Nazareth Conferences

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The Nazareth Conferences were the beginning of a project by psychoanalysts from England, Israel and Germany whose founding fathers and mothers set out to help resolve conflicts that had developed between national groups . The causes of the conflict were assumed to be collective prejudice and resentment . The aim of the conferences was - and it is for the following projects to this day - to become aware of these prejudices and resentments and - at best - to be able to give them up. Desmond Tutu compared the conferences in his foreword to the German and English editions of the book on the Nazareth Conferences with the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (TRC), which he chaired in South Africa after the end of apartheid .

history

Individual psychoanalysts and the organizations representing them - united in the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) - have come a long way before the first of the three conferences, called the Nazareth Conference , could take place in 1994. The roots go back to 1934, when Max Eitingon founded the Palestinian, today Israeli Psychoanalytical Society after his escape from Germany . Some of the psychoanalysts who called these conferences came into being from among their ranks.

A second line in the history of the project began in England in 1957. It was there that the Tavistock Institute began to develop what would later become known as the Leicester Conferences, an “empirical experiment on group relationships” that used partly psychoanalytic concepts and partly those from the “theory of open systems”.

In 1977, for the first time after the war and the time of National Socialism , the biennial congress of the IPA took place in Jerusalem. The events at this congress set processes of conflict in motion in Germany and Israel, which in 1985 were to have visible consequences in both countries. In Jerusalem in 1977, the German group suffered an offensive rejection of their wish to host a next congress - also for the first time after the Holocaust  - in Berlin, but used this offense for an intensive process of self-reflection . At the beginning there was the insight into the “illusion of an innocent tradition and history ”. The result was presented at the 34th IPA congress in 1985 in Hamburg in an accompanying exhibition that reproduced the self-reflective process.

In the same year, as a result of self-awareness efforts after the Jerusalem Congress, the OFEK was founded in Israel , an organization dedicated to the study of group processes through the Leicester Conferences. With the support of and under the direction of Eric Miller from the Tavistock Institute in London, special group relations conferences were established with OFEK in Israel.

Soon after the IPA Congress 1985 in Hamburg and inspired by it, Rafael Moses and his wife Rina Moses-Hrushevski proposed a research group in Israel that should initiate self-reflective processes of both groups in the presence of the other. The decision to take this risk and get the project off the ground was made in the apartment of the Moses couple, as Shmuel Erlich , who was there at the time, mentioned. But another 9 years - and the failure at a first attempt - went by before the first conference in 1994 in Nazareth could finally take place.

Because some people sorely missed the German Jews at the first and second conference, Shmuel Erlich, a native of Frankfurt, wrote to them in an open letter in 1999, shortly before the third conference , in which he encouraged them to participate. According to Hermann Beland, the path taken by the German psychoanalysts in these conferences included on the one hand the Germans' "still collectively effective (e)" defense against a "visualization of the Holocaust" and on the other hand the lack of a "convincing insight into madness why the Germans wanted this (the Holocaust, author's note) ”. He describes in detail the twists and turns - his own and those of a part of the German group - which ultimately led to participation in this project. It was not until 2007 that an IPA congress was possible again in Berlin for the first time since 1922 .

Conference location 2000 in Bad Segeberg
Conference location since 2004 in Platres / Cyprus

Director of the staff mentioned supervisors group was for the first three conferences in 1994 and 1996 in Nazareth and 2000 in Bad Segeberg Eric Miller. His unexpected death in 2002 caused a turning point, as did the death of Rafael Moses, who was a member of the staff from the beginning, in the same year . The fourth conference in Cyprus continued in 2004 and the fifth in 2006: under a new name, with a new design and with Anton Obholzer as the new director. In 2007 the PCCA -  Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities  - was founded, a non-profit organization with which the founders of the Nazareth conferences have given themselves a structure that is also visible to the outside world. From 2008 she took over the lead management of the conferences. In the same year Palestinians took part for the first time and in the following conference in 2010 they were represented in the staff with Nimer Said .

In 2019, the organizing organization PCCA was honored with the Sigourney Award for the development and successful testing of the method used.

