Editor's Introduction

This section's four papers deal with the use of teleanalysis, telepsychotherapy, and telesupervision. These modalities are clearly going to be of real importance in China, with its vast geographic spread and its paucity of well-trained psychodynamic therapists in these years in which psychotherapy is being popularised. The need is great, and the number of therapists small, with the added complication of a concentration of trained therapists in large cities.

The first two articles, by Lin Tao and Irmgard Dettbarn, respectively, examine the advantages and disadvantages of using Skype or similar platforms for distance analysis, and especially focus on the need to consider the psychodynamics of this new kind of setting for analysis. The third article, by Alexander-Guerra, describes the use of distance communication for supervision of psychotherapy, again a need when resources for well-trained supervisors exist largely outside China itself. The final article presents a radical innovation, and one that will elicit both interest and controversy. Li Zhen's development of a service specifically offering distance psychotherapy in China and beyond is innovative, takes advantage of the new technologies, and takes on the problem of quality control in a field in which this is a major concern.

We welcome responses to these four articles and hope to publish some of them in a future issue.