caroline-sehone-md

ECHOES OF CHILDHOOD: The Foundational Role of Child Analysis in Adult Analytic Work

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 20:51:03 GMT

Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP, is the editor of this forthcoming book

Organized in developmental sequence, the book traces psychic life from infancy through childhood and adolescence into adulthood. Along the way, contributors show how early trauma, attachment, and the internalization of parental figures reverberate across the life span, and how psychoanalysis informed by child work can help transform these dynamics. Echoes of Childhood demonstrates that there is one psychoanalytic process manifesting across different stages of life.

This must-read book is of particular value to graduate psychotherapists, analysts-in-training, and candidates in integrated child analytic programs, while also serving as a rich resource for practicing child and adult analysts seeking to deepen their clinical repertoire. More broadly, it will engage mental health professionals and all readers interested in how childhood experience continues to shape the adult mind.

IPI Lecture Series featuring ECHOES OF CHILDHOOD: The Foundational Role of Child Analysis in Adult Analytic Work

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:36:49 GMT

IPI 9 Session Book Lecture Series
We are delighted to invite you to an nine-session virtual series drawn from the forthcoming volume Echoes of Childhood: The Foundational Role of Child Analysis in Adult Analytic Work (Karnac, Dec 2025, ed. Caroline Sehon).

The series opens Friday, October 24, 4:45–6:00 pm (ET) with a presentation by Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP , What Child Patients Teach Us About Analytic Technique.

The program is open to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and clinicians-in-training.

Caroline Sehon Reviews or Editorials in Refereed Journals

Thu, 15 May 2025 19:58:17 GMT

Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP Reviews or Editorials in Refereed Journals

Sehon, C.M. (2021) In Press: Book Review: Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life Couple and Family Psychoanalysis

Sehon, C.M. Book Review: A Couple State of Mind: Psychoanalysis of Couples and the Tavistock Relationships Model . Authored by Mary, Morgan, Routledge, 2019, Journal of American Psychoanalytic, Association (JAPA), 2019.

Sehon, C. Book Review: Evan Osnos: The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China . 2015. 1(1)

Sehon, C.M. Book Review: Couple Therapy for Depression: A Clinician’s Guide to Integrative Practice. Authored by David Hewison, Christopher Clulow and Harriet Drake , Oxford, 2014, Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. 2015. 5(1): 98-106.

Books or Chapters In Books & Other Publications

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 20:09:05 GMT

Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP, is a contributing writer and commentator for numerous books and publications

Landscapes of Childhood and Adolescence . Publication of the IPA Committee of Child and Adolescence Psychoanalysis Committee (COCAP) . (2021)

“Repairing a Fractured Child and Family Mind.”

Parent Work Casebook , Eds: Kerry Kelly Novick, Jack Novick, Denia Barrett, Tom Barrett. IP Book: New York.

Commentary to “Emotional Abuse and Idée Fixe in a Case of Parent Work”

Psychoanalysis Online 4: Teleanalytic Practice, Teaching, and Clinical Research , 2019, Savege, Scharff, J. (ed)

Commentary to “ Sadomasochistic constellation and distance analysis” authored by Novick, J.

Psychoanalysis Online 3: The Teleanalytic Setting , 2017, Savege Scharff, J. (ed)

Sehon, C.M. and Savege Scharff, J., The Setting, the screen, and the conveying of unconscious dynamics

Family and Couple Psychoanalysis: A Global Perspective , 2017, Scharff, D.E. (ed.) and Palacios, E. (ed.)
Commentary to “Trauma and early enactment in couple therapy” authored by Velasco Alva, F.

Psychoanalysis Online 2: The Impact of the Internet on Development, Teleanalysis and Training , 2015, Savege Scharff, J. (ed)

Teleanalysis in Children and Adolescents? and
Commentary to “ Is There a Difference between Telephone and In-Person Sessions?” authored by Setton, L. S.

Psychoanalysis in China , 2013, Scharff, D.E.(ed), Varvin, S. (ed).

