This article describes a clinical intervention with a Chinese family whose fourteen-year-old girl suffers from school phobia and a psychiatric diagnosis of psychosis. The interview, conducted through translation and in front of an audience of Chinese colleagues, nevertheless demonstrates our way of working psychoanalytically with families, and in this particular setting offers an opportunity to see how cultural factors, intergenerational trauma, and alcoholism, contribute both to an example of “school phobia”, and to a picture of adolescent pseudo-psychosis, suicidality, and family-wide disturbance.