Haim Weinberg, PhD, CGP
Based on data collected in February 2026, it appears that the number of active users who review The Group Psychologist from China is twice the number of US reviewers! To celebrate this achievement, I decided to dedicate my column this time to describing the development of group psychotherapy in China. As you will find out, I am very involved in teaching group therapy and leading online groups for Chinese therapists. I asked Shuai Li, my Chinese colleague with whom I collaborated for 8 years, to write about how this development looks from her point of view. I also asked Cao MenGyun, the Chinese translator with whom I have worked for years, who is also a therapist, to write about her experience. In addition, I asked my friend and colleague, Robi Friedman, who established an EGATIN recognized group analytic Institute in China to describe the 4-5 years’ training program. Their report is part of this column.
Group Psychotherapy Training in China: A Quiet, Remarkable Story
When people in North America think about the development of group psychotherapy, China is usually not the first country that comes to mind. Yet over the last three decades, China has become one of the most interesting sites for the growth of psychotherapy training, including psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, and group-oriented work. This development did not emerge from a single school. Rather, it evolved through a series of international collaborations—German-Sino, Norwegian-Sino, British, American, and others—that gradually created a training culture.
The Sino-German project, launched in the mid-1990s, was one of the earliest and most influential. It introduced structured, long-term psychotherapy training to Chinese clinicians and helped establish psychodynamic thinking as a legitimate professional framework. A decade later, the Sino-Norwegian program, initiated in 2006 by Sverre Varvin and colleagues, extended this model, emphasizing continuous training, supervision, and personal experience. Together, these programs laid the institutional and conceptual groundwork for psychotherapy training in China.
For group therapists, an important next phase involved more specialized and sustained efforts to introduce group psychotherapy as both a clinical method and a training modality. The decade-long training initiative described by Winnie Fei, Molyn Leszcz, and Ruthellen Josselson (2023) represents one such milestone. Their work highlights how Western interpersonal group therapy needs to be adapted to Chinese cultural norms, particularly around emotional expression, hierarchy, and the value placed on harmony. Josselson’s reflections on teaching in China describe participants gradually developing greater capacity for self-expression, differentiation, and tolerance of affect, changes that often emerged through the group process itself. Molyn and Ruthellen visited China for 10 years, 10 days each visit. They used a mix of didactic and experiential training plus ongoing long-distance supervision. They trained directly and indirectly about 1000 people between 2008-2018 – many of whom continue to practice and train others. The Yalom Institute was established in 2008 in collaboration with the China Institute of Psychology. It focused on training Chinese mental health professionals in interpersonal group psychotherapy.
Alongside these developments, group analytic training also entered China through international networks, including the work of Robi Friedman. Friedman, a past president of the Group Analytic Society (International), has been involved for years in teaching, supervising, and conducting group analytic work across multiple countries, including China. His report is below.
What is striking about these different initiatives is that they did more than transmit techniques. They helped create a professional culture of training—one that includes supervision, self-experience, and long-term commitment. They also required ongoing adaptation. Concepts such as free expression, authority, dependency, and conflict carry different meanings in a Chinese cultural context shaped by collectivist values, respect for hierarchy, and a strong orientation toward social harmony.
My own connection to this story is more modest but personally meaningful. In recent years, beginning in 2018, much of my work has become international and online, including training programs and process groups in China. These experiences have convinced me that China’s contribution is not simply that it imported Western models of group therapy. Rather, Chinese clinicians and students are actively transforming these models, negotiating between cultural traditions and therapeutic principles, and in the process reshaping what group work can be. Following this experience, I published a chapter about adjusting group therapy to Asian culture (Weinberg, 2022).
What can we learn from this history?
First, the development of group psychotherapy depends less on exporting theories and more on building long-term relational training structures. Second, group therapy may be uniquely suited to cross-cultural work, because it makes the social unconscious visible in real time. And third, what we call therapeutic factors: cohesion, self-disclosure, authority, shame, dependency, are never culturally neutral. They are always embedded in a social matrix that must be understood, negotiated, and sometimes reinvented.
China’s story is still unfolding. But already it offers something important: when group psychotherapy travels across cultures, it does not simply spread – it evolves. And in that evolution, it challenges us to rethink our own assumptions about groups, culture, and the nature of the therapeutic process.
Group Psychotherapy in China
Shuai Li’s Report
April 12, 2026
Starting around 2000, the Sino-German Psychoanalytic Training Program first established a group therapy track, centered on the Frankfurt School and Foulkes’ theories. It trained psychodynamic group therapists with faculty from Germany and Europe. Subsequently, the Sino-Norwegian Psychoanalytic Training Program adopted a similar framework, while the Sino-US Psychoanalytic Training Program focused on Bion’s group theory and techniques, marking the professional beginning of group therapy in China.
My Path to Becoming a Group Therapist
I am a psychotherapist in private practice based in Beijing. I began my work in group therapy by conducting structured educational group counseling for college students and adolescents.
In May 2008, Dr. Bai Xiaoli from Beijing Friendship Hospital invited Dr. Irvin D. Yalom to communicate online with Chinese psychotherapists—a milestone in the development of group psychotherapy in China. Following this, Dr. Yalom appointed Dr. Ruthellen Josselson and Dr. Molyn Leszcz to lead a decade-long specialized training program in China (2008–2018), during which they conducted training sessions in Beijing twice a year.