Navigating the Uncharted Psychoanalytic Seascape between East and West: Pilot Project with Hainan Anning Hospital Cultivates Mutual Learning

Psychoanalysis Online: Mental Health, Teletherapy, and Training , 2012, Savege Scharff, J. (ed)

Psychic Transformations Through Cyberspace: The Screen as Catalyst

Sehon, C.M. Meet the Analyst: Madeleine Baranger , IPA Electronic Newsletter, 13, 2011

Other Publications

Scharff, J. S. and Sehon, C. M. (2015). Competency-based Psychoanalytic Supervision at IIPT. IIPT training document.

Books or Chapters In Books

Carolin e Sehon, MD, FABP, contributing writer of 6 topics In: An Introduction to Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy , Ed: Jill Savege Scharff. Karnac Books Limited: Oxfordshire, OX:

“The ethical stance in child psychotherapy.”

"Kindergarten age: the oedipal stage.”

“Unconscious communication: dreams and play.”

“The interpersonal unconscious and the transgenerational transmission of psychic trauma.”

“Neuroscience and psychoanalysis.”

“Psychic trauma: a disorder of reaction.”

Making Sense of the Senseless: Psychoanalytic Intervention for Wartime Trauma

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 16:46:42 GMT

Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP, As Published in the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA)

Psychoanalytic intervention can be challenging in the best of times, but during wartime it can be particularly so. When the psychoanalytic community steps up, it can bring support, relief, and a reminder that those living on the frontline are not alone. An online global psychoanalytic forum can offer understanding, containment, and group solidarity to therapists and analysts impacted by war trauma. A monthly Zoom Town Hall offered to clinicians worldwide by the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 increased to twice-weekly in February of this year to address the Russo-Ukrainian War. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its fourth month at time of writing (June 2022), the Town Halls continue meeting open-endedly.

The Town Hall welcomes therapists and analysts from around the world, especially those who are directly affected in Ukraine and Russia. Other attending clinicians call in from Canada, Estonia, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The group comprises individuals who began attending the Town Halls with the start of Covid-19, as well as others who joined after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Many participants attend regularly, whereas others attend variably, as their personal circumstances permit. Ukrainian colleagues often miss the Town Halls, leaving the rest to wonder if they (1) have been killed, (2) are seeking refuge in their basements, (3) are escaping to safer zones in or outside Ukraine, (4) are avoiding frightening encounters in the Town Hall with their Russian colleagues, or (5) are seeking solace with loved ones. Simultaneous Russian–English and Ukrainian–English translation is supported by interpreters. Tatiana Onikova, a Prague based colleague and Town Hall co-host, distributed the IPI Town Hall flyer beyond IPI's global email list to therapists and analysts throughout Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe.

The group had 150-215 participants immediately after Russia's invasion and for the first several weeks, and then diminished to an average of 80-150 participants for the next several weeks. It gradually decreased to approximately 25-30 attending regularly by the fourth month. The group considers the possible explanations for this gradual attrition to include participants’ accessing alternate local supports, feelings of saturation and need for respite, and acculturation in the country to which they evacuated.

As IPI director and Town Hall moderator, I aim to cultivate a meaning-making conversation where we listen to unconscious themes and associative links, decode non-verbal communications, and analyze silences; share dreams and drawings, to which participants freely associate; and address transference–countertransference. A distance-learning environment co-founded in 1994 by David Scharff and Jill Savege Scharff, IPI employs its Group Affective Model (GAM) at conferences and certificate training programs to examine unconscious resonances of psychoanalytic concepts expressed within groups. IPI was in a singular position to bring a psychoanalytic response to clinicians who are, in a sense, on the frontlines of this world-shaking conflict. And although IPI Town Halls are not GAM groups, we adapt psychoanalytic listening and group interpretation principles in support of “thinking under fire” during wartime. I felt compelled to offer these wartime global conversations, bearing witness to colleagues who were psychically hemorrhaging on the fault lines between life and death.

When the psychoanalytic community steps up, it can bring support, relief, and a reminder that those living on the frontline are not alone.

Navigating the Group Analytic Journey

As a wartime initiative, the Town Halls served initially as an acute crisis intervention. Heartbreaking stories flooded the meetings as traumatized clinicians express their helplessness, hopelessness, and life-and-death anxieties. They experienced imploding under the strain of uncertainties and terrors. Would their loved ones in Kyiv survive? Could their colleagues’ families escape from Ukraine? Would supervisors find refuge? When would the war ever end? The war shears personal and professional identities. Russians expressed shame and guilt over their country's actions. Commonly, Russian participants voiced intense marital conflicts or intergenerational tensions arising from differences of viewpoints about the war. They described painful feelings of isolation and loneliness when their spouse or parent had voiced an unshakeable pro-war stance. A Ukrainian participant described an incident in which actors at his amateur theater group entered into a warring conversation due to the diversity of viewpoints held about the war on Ukraine, with some actors voicing pro-war sentiments. Many of the participants say that the Town Hall is their only safe refuge.

