Commentary on “Countertransference and the Heart of the Heroic: Working with a Journalist from China,” by Gladys Foxe, PHD

IN THIS BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, MOVING PAPER, WITH ITS EXTRAORDINARY degree of self-revelation, Foxe charts a year's therapy course through the shoals and thickets of a Chinese dissident writer's severe traumas occasioned by the Cultural Revolution, which resonate with her own German Jewish family background of the Holocaust. She frames her patient's and her own reactions within a mythic orientation, which constitutes both the strength of her work as well as some weakness. There is no question that her patient benefited from the once-a-week psychoanalytic therapy. He was indeed able to work through his social isolation, depression, and emotional nonconnection in any love relationship, ending up able to develop a solid emotional relationship with a very suitable woman whom he later married and had children with. And this not so much apparently through varied interpretations as through the therapist experiencing feelings H. could not express or perhaps even be aware of; and then in a Chinese (and more Asian) way, nonverbally sensing what Foxe was feeling that he couldn't so easily allow into consciousness by himself alone (Roland, 1988). This is something that Western psychoanalysts are not so aware of.