Column ‘My Way’ written for the Newsletter of the British Association of Group Psychotherapists

After the Congress is over.

The Congress of the International Association of Group Psychotherapists has now been and gone. For a month afterwards I was in a state of mourning for this huge presence that the eight days had been, in particular that monstrous lover, the "large fucking group". I found myself urgently desiring more large groups - the small and the median would no longer do. Anything less than 500 participants was now suboptimal. Not only that, the group had to contain a plethora of languages, cultures and nationalities arranged in a multitude of concentric circles. Global conflicts had become my domestic concerns. My Russian blood had boiled. My Belfast Republican self had fired metaphorical bullets and had been fired at in return. I'd made new friends and new enemies. I'd taken risks that from this distance seem extraordinary but at the time were terrifyingly necessary. I'd danced, flirted and communed with colleagues as (un)equals - including my therapist - and basked in the thrill of association with the big cheeses. I'd consumed a mass of ideas, declined a whole lot more, there having been well over 300 papers, seminars, symposia and other brain foods. Ordinary life, just for a while, couldn't compete.

I have many stories to tell about my (rite of) passage through the Congress. Two will suffice for now. The first is about my voice - my somewhat neutral middle class accent to be precise. One of the most powerful and defining themes of the congress was concerned with the 'transgenerational transmission of trauma' in particular in conflict strewn parts of the world and how certain historical events can operate like 'chosen trauma' that repeat in various degrees of disguise over time, rather like emblems of a nation's or ethnic group's struggles. I have an uncle, my mother's elder brother, who came to Birmingham from Belfast in his late teens in search of work and to escape his tyrannical father. There he fell in love with a lower middle class English girl from a family with aspirant social values. To gain her family's acceptance he anglicised his Irish name and did the same with his accent. I'd always resented that he'd done this and found his Birmingham accent grating. Now, when I was growing up I had a typical Brummy accent and arriving at University in Sheffield, aspiring to escape my immigrant working class routes and to join an elite social class, my accent felt like a bar to entry, so more or less consciously I set out to rid myself of it. For the uninitiated, there is a hierarchy of accents in this country at the bottom of which are the Brummy accent and the more inscrutable Black Country variants. At the congress my struggle to find my voice in the large group suddenly connected me transgenerationally to my uncle - I could now forgive the bastard!

In the central circle of the large group each day, along with Earl (the captain's name was Hopper, my god he had a ...) and others, was a vocal, formidable and expressive Palestinian woman called Lamis - the sole representative of her people at the Congress. For the first four days I sat well away from this central circle and sniped from the edges. Then on the penultimate evening I tumbled out of the conference centre with a crowd of people and found myself walking towards the west-end in conversation with none other than Lamis. We both shared a passion for a colleague of hers, Macario Giraldo, who had provided my Congress high, becoming my Congress father as a result, during a moving and illuminating symposium on his work in which he combines (believe it or not) Lacan and object relations around a core theme of intersubjectivity. I'd fallen into his session by chance, too tired of choosing between the vast aray of possibilities. Lamis told me she needed to return to Washington the following day and that she would not be at the final session of the large group. She also told me that she'd found my contributions to the large group very moving, that I reminded her of her brother and that as a consequence she wanted me to take her vacant seat the following day in the large group. My knees nearly buckled as she told me this. I felt myself touched yet at the same time overwhelmed by the responsibility of being her Congress brother, of taking her place and risking annihilation. I did once work in the Gaza Strip for a summer as an English teacher but never did I feel so involved, with this sense that their struggle was my struggle, as I did at that point. I think the large group experience taught me above all else that annihilation is in equal measure a potential consequence of the polarities of involvement and uninvolvement.

One question on my mind since the Congress: do group psychotherapists have more fun? You bet we do!

Peter Zelaskowski

RETURN TO ARTICLES BY PETER ZELASKOWSKI