Participants in Russia and Ukraine speak about feeling plagued by an ever-present war upon their minds, forced to defend against such horrific anxieties with denial, depersonalization, derealization, and deadening of their thinking capacities when alone, with families, or with patients. One US participant, who spent many childhood years in a Latin American country under a military dictatorship, shared a recent nightmare of being held hostage. In turn, another woman living in Russia associated to the dream—tears flooding her face, she described a constant feeling of being raped in a room with no escape. Upon noticing that she appeared to be doodling, I invited her to show her artwork. She held up the image (shown here). Many participants remained mute throughout, though their faces wore palpable distress. They appeared shell-shocked, their tears revealing their torment. Several persons extended a psychoanalytic helping hand for holding and containment. Some described firsthand and intergenerational war trauma histories. Others empathized and identified with those most traumatized.

Early on, participants bonded by their shared respect for psychoanalytic “thinking under fire” (a wartime phrase coined by Wilfred Bion), which served to unite us despite our varied languages and cultural roots. Resiliency was evident. Several persons who were initially shy became increasingly able to speak out as time went on. Russian participants voiced their freedom at being able to share sentiments and perspectives in a safe territory, which one person called a “humanitarian corridor.” For some, these Town Halls offered the only opportunity to speak freely without fear of reprisal and incarceration. Western participants from South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom often voiced guilt over their freedoms. For example, one American participant described her freedom to “open and close the door” to media accounts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She told us that it was important for her to “keep the door open (in her mind)” by participating in the Town Halls, so as to confront the atrocities that are ever-present in the lives of Ukrainians and Russians and to support those who have been robbed of such freedoms. One Western participant voiced his privilege to stay in contact with those in Ukraine and Russia as media attention recedes.

After a few weeks, I wondered aloud whether the expressions of gratitude were connected to their dependency on the Town Halls as a symbolic lifeline and their fear of the group ending, perhaps echoing their larger worry that the world may lose interest and turn away to leave Ukrainians, Russians, and Eastern Europeans to fend for themselves. I reaffirmed that IPI would continue offering these meetings open-endedly. These interventions may have catalyzed a breakthrough for the group, deepening investigations of analytic themes because of enhanced trust in the setting.

For example, a few Ukrainians described their fear that their Russian colleagues in the Town Halls would be unable to tolerate their voiced outrage at the Russians for instigating the war, or their fierce conviction that Ukraine would ultimately prevail. In one Town Hall meeting, a kind of standoff emerged between the Ukrainian and Russian interpreters: a Ukrainian participant began speaking in Russian whereupon both interpreters began translating into English at almost the same time. Consequently, both interpreters’ voices drowned out each other, leading to a confusing cacophony of sounds that created momentary chaos within the group. At this moment, I asked the interpreters to pause to allow the group to analyze the unconscious dynamics that might be at play. Then the Ukrainian interpreter recognized that she was overcome by the urge to help her fellow citizen when she later realized that it was not her remit to translate when Russian was being spoken. A mother-baby pair from Eastern Europe join regularly—the mother recently remarked that she noticed a direct correlation between the severity of her daughter's skin condition (atopic dermatitis) and their joint attendance; her baby's skin clears up when her mother attends with her and flares up if the mother misses. This compelling example has been riveting to the participants as a testament to the power of metabolizing traumatic affects lest they become deposited in the body in the current or next generation.

