ABSTRACT
For the past seven years, we have been invited to China twice a year to offer a training course for therapists learning about couple and family psychoanalysis, a Western treatment that we transport to China, a country with a vastly different language, history, philosophy, family structure, and culture. The Chinese language is based on combinations of thousands of characters, not twenty-six letters, and words derive meaning from rising and falling tones. The Chinese communicate in metaphor and innuendo: Americans tend to be direct, a quality the Chinese view as self-centered and concrete. The dominant philosophy in China was that of Confucius, in which loyalty to the emperor was the highest value, followed by loyalty to the group, the family, the father, and the friends. After 1949, loyalty to Mao and the Party disrupted the value of loyalty to family and friends, and immense social trauma followed with the deaths of 70 million Chinese through famine, industrial havoc, and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Then, in the early 1980s, the Party allowed the freedom to marry and to have sex for pleasure, no longer only for procreation, and then restricted procreation by imposing the “one child policy” (with exceptions for farming families) to slow China’s catastrophic population growth. A middle-class Chinese “only 114child” is under intense pressure to get into a good college so as to ensure a strong financial future because this child will be responsible for the parents and grandparents in their retirement years. At the same time, sexuality is a source of excitement and confusion.
