Editorial Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China

This volume of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China continues the tradition we began last year of featuring cultural issues that confront analysts and therapists as they apply psychoanalytic thinking to their work with Chinese patients and students. Therapy and work with institutions is embedded in the civilization in which we work, so the issues facing China and its people confront us every day that we conduct therapy, consultation, and training there.

This second volume of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China features an extraordinary essay by Richard Wu, an internationally recognised authority on ancient Chinese painting, and an analytic psychotherapist practicing in Sydney, Australia. Wu's essay looks at the practice of Chinese Xie Yi painting historically as performing a set of psychic functions for scholars and artists who could not safely speak out because of the political constraints of their time, and who therefore needed a subtle medium for reconciling themselves with Chinese society. This set of documents from times in China when things could not be said directly shows how these times of political repression can result in extraordinary creativity. Wu traces the unconscious functions that this art form carried for its practitioners, and for the viewers who understood its codified messages. Then he compares it to functions of the modern psychotherapist, and demonstrates how he uses Xie Yi painting to enhance his own therapeutic practice.

Tomas Plänkers of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, is one of the most respected teachers of psychoanalysis in China. He explores issues of prejudice and tolerance in an essay that draws from the history of these matters in Europe, but that apply to current concerns everywhere.

Alf Gerlach, one of the founders of psychoanalytic training in China through his introduction of the Sino-German training programme many years ago, focuses on the psychoanalytic understanding of Chinese life experience in a fi