Cross-cultural experiences and self-development: a psychobiographical study of Bruce Lee

Abstract

A common challenge people face in today’s cross-cultural world is how to solve a series of adaptation problems caused by cultural conflict. Exploring Bruce Lee’s successful cross-cultural experiences through psychobiography offers some inspiration and thoughts. How did Bruce Lee successfully integrate martial arts, symbolising the Eastern culture, with films representing the Western culture, finally propelling kung fu films onto the international stage? Numerous publicly available materials about Bruce Lee were collected for this study, and the research data were evaluated using thematic analysis. Bruce Lee’s success benefitted from reconstructing cultural environment information and exercising his initiative to shape a new cultural environment. His life experiences reflect individual cognition behaviour and social and cultural environments as two aspects of a dynamic circulation system and show that the two have reached internal and spiralling harmony through mutual integration. In the context of the Oriental collectivism culture’s family narrative, Chinese adults’ personality development features the unique theme of ‘inheritance and innovation’. Dealing with the relationship between self-actualisation and familism is another important and challenging task in developing the Chinese personality.

Keywords:

• Bruce Lee
• psychobiography
• familism
• self-development
• cultural psychology
• yin-yang philosophy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The purpose of martial arts is not to hurt the opponent, but to defend oneself and strengthen the body.