Editors' Introduction

The first conference in China of the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) took place in Wuhan on 19 April, 2017, on the day before the general IPA Chinese Congress there. It marked the great progress and the growing importance of psychoanalysis in China, with three main cities as centres of development and training of the IPA: Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan. Although there were deficits and traumatic life events in individual and collective experiences, the conference demonstrated just how women have slowly gained a status which corresponds with their great importance for the family and for cultural life in China. The overall title “Women Matter—Women's Matters” was chosen deliberately as an open slate because it was not known from our faraway geographical and cultural positions, which “matters” would be the most burning and offer opportunities for the most in-depth analysis of problems in this society during its transition from traditional cultural Chinese values to modernity.

The main articles that set the frame concerning the individual dyadic mother-infant relationship are from Frances Thomson-Salo, and that of the sharply contrasting picture of mothering in a collective society from Maya Nadig.

Frances Thomson-Salo spoke about a detailed observation of the searching for eye contact in the earliest mother-child relationship, describing the intimate Western individual dyadic relationship of early childhood that we are accustomed to. Thomson-Salo's description employs the classical modern psychoanalytic model: the baby in an “ideal” early childhood interaction with the mother. This ideal is based on practical observation, theoretical conclusion, and subsequent conviction that a child that can reflect itself and its moods emotionally and cognitively in the mother's—or primary object's—gaze can feel safe. That is our classical Western conviction.

Whilst studying a unique culture that is certainly not mainstream Chi