the thesis — No.1

Why Be Happy

Why be happy when you could be normal? Because normal was never on the table. This project uses psychoanalysis to think about the inner life — the queer parts, the diasporic parts, the parts that don't fit anywhere. In Chinese and in English, from the gap between.

After Winterson — a question, not a promise. Not be happy, but first: find precise words for what you are living through. In two languages. The gap between them is where we work.

Read the writing → The research ↗

The work

Four ways in

Not a mirror of the Chinese side.
The other face of the same magazine.

Writing

Essays on the inner life — the parts that don't fit. Chinese experience, queer subjectivity, the politics of training, the body's memory. Writing that thinks out loud, for readers who arrive through thinking. essays · CPS · professional writing · podcasts · talks

Read →

Experience

Where the work stops being words. Sound, fiction, games, software — ways to meet the inner life that a paper can't carry. Palimpsest · QPHU · Spotify · games & software

Enter →

Research

Three research programmes asking the same question from different directions: how does psychoanalytic understanding grow outside its institutions? Through literacy, through design, through the encounter between systems that don't share a language. Psychoanalytic Literacy · Gentle Structure Lab · Buddhism × Psychoanalysis · peer-reviewed papers

The programme →

About

Not everyone fits. This project starts from that — in Chinese and in English, using the same method, for different audiences. The story of how one field, one method, and two languages became a single practice. the mission · Jo Qiao · the bilingual project

Who →

Currently

What's alive now

A living practice — not an archive.
What's being written, researched, and built right now.

Talk · BPF New

Understanding Chinese Subjectivity: Growth Rings, Psychoanalytic Development, and Clinical Implications

Invited presentation at the British Psychoanalytic Foundation. How six layers of enigmatic messages shape Chinese subjectivity — and what this means for clinical work.

By Jo Qiao · May 2026

Recent

Talk 2026

Ghostly Persistence: The Indigestible Queer Subject in China

Research · PL ongoing

Psychoanalytic Literacy — how it grows outside the clinic

Experience new

Palimpsest — a psychoanalytic vibe coder

Writing · PQ —

Murakami's Traumatic Cities: When Time Stops in the Unconscious

A century of thinking about the inner life — and almost none of it written for the people who need it most.

the premise of the whole project