Editor's Introduction

This issue brings the journal uncommon breadth and depth. It demonstrates several aspects of the fruit of partnership between the growing number of Chinese clinicians, theorists, and students, with Western psychoanalytic teachers. It demonstrates the importance of Chinese contributions to psychoanalysis everywhere, as it gives specific examinations of what analysis means in the context of Chinese experience and culture. As editor, it is a great pleasure to see the growth of thought inside China in the space of the ten years of the journal, documented both in these pages and beyond.

This issue begins with just that theme in the first section: the opening article by Klaus Kocher is at the forefront of psychoanalytic cultural and clinical exploration, examining the newly described phenomenon of “empty heart disease”—a “syndrome” dear to me because I have also written elsewhere about this picture, although from somewhat different perspectives (Scharff & Scharff, 2024). This is followed by an article that also examines central theoretical issues: Zhang Xiuming and Xhao Xudong's explication of self psychology in a Chinese context. Jeanne Magagna, a storied proponent of the art of infant observation in the UK, Italy, and the USA, tells of expanding her reach with this tool in China, and in the process delivers lessons for infant observation worldwide. We round off this section with Zhong Jie's lessons from his own process of becoming a certified International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) analyst, among the first in China.

Section II offers a group of articles on training, focusing especially on child training carried out in programmes offered by the International Psychotherapy Institute in the United States, in partnership with Jiandanxinli in China. Jill Savege Scharff has founded and overseen that programme. She introduces the articles and then co-authors two of them with the Chinese collaborators, one a case of helping a mother understand and support her son with ap