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My journey on the stony path to becoming a psychotherapist was led by my mother, who was little better than illiterate. As a child she learned a few Chinese characters by standing outside the window of a classroom listening to the teacher in an old-style elementary private school whilst her two-year younger brother was a formal student there. At that time, she was about eight or nine years old, and her responsibility was to carry her brother on her back to and from the school. Later on, in the 1950s, in the national “Sweeping out Illiteracy Movement” after the liberation of new China, she studied in a women's night school for a few months.
Certainly, she had never heard of the name “Freud”. Even if she had, it was impossible for her to remember such a strange Western name. I never troubled myself to explain who he was. After all, the idea that “Talking with people can earn money” was beyond her imagination. She worried about how I could make a living that way in those years before she passed away. At that time I was a beginner in psychotherapy training, with an unstable income.
She was the most typical Chinese mother, knowing nothing about Western civilisation. But she was the one who propelled me forward on the path to becoming a psychotherapist.
I'd like to start with a dream.
I had an arresting dream after I began my analytic training at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. I started four-sessions-a-week psychoanalysis on Zoom. I lay down on the couch in my study in China while my analyst sat before her computer in her office in USA. Before that, I had already had two years of once- or twice-a-week psychotherapy with her. After two or three months of working together in psychoanalysis, I had a scary dream.
An ugly white woman, with quite a lot of wrinkles on her face, was sitting with me on a sofa. In front of me, there were two bowls of wine, which seemed to be made of rice. Whilst I was drinking from the first bowl, that bowl covered my face and made me lose m