Task and design

The title of the three Nazareth conferences - "Germans and Israelis: The Past in the Present" - was also the program. He addressed two national groups and suggested realizing the past of the relationship between both target groups in the present. This made the conferences a place where individual and group identities could meet and where the opportunity was given to sound out the opportunities and risks of such an encounter. The aim was to find out how the current relationship to the other group was influenced by belonging to one's own and how the present of this relationship was influenced by the past. Although the intention was to get on the track of the underlying, unconscious fantasies, the goal was not therapeutic, but learning at the moment of encounter. In order to be able to devote oneself to this difficult task undisturbed by the everyday life of the participants, the design of the conference provided a safe framework. Members and staff , as it was called at the conference, lived together in one house and worked on the topic for 6 days. The conference language was English. The use of one's own national language was permitted, but only provided that everyone present spoke it. All of this should make it possible to gradually perceive one's own role, which was taken on in the conference in the presence of the others, and to explore how it was influenced by past and current emotional and social processes.

Attendees

Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (Staff: 2011). Front: Hermann Beland / DE, Shmuel Erlich / IL, Dorothee C. von Tippelskirch-Eissing / DE, Louisa Diana Brunner / IT, Anton Obholzer / UK. Middle: Mira Erlich-Ginor / IL. Back: Jona Rosenfeld / IL, Fakhry Davids / UK, Veronika Grüneisen / DE, Karin Lüders / DE.

Since the conferences were viewed as a courageous and risky undertaking from the start and were planned by psychoanalysts, the invitation was initially sent to a kind of closed society: through various psychoanalytic professional associations to its members. That later changed. Participants were members of the groups in the conflict and members of the staff . The staff was responsible for the management of the conference, they took responsibility for the framework, thus ensuring the boundaries of space, time and task; systematically or when necessary he provided so-called consultants and offered working hypotheses about what was happening. At the same time, he was not an external observer, but was involved in the overall process through the individuals involved and as a group.

As it turned out, the participants came not only from Germany and Israel, so that the “division of the world” indicated in the title turned out to be “the imagination of the planners”. The largest age group was made up of the so-called second generation. But also some from the previous and members of the next generation were represented.

Although Germans and Israelis were invited to take part, they often felt that their identity was not properly recognized. The question of identity was central, especially for the Israelis, because it was this question that had decided in the past who was allowed to live. It was clear to everyone involved what finally found words: "Our parents would not sit here together".

Structure and method

The individual participants and their stories only seem to be the focus of consideration. On an experimental basis, they could be viewed as representatives of their group and thus gave the opportunity to understand the individual as a significant part of group conflicts. In an attempt to find solutions to these group conflicts, various group processes were initiated and studied. The groundbreaking working hypothesis was that the group conflicts that appeared insoluble were based on conscious and unconscious attitudes, feelings, willingness to react and fantasies, which were often identity-creating and therefore difficult to give up. Just the perception of this was accompanied by violent affects and required a high willingness to tolerate affect on the part of the participants.

Corresponding to the task of the conferences to gain a deeper understanding of the individual and collective causes of group conflicts and thereby create the prerequisites for their solution, the method provided a system of different group constellations that were either experimental or reflective. In some, experiences should be gathered in the here and now and evaluated in others. As far as the experiences of a previous conference suggested changes to the design, it was adapted accordingly. By the third conference, the system of the various groups had initially been consolidated. Plenary , review and application groups were supposed to help initiate reflective processes, the small study group and especially the system event offered space for experience, design and experience, i.e. encounters with oneself and others. A total of 33 ½ working hours were spread over 6 days - also on the Sabbath . The application group was later abandoned.

While the task in the five plenums was to bring events and experiences from the other groups together again and again and to be able to view and understand individual events as part of the whole, the review and application groups had different tasks. Both had the same composition of five to seven participants from the same nation and a constant advisor. The aim of the review group was to find out which role each individual had taken on in the overall system of the conference and whether or how it had changed. The application group gave the opportunity to consider how the conference experience at home could be used in professional or other roles. In the small study group , both nationalities sat together with a counselor six times to experience and consider the behavior of the group as a group. The system event , with its seven sessions, was not only the focus of the conference in terms of time. It began in two large groups of separate nationalities without an adviser; the staff worked continuously in a third room in public. That meant he could be visited and his work observed. In an ongoing process, the participants in the System Event had to agree on who would like to work with whom, in which room, with or without a consultant, on which topic, and then implement that. In this way, current conflicts unfolded, which often turned out to be similar to the conflicts brought with them. The event system made them accessible to experience because they were currently (re) staged and made it possible to observe and understand their origins and meaning. If the process threatened to derail, the staff helped with specific interpretations. The aim of the whole, according to the declared intention of the initiators, is an educational one: learning through experience.

course

Each of the three conferences took its own course depending on the participants and the stories they brought with them. While fathers and their influence on the development of prejudices and resentments were in the foreground in the first and second conferences, the mothers also came into focus in the third conference.

