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Freud (1937c) regards psychoanalysis as an “impossible” profession where the practitioner at the very beginning knows the results of future work will be dissatisfying. However, in China, to most students and clinicians in the mental health field, psychoanalyst as a profession has been, for a long time, literally “impossible”—there is no domestic psychoanalytic institute that can train analysts, the alternative being a potential analytic therapist has to go abroad to have analytic training, which is not affordable. For most of us, the programme provided by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) is unreachable.
I am Xiao Shao, a full-time psychotherapist in Beijing Anding (Psychiatric) Hospital, a private practitioner, a graduate of the supervision program of China American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA), and a year-4 adult analytic candidate receiving distant training at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia (PCOP). In this article, by sharing my personal experiences and journey of learning psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis, I wish more amateurs, students, and professionals in China can have more understanding about psychoanalyst as a profession, more information about how to become an analyst—especially via distant training, and even interest, will, courage and plan to become one. I will be very happy if you, when reading this article, find some descriptions are outdated, which means more options to become an analyst have emerged, whilst I also apologise for my subjectivity, biases, and limitations.
During a summer many years ago, I was still a college student major in chemical engineering in Tianjin University. Accidentally, I watched The Shopaholics, a comedy movie about several types of mental disorders, and was struck by one scene in it: a portrayal of Carl Jung with his motto “Personality type is destiny” at the bottom. “So, if there's a way to change personality, then we can change our fate!” I said to myself. Months later, in an old Am