Transformative Moments in an Online China Child Therapy Teaching Journey

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 17:02:28 GMT

Caroline M. Sehon , MD, FABP , Chiung-Hsuan Huang , LMSW & Xiaoyi Zhou , M.Phil,
As published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child Volume 76, 2023 - Issue 1

ABSTRACT

Over the past 25 years, the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) faculty has been honing it's technique for distance learning by listening for unconscious themes emerging in the classroom that resonate with learning resistances or teaching concepts. This co-authored paper describes an online, child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy training program coordinated by IPI and Jiandanxinli, offered by Western faculty to Chinese psychotherapists-in-training. An IPI child analytic faculty member collaborated with two Chinese course participants to study the cross-cultural meanings of teaching, presenting, and consulting. This independent research project unearthed new understandings about the challenges, strengths, and limitations of online, translation-dependent learning. Additionally, the article underscores the importance of embracing an ethical stance and cultural humility when teaching child therapy to students from different cultures.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity and candor of Dong Mingrui, Wu Cecilia, and Keyan-Wu for their commentaries about the vignettes described in this article. Additionally, we thank Jiandanxinli (My Therapist) Platform (Beijing) for offering their translation services and for their partnership with IPI in designing and implementing the Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Certificate Course.

Disclosure statement

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

The Use of a Simple Writing Task to Enhance Psychoanalytic Education

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 15:55:20 GMT

Jill Scharff, M.D., F.A.B.P. & Caroline Sehon, M.D., FABP , As Published in International Forum of Psychoanalysis

Volume 29, 2020 - Issue 4: Voices of psychoanalytic education

This publication describes a simple recurrent writing task called the “Two Page Paper Exercise,” designed to enhance candidates’ learning of analytic theory and technique. The task is set in the context of other analytic institutes’ writing programs and show that this exercise is unique.

Our educational philosophy is that, as candidates confront multiple perspectives in contemporary psychoanalysis, this writing task develops their ability to conceptualize, reflect on their learning, integrate affect and cognition, and express their ideas to others in written form and in discussion with peers. The candidate group develops cohesion that reduces writing anxiety. As individuals they develop a writing habit that supports the eventual duty to develop the field of psychoanalysis through publishing.

We present raw data from candidates’ writing for readers to make their own assessment of the usefulness of the task as a measure of candidates’ integration of learning, development of analytic sensibility and synthetic capacity, and communication of experience and ideas to others.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous contributions of Flora Barragan, Ryan Garcia, Stefanie Minen, Andi Pilecki, Matthew Rosa, and Karen Sherwood of the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training.

Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, “Contemporary approaches to the encapsulation and dispersion of trauma: Holocaust trauma as a barrier to couple intimacy”

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 20:23:12 GMT

Hanni Mann-Shalvi, PhD, Caroline Sehon MD, FABP, Timothy Keogh PhD As published in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 2019. 9 (1) 24-35

This article describes a contemporary approach to dealing with the encapsulation and dispersion of transgenerational trauma. It focuses on how such trauma, when undigested, can create barriers to intimacy in a couple.

The lead author and couple therapist not only describes her clinical approach, but provides a theoretical framework from which to view this type of trauma and the way in which it can impact on a couple relationship.

The second (Caroline Sehon) and third authors provide individual and shared commentaries aimed at highlighting the applicability of couple therapy to psychoanalytic work with individuals. The authors conclude that experience working with couples enriches individual psychoanalytic work as a result of the focus on the “couple state of mind” this work affords.

IPA Prague Congress Panel Report

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 19:17:52 GMT

Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP IPA Prague Congress Panel Report. The Analyst’s Pain as published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis ; 94(6):1177-1180. doi.org/10.1111/1745 8315.12153

Inspired and chaired by Theodore Jacobs, the IPA panel entitled "The Analyst's Pain" aimed t investigate the analytic situation in which we are subject to periods of extremely intense "pain" during the course of our day-to-day work as analysts. For this panel the analysts;s "pain" referred to extremely powerful positive or negative affects, such as rage, terror, hatred, impotence, heart-wrenching sorrow and sexual arousal. Often these affects are evoked by a trying patient who acts out, for example, in a manipulative, provocative, hostile and seductive ways within the transference.

The Setting, The Screen, and the Conveying of Unconscious Dynamics

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 16:34:26 GMT

ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we provide a commentary, and draws on the analyst’s observations and descriptions of her countertransference and on the reactions to the clinical material presented at a teleanalysis clinical research working group in which the co-authors participate to study analytic process material of sessions conducted by telephone and/or encrypted video teleconference.

