ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the experiences of supervising several hundred case presentations and psychoanalytic therapeutic encounters with patients in China in the period of 2002–2012. Psychoanalysis is also a way of thinking about the specificity of human suffering and its embeddedness in the culture in which the suffering takes place. The chapter presents the creating and developing the meeting points between psychoanalysis and Chinese culture is a work in progress. Cultural-socio-political structures influence and bring elements into language. Language structures the social reality in which persons and groups live. When western analysts teach psychoanalytic concepts to others, they do it with a background of metaphors and narratives that illustrate the concepts in a pictorial and process-like way. Socially, the development of individualism and freedom of choice on the basis of individual preference relatively independent of the family, is a relatively late development in the West.
