How The Catcher in the Rye helped a clinical psychologist get to know herself better, and have empathy and compassion for her teenage patients
- Jamie Chiu works extensively with teenagers and the novel helped give her a better perspective on what they were going through
- Generations of people have grown up identifying with the book, and it has helped many feel less anxious and isolated
Both a literary classic and one of the most popular English-language novels of the 20th century, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is a tale of teenage angst and alienation, depicting protagonist Holden Caulfield’s struggles to come to terms with an adult world that he finds fake, shallow and hypocritical.
Jamie Chiu Chin-mee, a clinical psychologist who works extensively with teenagers and who is co-founder of The Brightly Project, a Hong Kong-based start-up that creates digital mental health programmes for schools, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
When I first read it, I’d just moved to Australia. I got it from my English teacher. I had been living in Ghana, where my dad was running a Chinese restaurant. We’d lived in Australia before, when he was working in a restaurant – but he got a chance to run one in Ghana, and part of the deal was that my brother and I could go to an international school there.
When I was about 13, my parents split up and my mum took me back to Australia. I went from an bubble “bubble” environment, with 10 kids per class, to a public school in Australia. My mum doesn’t speak English, the finances weren’t good – it was a hard adjustment. That was why I very much identified with Holden. “Why do people keep expecting things from me?” These were things I thought adults should do, like translating at the bank. I felt I didn’t have a say.
I’ve read it a number of times throughout the years, and the feeling I get each time is different, which I find interesting.
The first time I read it was as a teenager, it was very much that cliched feeling of “I am Holden”. I identified with him. In my early 20s, I read it again and hated it. I thought, “Holden’s so whiny and self-absorbed – was I like that as a teen?”
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Now I work as a psychologist with young people and teens, I have a different perspective, where I see Holden as an insecure, hurting young person who’s trying to navigate the world but doesn’t know what to do, and ends up isolating himself with his tough exterior. I have more sympathy for my past self and for the young people who I work with.
Maybe my love for the book also pertains to coming from a Chinese family where no one talks about emotions. When I first read it, I didn’t have the words to even think about my feelings. This book expressed all the feelings I had within me but couldn’t express.
It opened up an avenue for me of books being a vessel to understanding myself and knowing myself better. I studied psychology more for a self-serving motivation – I wanted to understand myself. I grew up always thinking there was something wrong with me.
A lot of teens tell me that this is the book they identify with. Generations of people have grown up reading it and identifying with it, especially the kids I’m seeing, who are anxious and depressed. In therapy, I’m trying to help kids who feel like Holden to no longer feel like Holden, but also to have empathy and compassion for their past selves.