We discuss the impact of the teleanalysis setting on the analytic relationship and review the patient’s choice of setting and its visual impact on the screen to convey the unconscious dynamics. Brent is a fifty-eight-year-old man who is isolated, obsessive, resentful of a long history of mistreatment, and was an insomniac until successfully managed with a continuous positive airway pressure machine. In traditional psychoanalysis the analyst provides a uniform setting for all patients, and the patient’s unconscious is expressed in relation to the analyst, the frame, the analyst’s office environment, and in the use of the couch.

Caroline Sehon , Jill Savege Scharff , As published in Psychoanalysis Online 3 , Edition 1st Edition, First Published 2017

Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. “Couple, Child and Family Therapy"

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 20:43:53 GMT

Jill Scharff, MD, FABP and Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP as published in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 2016. 6(1) 132–137

At the summer institute “Couple, Child and Family Therapy: Links from Theory to Clinical Practice” co-organized by the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) and the Department of Primary Education at the University of the Aegean, participants gathered from Greece, the United States, Canada, Israel, Australia, and South Africa to study together in Rhodes.

Led by David Scharff and Anastasia Tsamparli, the institute featured presentations by Greek and American child psychotherapists, couple and family therapists, and child analysts. David Scharff gave a theoretical and clinical introduction to object relations couple, child and family therapy to set the base on which the presenters built their talks. Janine Wanlass, Director of IPI, taught assessment of families and couples. Ionas Sapountzis, a Greek-American psychologist returning to his homeland, shared his Winnicottian approach to children with ADHD. Following her interest in field theory, Caroline Sehon gave a talk on decoding the links in families with psychosomatic difficulty. Jim Poulton of IPI-Salt Lake City gave a literature review of the concept of narcissism and illustrated its destructive effects in couple relationships. Greek colleague Dimitri Kyriazis elaborated on the destructive psychotic links in couple and families.

Jill Scharff outlined the history of the development of the concept of projective identification and why she has found it helpful in working with couples and families. Vali Maduro, Chair of the Couple, Child and Family program at IPI, took the concept of projective identification to the arena of the family where couples may project into their children. Norma Caruso addressed issues of sexuality and intimacy in couple therapy. In a related but very different presentation the summer institute host Anastasia Tsamparli spoke of the negotiation of sexual desire and the analytic third in couples. Dimitris Anassopoulos intrigued us with a highly complex paper on the analyst’s contribution to the intersubjective process.

We understood in discussions with our Greek colleagues that the economic situation is extremely uncertain. Many of them had lost patients that week and thought of canceling because of the crisis, but they came. As Americans we were buffered from the squeeze, since our credit cards backed by American banks were welcome whereas our colleagues’ could withdraw only 60 Euros a day or less. We were impressed by the Greeks’ willingness to confront the crisis and set it aside in order to learn.

In her opening speech of welcome, Anastasia said that although the crisis is humiliating, and everyone feels scared, we cannot succumb to feeling awful. We must keep on doing what we do, and keep thinking. Her clarity and strength of character was inspiring and set the tone for acknowledgement of the real crisis in the there-and-now and focus on the here-and-now of the learning process.

Participants new to IPI events were especially appreciative of the small group using the Group Affective Model (GAM) as a place to integrate professional cognitive apperception and personal emotional response to the material about couple, families and children. As foreigners, the group leaders worked through group transferences that reflected the apprehension felt by Greece towards privileged nations to create a secure holding environment where these charged affects could be voiced, thought about, and understood as they relate to family dynamics and cultural context.

For example, having heard presented a vignette of a couple in which one partner unconsciously evoked in the other a sadistic response, the small group related these unconscious pulls to similar forces in the troubled marriage of Greece and Europe.

Despite the tremendous uncertainty, anxiety and terror at this crucial moment in history, there was an impressive turnout. The quiet space to think away from turbulent Athens brought relief and pleasure, but also led to guilt and conflict about family members left at home burdened by worries, such as whether they would lose their jobs, or how the political machinations would ultimately be resolved.

Nevertheless, Anastasia and her colleagues managed to give the visitors a wonderful Greek welcome, with informal dinners, a rooftop party courtesy of the University of the Aegean, trips to the sea, and Greek dancing which having watched a performance we were coaxed into getting on the cement floor of the balcony to participate in this Greek expression of emotion.

