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).