Suchergebnisse

The author traces the development of a collaborative psychoanalytic training programme for couple and family therapists in China, launched through the shared efforts of Drs David Scharff, Jill Savege Scharff, Janine Wanlass, Fang Xin and Gao Jun, enrolling more than 400 students over the past twelve years. The stressors of economic change, greater interaction with the West, legacies left by the Cultural Revolution, challenges associated with the one-child policy, and escalating divorce rates created a need for therapists to intervene with Chinese couples and families exhibiting distress (Scharff, 2020, 2021). A training programme was conceived, including didactic teaching from an object relations perspective, a live clinical demonstration of psychotherapy with a couple or family, and small process groups led by Chinese therapists to help trainees integrate affective, cognitive, and behavioural learning components. The author contends that the success of this programme was largely dependent on a collaboration of cultures and personnel, as American teachers learned about psychoanalytic thinking from a Chinese cultural lens and Chinese administrators, faculty, and students discovered effective ways to address the mental health struggles of Chinese couples and families.

This article describes a clinical intervention with a Chinese family whose fourteen-year-old girl suffers from school phobia and a psychiatric diagnosis of psychosis. The interview, conducted through translation and in front of an audience of Chinese colleagues, nevertheless demonstrates our way of working psychoanalytically with families, and in this particular setting offers an opportunity to see how cultural factors, intergenerational trauma, and alcoholism, contribute both to an example of "school phobia", and to a picture of adolescent pseudo-psychosis, suicidality, and family-wide disturbance.

This article gives a detailed account of a twelve-year-old boy and his parents, seen from the perspective of both the child's and the couple's therapists, and then from that of visiting teachers and a commentator in the Continuous Training Course in Family and Couple Therapy carried out with The Beijing Zhi-Dao-Zhong-He Medical Institute, which is directed by our collaborator, Fang Xin. The referral concerns a twelve-year-old boy who we will call Haitao (not his real name), whose symptoms included compulsive hand washing, social isolation, difficulty making decisions, and hesitation in answering questions and in initiating actions. He was initially referred for individual therapy. After his individual therapist met with the family, she suggested parent therapy at the same time that she initiated weekly child therapy. There was instability in his therapy because when his first therapist became pregnant, he was referred to a second therapist who met twice with him before resigning and referring him to a third therapist, who then recommended that he return to his first therapist. We all noted from the outset that this therapeutic instability had a negative effect on the family's adaptation to Haitao's therapy. This case report details a consultation to two difficult therapies for a neuroatypical boy and his parents.