Issue Introduction: Psychoanalysis in China

Psychoanalysis was first introduced in China in 1912, but was suppressed, along with almost everything Western, with the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. After Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution - the most recent of many widespread traumas in China - China rapidly opened up to many Western ideas and technologies. Analysis arrived first in the early 1980s, followed by psychodynamic training in the late 1990s through programs offered by the German and Norwegian institutions, and through extended visits to Europe by Chinese mental health leaders. More recently the International Psychoanalytical Association, the Chinese-American Psychoanalytic Alliance, and other groups including the International Psychotherapy Institute, of which I am former director, have offered psychoanalytically oriented training more widely in China. At the same time, many psychoanalytic texts have been translated and published, including several of mine.

The encounter between psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapy - actually psychotherapy of all persuasions - with China and the Chinese is a complex, interesting, and often puzzling matter. It has been fascinating to me, because of all the countries in which I have taught, this culture is the most difficult to understand. The isolation of China from the West for more than half of the 20th century, the enigmatic quality of China's cultural assumptions when viewed from our Western perspective, the often adversarial nature of Chinese-American political relationships - all have meant that we come to China almost as from another planet. We believe we have something to offer the Chinese and their nascent mental health system, and those Chinese colleagues who want to work with us believe also that we have something to offer. But there is much more than a language barrier to negotiate in the process of rapprochement with our Chinese colleagues and students. There is the gap of understanding of more than 2500 years between two gr