Teaching Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in China

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• China child psychotherapy training
• clinical consultation
• affective group learning
• Western and Eastern frames of mind
• teaching and learning
• online education

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jill Savege Scharff

Jill Savege Scharff MD, FABP, FIPA is co-founder, the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) www.theipi.org; founder, International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT at IPI); founder and past Chair, IPI Combined Child Analysis and Child Psychotherapy Training Program. She is Chair, China Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program of the International Psychotherapy Institute at Jiandanxinli. She is the founding cochair of the International Psychoanalytical Association Working Group on Teleanalysis. She is the author and editor of books on object relations theory and practice and on psychoanalysis online, and is acquisitions editor at www.freepsychotherapybooks.org. Her most recent book is Psychoanalysis Online 4.