In 2008, I formally began studying Irvin D. Yalom’s model of interpersonal group therapy. As one of the first cohort of trainees, I participated in the full program, including in-person learning, experiential groups, and online supervision. I became one of the first certified group therapists, supervisors, and trainers in China.
The professional dedication and personal integrity of my two mentors made group therapy my professional calling. Over my 20-year career, I have witnessed how group therapy transformed my professional development, helped clients achieve healing, and strengthened my commitment to this field.
Expanding into New Roles
In 2015, I attended the annual conference of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA), where I was exposed to diverse schools and formats of group therapy. This inspired me to introduce contemporary international group therapy training to China.
With this vision, in 2018, I collaborated with Dr. Haim Weinberg to launch the CAP-Group Advanced Process Group Online Training Program, covering group theories and supervision groups from different theoretical orientations, with generous professional support from Dr. Weinberg. The program brought together senior experts from Europe and the United States, and was later suspended due to the pandemic.
In the same year, I partnered with The Center for Group Studies (CGS) in New York to offer online training and supervision in Modern Group Analysis, supplemented by an annual experiential workshop in Beijing. The first cohort of trainees will graduate in September 2026, and participants have maintained extremely high enthusiasm for this immersive learning model.
Group psychotherapy in China has gradually evolved from the introduction of Western theories to localized practice, supporting more professionals and individuals in China in their healing and personal growth.
Cao Mengyun’s report
I am Cao Mengyun and I work in the field of psychotherapy both as a psychotherapist and as a translator. This is my fifth year translating for the process group in China, and my sixth year translating for the group therapy supervision group in China; both groups are led by Haim. These two positions also marked my entry into the field of group therapy, and I feel very fortunate to have embarked on this journey with Haim. In the time that followed, my work as an interpreter exposed me to various group therapy training programs in China, as well as group therapy supervision groups organized by Chinese therapists.
The reason group therapy has come to account for an increasing portion of my translation work is, on the one hand, because I met Haim and, through his introduction, got to know Shuai Li—who possesses both a deep passion for and a strong commitment to group therapy in China—and, on the other hand, because of the inherent appeal of group therapy itself, which makes me accept related translation work without hesitation.
While translating for group therapy-related work, I have witnessed the transformation of many Chinese therapists and lay participants. I have seen that, like me, many of them return time and again after experiencing the group’s influence and support, simply to rekindle the flame within.
As a Chinese therapist with a background in studying abroad in two English-speaking countries, I have come to increasingly recognize the unique importance of group work for Chinese therapists who have grown up in a collectivist culture. I very much look forward to continuing to bear witness to, experience, and reflect on the process of individuation within groups in my future work.
Robi Friedman’s Report:
The creation of a group analytic Institute in China
It all started with an invitation of Dr. Xu Yong, a chief psychiatrist who became also a friend, to do a week-long seminar in Shanghai on the practice Group Analysis at the end of 2016. I was then the President of the Group Analytic International Society (known as GASi). A group of about 50 interested Chinese colleagues went through the first program, in which they experienced the basics of Group Analytic in small and large groups, together with some of my innovations: how to work with dreams in groups, how to look at pathology from a relational perspective and how to understand traumatic social situations (like the soldier’s matrix). After another two similar seminars in Guangzhou and in Wuhan a group of Chinese colleagues asked me to organize for them a whole Curriculum of Group Analysis, which would include the fascinating journey to get accredited according to international standards. Finally, 4 years ago, in 2021, more than 30 group therapists registered for a 4-year course, including 3 years of weekly group experience (partly online and in person) conducted by Western group analysts. This experiential side (which also included “twice a week therapy” was complemented with the required hours of theory and supervision (group analytic candidates have to conduct a two-year group-analytic group).
Now this first course needs only to finish some supervision and theory as required by EGATIN (European group analytic Training Institutions Network) and write a final article to become group analysts. But they are already conducting group-analytic therapy groups. A second Chinese course has already started the “Introductory” part (Haim is also teaching there). Maybe the major collective achievement is that the Chinese Institute for Group Analysis has received its first formal accreditation. I am glad we could provide the best possible education for group therapy. Of course, many questions are pending about the future, e.g. how to continue the Institute’s development. The continuous integration of group analysis, which mainly relies on egalitarian, shared conscious and unconscious free responses rather than on expert leadership, with the Chinese approach to the centrality of leaders is a challenge. We invested a lot in providing our Chinese colleagues tools and self-reflection in order to succeed in this and other complicated emotional/professional endeavors. I did what I could; my limitations are clear. But my hunch is that the seeds are good-enough and will continue spreading and I am curious how this “movement” continues to move.
Robi Friedman, PhD. Clinical psychologist, group analyst, Past President of GASi, Past Chair of the Israeli Association for Group Therapy and the Israel Institute for Group Analysis.
References:
Fei, W., Josselson, R., & Leszcz, M. (2023). When Chinese Culture Encounters Western Interpersonal Group Psychotherapy. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 73(4), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207284.2023.2276488
Friedman, R. (2019) Dreamtelling, Relations and Large Groups. Routledge, London
Weinberg, H., (2022). Adjusting Group Therapy to Asian Cultures. In: C. Martinez-Taboada & M. Honig (eds.). Cultural diversity, groups and psychotherapy around the world. pp: 168-187. Illinois: International Association for Group Psychotherapy and Group Processes. https://www.iagp.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Transcultural_2022_Ebook.pdf.