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Many professionals, intellectuals, and politicians expectantly await the awakening of the ‘sleeping giant’, as Napoleon once referred to China. Members of the psychoanalytic movement appreciate how difficult will be the task of introducing and developing our science in that country, and this panel was organized to give initial perspectives. Before inviting the panelists to present, the moderator, with practical experience since 1995 of working in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong and Taiwan, remarked that 2005 represents the 10th anniversary of the IPA starting operations in the PRC, which have knock-on effects throughout the region. Psychoanalysis is a cross-cultural discipline whose international discourse and practice face new challenges in ethnic Chinese societies. Although much research is required into these new encounters and developments, psychoanalysis will never lose its unique and metaphorical identity. This is one of the discipline's creative convergences and motive of inspiration for the Chinese thinking.
Alf Gerlach presented the paper ‘Psychoanalysis, an inspiration for Chinese culture?’ Until the beginning of the 1990s, psychotherapeutic methods used in the PRC were oriented to behavioral therapy or supportive techniques. The techniques were based on traditional Chinese models, which exclude disclosures about one's own feelings and thoughts to a stranger as well as openness to sexual desire. These cultural patterns are more oriented to conflicts of shame than to feelings of guilt and impede the adoption of insight-oriented psychotherapy.
First, Gerlach discussed psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in pre-revolutionary China. Western medicine was first introduced in the 19th century by Christian missionaries, the first psychiatric clinic opening in Canton in 1898. In 1935-9, Dr. Bingham Dai, a psychiatrist born in China and psychoanalytically trained in the USA, worked at the Peking Union Medical College, but was forced to emigrate to the USA