Teaching Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in China

To illustrate the reciprocal processes of teaching and learning across cultures and the pedagogy of online teaching, the author describes her design and implementation of an online two-year program for training Chinese therapists in child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy based on object relations theory and practice. Faculty drawn from the United States, South America, and Spain, and translators from mainland China and Taiwan, offer two immersion weeks on technique, 60 weekly didactic seminars and 60 clinical case consultation group meetings, and individual consultation on request, over two years. The author specifies teaching techniques found useful in the online setting. She shows how Western ideas are communicated through the translator from English to Chinese and how the Eastern frame of mind is translated to the Western. She also demonstrates the parallel translation from cognition to affect, from the realm of conscious apperception to unconscious responses that both support and interfere with learning. She gives vignettes of a clinical case consultation group to show participants’ expectations of top-down teaching, resistance to accepting the value of the group mind at work, and moments of insight. She describes the closing plenary for evaluation of the learning.