Strictly speaking, for many, the conferences began with the almost always anxious question: "Go or not?" In the further course, "meaningful moments" were experienced by all those present "in very different group events". Stories of "perpetrators" and "victims" and the consequences of the Holocaust for the following generations - intellectually processed by political scientists and historians - were tangible in the course of the conferences and conveyed through individual fates and showed the large gap in individual and personal processing . “Fantasies, dreams, the unknown, the misunderstood, the unspoken and the unspeakable” came to life. This paved the way for change in the individual. It could be a prerequisite for putting a stop to the mute transmission of damage suffered on both sides to the following generations.

Although the three conferences were not identical in composition and structure, a process-like event emerged in their course not only for each one, but also across all three conferences. It condensed in the third conference with the only interpretation that the staff made available to the participants in this conference:

“The participants who came to this conference have put themselves in a painful situation that can be experienced as cruel. This leads to greater dependency on the staff, who should take everything on board, along with fears of whether they can do it and disappointments due to insufficient support. These frightening ideas could have something to do with unexpected but effective changes in one's own sense of identity and with the fear of giving up cherished parts of one's own identity, such as the role of the victim (for the Israelis) or the guilt of the perpetrator (for the Germans). "

One participant understood this interpretation as both very unsettling, but also further, because she had raised questions that needed an answer:

“It seems to me that the staff had said something outrageous: namely, that the role of the victim among the Israelis and the guilt of the perpetrator among the Germans are 'valued' parts of their own identity. It is difficult to acknowledge that. But that's not all. Interpretation takes into account that these parts of identity could be abandoned. But what then? Wouldn't that mean that the Jewish group had to disidentify itself from the role of victim and the non-Jewish, German group had to disidentify itself from the guilt of the perpetrators? Would that not mean to separate oneself in a deep sense from the parents, who nevertheless had to be available not only in the world of inner objects, but often also in real life as a place where one's own fears and desires of annihilation unconsciously well accommodated could become? What to do with this experience if it loses its place? What consequences would that have, for oneself, but also for encounters with others? Doesn't someone who touches a taboo become a taboo himself? Worry questions that this interpretation could have raised and many more of them are conceivable. A change in identity destabilizes the image that we have made of ourselves, of others and of the world, and that is inevitably associated with crises, anxious questions and a lot of uneasiness. "

A participant in the Israeli group, who belongs to the so-called child survivors , participated in all three conferences and published a lot on the subject, was concerned with the question of whether Jews have a face for Germans. He had played a special and deliberately provocative role in the third conference, carrying around the whole time a plastic bag containing, among other belongings, one of his publications that he was offering for sale. In it he writes:

"Also, we, the professionals, like the rest, are unable to look into the eyes of those who return from death"

"We, the experts, like everyone else, are incapable of looking those in the eyes who have returned from death."

- Haim Dasberg : Echoes of the Holocaust

One of the goals of these conferences was to be able to look one another in the eyes.

Result

The results of the conferences differed from each other and were very individual in nature. One participant put it this way: “Being able to look can help to recognize how the other differs from my fantasies about him. This releases me from the bondage of my fantasies and the others from the world of my inner objects that I have at my disposal, into the world of those who can confront me as a subject and who I no longer have at my disposal. Then, but only then, will both have the freedom to enter into a relationship with one another, or else to let it be. "

In addition, two books could appear as a collective result, one in German, one in English, both almost simultaneously as a voluntary joint effort. In addition to a few chapters to understand the project, its history and the design and structure of the conferences, the conference experience of the participants was presented as a collage: thematically arranged individual contributions by named co-authors. Mira Erlich-Ginor, who was authorized by those involved to put together a collage from her contributions, wrote in her introduction: "There are as many conference stories as the number of conference participants is large."

Although everyone was written to and asked to participate, the collage was essentially carried out by participants who viewed the conference positively. There are hardly any critical positions. However, the two books helped make the project accessible to a wider public and allow readers to learn firsthand about the personal and often painful experiences of the participants.

The conferences were received quite differently in Germany and Israel: “In contrast to the very positive assessment of our work in Germany and elsewhere, this was not the case in Israel”. Nonetheless, the assessment of "those Israelis who attended the conference was decidedly positive, deeply involved and grateful."

