Teaching in China One psychoanalysts account
Arlene Kramer Richards
Having devoted most of my energy and passion to the practice of clinical psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, and to teaching and writing about it, I was amazed to find that my past decade has been devoted to psychoanalytic administration. This began when a Chinese psychiatrist contacted me by e-mail to invite me to teach in China. She explained that there was an enormous problem with the suicide of young women. This was a social as well as a personal problem because there were too few young women as a result of the abortions of female fetuses that resulted from the one child policy imposed on a society that relied on sons to support aging parents. The suicide problem among young women was exacerbated by the use of anti-depressants in young people without psychotherapy. The patients were using their medication to kill themselves by taking large doses all at once with alcohol as a chaser. Chinese psychotherapists were eager to learn how to treat such people so that they could live productive and satisfying lives.
At the time I was reluctant to leave my husband, so we agreed that he would come as well and would teach. The two of us each gave five lectures to a group of over 100 psychiatrists. In addition we supervised and did “personal consultations” for the young therapists who were having difficulty themselves, experiencing anxiety and depression as a result of the stress of treating severely depressed patients. At the end of the two weeks the hospital at which we were teaching gave us a farewell banquet. The commissar of Hubei Province sat next to me. Not knowing how to talk with such a person, I asked him: “Tell me about yourself.” He did and we talked about his current concerns in his personal life. At the end of the conversation he asked: “Is this what you do?” I said it was. He said that it was worth supporting. And the Chinese government has supported the program since by paying the fares and hotel bills as well as building a beautiful new hospital for inpatient and outpatient treatment where we have state of the art auditoriums and conference rooms for our program.
The next step was planning a larger and more ambitious educational program. I modeled it after the curriculum at Smith College School for Social Work where I had taught for 16 years. We met in person twice a year for two weeks at a time. A formal lecture each morning was presented in English to the 144 students from all over China. In the afternoon we had group supervision with students attending the group they had chosen for its special orientation. We had seven teachers so there were about twenty students in each supervision section. We recruited teachers who are experts in the areas of interest to the students. Jeffrey Stern from Chicago teaches self psychology, Arnold Richards teaches Modern Conflict theory, Janet Bachant teaches trauma, Arthur Lynch teaches (Modern Conflict theory as well, Leonie Sullivan from Australia) teaches the use of Baliint groups to ease the stress of doing psychotherapy, I teach female development and sexual issues, others teach child development, interpersonal and relational ways of treating patients.
During the interim students wrote up case reports about difficult cases in their own practices, had them translated, sent to their supervisors and discussed them with their colleagues first and then with their supervisors.with whom they had group supervisions on Skype. The first program lasted three years and of the original 144 students, 142 graduated. Two dropped out because of pregnancy. The remarkable devotion of these students led to a decision to start another class.
This year we have a larger staff and 240 students who have already begun and will continue to attend the in person teaching program and the distance learning supervisions. Our program will continue for three years. Now we have some psychologists and social workers in addition to the psychiatrists. And we have started a didactic series with courses online as well. I have two sections of 60 students each in that program. Arthur Lynch teaches three groups 60 students each there. So our work is spreading psychodynamic thinking in China where many dramatic events over generations have created a great need and a great thirst for ways to help with mental health issues.
Teaching, supervising and doing psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy in China has been a stimulus for me to consider issues in order to respond to questions from people who see things from a very different cultural and historical perspective than I or most psychoanalysts have come into contact with in the past. For example, I have been asked many questions about how women can overcome the cultural devaluation of females that left their grandmothers and their mothers seeing themselves and their daughters as less valuable than their sons. While Western cultures have some of this, China has had a much more extreme version for many centuries. The issue of beauty and how it can ameliorate some of the devaluation is one I have felt challenged to explore. The result of the new challenges has led me to write and publish seven new analytic papers and to co-edit two books during the four years of working in China.
One of the books is on loneliness. Entitled “Encounters With Loneliness: Only the Lonely”, it deals with an issue that is universal, but has special poignance for the Chinese who have a cultural tradition of large families that live together in multi-generational settings and very close relationships between neighbors and colleagues at work but who now are moving to cities and living apart from their families of origin, apart from the people they knew as children and often alone when they do not want to be alone.
The other book is called”Myths of Mighty Women.” It is a response to the need for role models of women of power that is especially acute in China, but is also very useful in terms of modern women in the West. It was directly inspired by a paper written by Irmgard Dettbarn who has been doing psychoanalysis in Beijing for a decade. She wrote about a Chinese heroine whose power over the first Emperor is legendary. The book collects myths from Western and Middle Eastern cultures and describes how knowing these myths can help modern analysts in understanding our patients just as the Oedipus myth helped Freud and Freudian analysts to understand the conflicts of our male patients and to understand ourselves.
Thus, working psychoanalytically in China has contributed to analytic understanding as well.
I am very proud of having been able to do this for Chinese people and for psychoanalysis.
Click Here to Purchase: Psychoanalysis: Listening to Understand by Arlene Kramer Richards.
Click Here to Purchase: Encounters with Loneliness: Only the Lonely edited by Arlene Kramer Richards, Lucille Spira, and and Arthur A. Lynch.
Click Here to Purchase: Myths of the Mighty Women Edited by Arlene Kramer Richards and Lucille Spira.