The IPI contingent returned to America grateful for all our opportunities at home, and impressed by the generous spirit of our Greek colleagues. We hope to see our Greek colleagues again soon, if not in person, then when they connect to IPI’s couple therapy video conference training program.

Navigating the Uncharted Psychoanalytic Seascape between East & West: Pilot Project with Hainan Anning Hospital Cultivates Mutual Learning, In: Psychoanalysis in China

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 19:38:49 GMT

Sehon, C.M. As published in Psychoanalysis in China, 2013 , Scharff, D.E.(ed), Varvin, S. (ed).

This book proposes to explore the introduction of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic therapy, and the wider application of psychoanalytic ideas into China. It aims to have articles authored by Chinese and Western contributors, to explore ideas that apply to the Chinese clinical population, cultural issues relevant to the practice of analysis and psychotherapy, and to the cultural interface between Western ideas underpinning psychoanalysis, and the richness of Chinese intellectual and philosophical ideas that analysis must encounter in the process of its introduction.

Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China features theoretical and clinical contributions, philosophical and cultural explorations, applications such as the analytic study of art, cinema and theatre, social aspects of analytic thought, and wider cultural and social issues that set the context for clinical practice.

My Chapter of work is Chapter 26.

Reminiscences of A Learning Experience: A Partnership between TCCR and IPI

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:41:45 GMT

Caroline Sehon, MD, FABP Reminiscences of A Learning Experience: A Partnership between TCCR and IPI as published in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. 2012; 2(1): 116-121.

This summer I had an extraordinary experience. I went to study psychoanalytic couple therapy at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR) in London, in a week-long course on The Unconscious World of the Couple. I'm an avid theatregoer, and was thrilled at one point in the week when we went to the Comedy Theatre. The play, which might be considered the furthest thing from a comedy, was Betrayal, the heart-wrenching drama by the acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter. It tells the tragic story of two married couples enmeshed in affairs with each other's partners. I couldn't help but feel pained by the characters' loneliness and desperate longing to connect with others. But, tragically, Pinter's insecure characters can only relate to ‘part-objects’. The couples' relationships lead to wide-scale damage and failure. I did wonder whether these sad people might have found freedom and relief via psychoanalytic couple therapy.

I suspect the course members all would answer with a resounding, ‘Yes, most definitely!’ This imagined response speaks to the course's success, and the universal optimism of the participants, thirty couple therapists from all over the world — Australia, England, Finland, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and the US. Conceived by a partnership between TCCR and the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI), which has developed a videoconference series on couple therapy, Caroline Medawar and Christel Buss Twachtmann of TCCR designed the course in consultation with David Scharff and Janine Wanlass of IPI.

Letters from China. Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Stud. 2011. 8:268-281

Sat, 14 May 2011 20:51:40 GMT

David Scharff, Caroline Sehon MD , Qi Wei MD , Janine Wanlass PhD and Janine Wanlass PhD, As published in International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies,8(3):268-281m

Introduction

Psychoanalysis is a 19th century Viennese development of the Western mind. As it travelled to other countries and continents, it has been changed by the differing mentalities of place and time. Sometimes the changes were subtle, sometimes more radical. What can we expect now of the journey that psychoanalysis is beginning in China? China's philosophical and social systems are unlike those of the West, and unlike those of old China. We must expect that there will be change as it becomes a Chinese analysis, and in all likelihood that change will be more radical than the changes psychoanalytic theory and practice underwent in spreading from Austria and Europe to Great Britain and the Americas. China is a large and influential country and culture. We should expect that the Chinese experience of analysis is likely to change psychoanalysis itself.

In the four “Letters from China” that follow, we can see the beginnings of such a process. In this collection, two recently graduated analysts from the United States recount the experience of their first encounters with colleagues in China, and two young Chinese women, one a psychiatric resident, one a recent PhD in psychology, tell of their exposure to and growing interest in analysis. We can see the beginnings of reciprocal influence of our cultures in these reports that speak of mutual curiosity, interest, and respect. But there is also a quality of puzzlement mixed in with the wonder as they approach these new experiences. It is a privilege to read these personal stories of our colleagues from East and West as they grapple with understanding how analytic ideas and psychoanalytic treatment will work in China.

David Scharff, International Psychotherapy Institute, Washington, DC, USA