BEIJING — The emotional disintegration of a 17-month-old boy named John as he sought and failed to find comfort from caregivers in a British boarding nursery, captured in a 1969 documentary film, deeply distressed the Chinese women at a seminar last week on early childhood separation.

It showed in hard-to-watch detail the damage that can be inflicted when young children lose their primary caregivers. John’s anguish was extreme. He cried for days, refused food and withdrew.

One woman at the seminar, which was offered at a Beijing university and attended mostly by mothers and professional caregivers, took off her glasses and hid her face in her hands for a long time.

Another stared straight ahead, tearing up.

A third asked, somewhat frantically, whether John had healed later. The answer — that he had not, entirely — from the teacher, Alf Gerlach, a psychoanalyst at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, was met with quiet consternation.