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The section begins by setting the context for training Chinese therapists to work with children. David Scharff, in the course of training couple, child, and family therapists in a Beijing program since 2009, has interviewed at least 20 Chinese couples and families in five-session brief psychoanalytic consultations over the 15 years. He chose to highlight three of these consultations to show what the families’ histories have taught him about marriage and family in China . He shares what he has learned about the effects of the One Child Policy, the impact of Confucianism and Communism, trauma and resilience in China, and makes the case that teachers who are aware of these factors will feel more prepared to work with Chinese therapists and the families they treat.
Janine Wanlass, who joined David Scharff in the Psychodynamic Couple and Family Therapy Continuous Training Program in 2010, traces its development and evolution from a two-year series of four immersion experiences in couple therapy training only to now include immersions in family therapy for families with children and adolescents. She describes the program’s learning components: a live clinical demonstration, didactic lectures, and small process learning groups. Of relevance to this section on training child therapists in China, in the past 10 years program faculty opted to focus on the child in the family so as to address the relative absence of child psychodynamic psychotherapy training in China despite the increasing mental health needs of Chinese children. Janine Wanlass presents her research on the training’s effectiveness, including her finding that the live clinical demonstration is critically important to the group’s learning, as it shows clinical theory and technique in action. Not surprisingly, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic threw that program off its Beijing base, and adaptations had to be made, as it morphed from an in-person to an online training format. Janine Wanlass illustrates the live