Lost Subjects, Contested Objects.
- Britzman, D. (2003). After-Education.
- Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments.
- Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality.
- McKenney, S. & Reeves, T. C. (2019). Conducting Educational Design Research.
- Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as Research in the Arts.
- Sandoval, W. (2014). Conjecture mapping.
- Tracy, S. J. (2013). Qualitative Research Methods.
- Tracy, S. J. (2020). Phronetic iterative analysis.
Roots
The research site — 何苦开心 and the ecology around it — has been building since 2020. Naming psychoanalytic literacy as a research programme in 2026 formalises six years of practice, not a fresh start.
何苦开心 founded
WeChat public account launched. Psychoanalytic writing for general audiences. Began translating psychoanalytic lecture videos.
First content experiments
Podcast 清醒梦 (30+ episodes). Paid newsletter 随愈而安 (小报童). Psychoanalytic literature notebook. 咨询师元知识库 launched. Completed 咨询师的自媒体指北.
Concept emerges
Chinese newsletter 阅读联想 launched (ongoing). The concept of psychoanalytic literacy begins to take shape — not yet explicitly named.
English expansion
English newsletter CPS launched (ongoing). Digital garden: 晓萌的过渡空间.
First academic study
MA dissertation: Nurturing the Creative Self (Tavistock) — first academic research on psychoanalytic literacy in an online community. Psychoanalysis-related AI creative work.
Multi-media expansion
AI music albums (Enough, Emotional Device 404). QPHU novel series begins. Six peer-reviewed papers published. CPS regular writing. 博雅精神分析 preparation — platform live and early users onboarded while refining course structure.
Programme launch
博雅精神分析 launched (260+ paid members). Psychoanalytic Literacy formally named as research concept. Reader response coding begins.