REFLECTIONS ON EATGA YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW
Dennis Brown
Thank you, Kurt, for asking me to share some thoughts on our association from the viewpoint of a longstanding member but not one of the “founding fathers”. I had been invited to join the Association by Malcolm Pines and Elizabeth Foulkes, the British members of the group that first met in Paris in 1982.
It was an exciting time. Colleagues approaching the peak of their professional creativity came together from many parts of Europe, at a time when there was a hope of Europe emerging from narrow national interest and ideological paranoia. The idea of a cooperative Europe that built on common interest while valuing differences must have added to the professional and personal motivation of all of us. We had probably all had personal reasons to be sensitive to the impact of cultural factors. For example, if national boundaries had not been permeable, I would not have been born British.
I believe that the dynamics in our Association reflect those of Europe. The Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1991, six years after our first workshop. There was, and of course still is, much fear competing with idealism: fear of being swamped and of bcing excluded. Some of this dichotomy is reflected in our name: TRANSCULTURAL when we are often faced with INTERCULTURAL issues.
The hypothesis, originally formulated by René Kaës was that culture 1) provides and maintains the undifferentiated, nonindividualized part of the personality necessary for belonging to a social whole 2) provides a set of common defences, and 3) provides points for identification and differentiation. 4) Kaës added a fourth function of culture, to constitute an area of psychic transformation by providing signifiers and representations for organizing psychic reality. Kaës here analyses elements of what Foulkes called the Foundation Matrix of shared biological and cultural values and reactions.
My proposition today is that by choosing transcultural for our name rather than intercultural, we might have unbalanced our shared psychic reality by focussing on a supposed mutual identification, relegating differentiation to our shared social shadow or unconscious. In terms of Matte Blanco’s bilogic, we focussed on symmetrical at the expense of asymmetrical logic.
Has this lack of balance made it difficult to face up to our differences and thus grow through creative dialogue? Should we have called ourselves The European Association for Cultural Group Analysis?
It might be instructive to trace the chosen themes of our workshops. 1) The Maastricht workshop was set up partly to test the hypotheses of Kaës, and involved a subgroup of researchers and observers in the small groups (of which I was one). Our observations were compatible with the hypotheses were supported, and what was very clear was the importance of language and its power to unite, differentiate and confuse giving rise e.g. to a potent image of the Tower of Babel and the longing for a universal language, personified in our envied multilinguists. The continuing impact of historical social trauma was also made painfully clear, as well as the related fact that German could not be spoken. But there was an open struggle for dominance between French and English.
2) Heidelberg was chosen partly to confront the silencing of the German language. Here conflicts over historical social trauma came out into the open, particularly painfully between (some) Jews and Germans. The latter were driven to talk about their own suffering – as it were transforming the competition over language into competition over suffering.
Leaderless national groups were introduced at Heidelberg, each seemingly forming a different quality of culture – some (e.g. the French) more serious and intellectual than others.
3) Oxford gave national groups an even higher profile, but it became clear that some smaller groups rebelled at being lumped together with others, and that some participants preferred to form “unofficial” groupings to protest against the imposition of labels by staff. Another aspect of national labels is that they blur other categorizations such as color. I recall the anguish of a “very English” participant of AfroCaribbean origin when giving voice to this. I am not sure what went on in the staff group as I was chair of the local organizing committee, but had a feeling that I was not part of the “inner circle” for other reasons too. I think it is true that, unlike Maastricht and Heidelberg, no written reports of the workshop emerged. The staff member who accepted the task failed to deliver.
4) Paris was ostensibly based on differences of religious upbringing, as Edith Lecourt’s excellent report in the latest Newsletter (2000/2) makes clear. I had been asked to join thc staff for this workshop, but declined partly be cause I was under a lot of pressure at the time. and in fact became ill just before the workshop, but also because it seemed like an attempt to correct an imbalance between the French and British influences in the Association. I even wondered if it was related to the sense I had had in Oxford of not being included in the central staff circle. Was this personal paranoia, I asked myself? Then I read Edith’s recent report, which seems to point to wider issues. For example, she describes conflict about Malcolm Pines’ interventions which were criticized as “too educative”, and Jaak le Roy’s fantasy of Jean Claude Rouchy as the Pope! Religious beliefs were equated with psychoanalytic beliefs among the staff I was not there, but believe this touches on a difference in theory and outlook between the French more psychoanalytic view of groups, and the British one which is Foulkesian and groupanalytic. This involves a more democratic and open relationship between members and conductors in psychoanalytic thinking, more in tune with selfpsychology and intersubjectivity. The French focus more on infantile processes, the British on maturational ones. Sometimes this difference has been manifest in our workshops through arguments about how large groups should be conducted and whether there should be any contact between staff and participants.
5) Köszeg It is not surprising that the theme for the next workshop, the first in Eastern Europe, was on sibling relations. It arose from one of the working groups set up at the study day in Leuven to encourage “likeminded” members to work on a particular area of study. Ours had chosen to focus on the effect of social constraints and configurations on the personality and how people relate. The social manifestation of “sibling rivalry” was enacted in the wish to be generous to our Eastern European colleagues, their envy and suspicion of colonialism, and our fear of being taken advantage of by them. Some of this “paranoia” might have entered into the resistance to non-analytic research questionnaires, felt by some to be alien to the culture of EATGA.
6) Fiesole The report by Rudi Olivieri-Larsson, also in the latest Newsletter, drawing in part on the experiences of staff members Ugo Corino and Luc Michel, highlights the continuation in the Association of some of these conflicts – struggle for leadership, sibling rivalry and envy among the staff. What was specially striking was the avoidance of the chosen subject of professional identity. Neither staff nor participants felt safe enough to manage without the illusion that all were psychotherapists with similar intentions and convictions. Rudi concluded that it is necessary to trave a space where open and hidden conflicts within staff can be faced up to and resolved on a transcultural background. I believe this applies to our Association as a whole. I started with a hypothesis that the dynamics of our Association inevitably reflects those of Europe. An illusion of unity and uniformity avoids the hard work of facing up to diversity and creative conflict. The working groups set up in Leuven produced “safe havens” and interesting workshops but avoided facing up to differences in the association. With that in mina I shall finish with three questions.
a) Have we become stuck because we are avoiding differences between us?
b) Are we afraid to grow as an organization because we are afraid of “immigrants” without papers coming into our version of “fortress Europe”?
c) Do we need to start with an examination of the complexity of the Foundation Matrices in each of us and which are therefore present in the Association?