The work of the conferences received international attention through lectures, presentations and publications - initially in the psychoanalytic community. In 2009 it was foreseeable that they “have a future”. A website was set up and the PCCA opened the conferences to all interested parties, so that the project could now also address other national groups in conflict.

literature

  • Hermann Beland: Experiences from a Leicester conference in Israel. In: DPV information. 12, 1992, pp. 23-25.
  • Haim Dasberg: Myths and Taboos among Israeli First- and Second-Generation Psychiatrists in Regard to the Holocaust. In: Shalom Robinson (Ed.): Echoes of the Holocaust. Bulletin of the Jerusalem Center for Research into the Late Effects of the Holocaust. No. 6, Jerusalem 2000, pp. 26-36. On the Echoes of the Holocaust website . Retrieved January 26, 2016.
  • Rivka Eiferman : "Germany" and "the Germans". Acting out fantasies and their discovery in self-analysis. In: Yearbook of Psychoanalysis. 20, 1987, pp. 165-206.
  • H. Shmuel Erlich, Mira Erlich-Ginor, Hermann Beland: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. The Nazareth Group Conferences Germans and Israelis - The Past Is Present. (= Library of Psychoanalysis. ) With a foreword by Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu. Psychozial-Verlag, Giessen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89806-765-2 .
  • H. Shmuel Erlich, Mira Erlich-Ginor, Hermann Beland: Fed with Tears - Poisoned with Milk. The "Nazareth" Group Relations Conferences. Germans and Israelis - The Past in the Present. With a foreword by Desmond M. Tutu. Psychozial-Verlag, Giessen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89806-751-5 .
  • Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein: Germans and Israelis: The Past in the Present. A psychoanalytic workshop in Nazareth in June 1994. In: Forum der Psychoanalyse. 10, 1994, pp. 363-370.
  • Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein: The division of the psychoanalytic community and its consequences. In: Forum of Psychoanalysis. 12, 1996, pp. 363-369.
  • Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein: Germans and Israelis: The past in the present. Third “Nazareth Conference” from June 21-26, 2000 in Bad Segeberg / Holstein. In: Forum of Psychoanalysis. 2001.
  • Eric J. Miller : The "Leicester" Model: Experiential study of Group and Organizational Processes. In: Occasional Papers. 10, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London 1989.
  • Carl Nedelmann: The Past in the Present Between Germans and Jews. In: Forum of Psychoanalysis. 14, 1998, pp. 176-189.

Web links

  • PCCA website , i. e. Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities - Working with the impact of societal conflict , with information about the conferences, the history of the project, the people behind the project and with articles and further links, accessed on December 25, 2015.
  • Website of the Tavistock Institute. Retrieved December 25, 2015.

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ a b Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 33.
  2. ↑ a b Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA) - Working with the impact of societal conflict - with information about the conferences since 1994 , the history of the project, the people behind the project and with articles and further links. Retrieved December 25, 2015 (English).
  3. ^ Desmond M. Tutu: Foreword. In: Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - Poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 11. Text of the foreword online , accessed on December 26, 2015 (English).
  4. ↑ a b H. Shmuel Erlich, Mira Erlich-Ginor, Hermann Beland: Stilled with tears - poisoned with milk. The Nazareth Group Conferences Germans and Israelis - The Past Is Present. With a foreword by Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu. Psychozial-Verlag, Giessen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89806-765-2 . On the publisher's website with table of contents and reviews, accessed on December 25, 2015.
    H. Shmuel Erlich, Mira Erlich-Ginor, Hermann Beland: Fed with Tears - Poisoned with Milk. The "Nazareth" Group Relations Conferences. Germans and Israelis - The Past in the Present. With a foreword by Desmond M. Tutu. Psychozial-Verlag, Giessen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89806-751-5 . On the publisher's website with table of contents and reviews, accessed December 25, 2015 (English).
  5. ^ TRC ie short for Truth and Reconciliation Commission
  6. ↑ Official website of the Israeli Psychoanalytical Society ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 1, 2016 (English). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.psychoanalysis.org.il
  7. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 21.
  8. ^ Official website of the Tavistock Institute , accessed December 25, 2015 (English).
  9. ^ A b Eric J. Miller: The "Leicester" Model: Experiential study of Group and Organizational Processes. Occasional Papers 10, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London, 1989.
    Group Relations on the Tavistock Institute website, accessed December 25, 2015 (English).
  10. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 23.
  11. ^ Official website of the IPA , accessed on January 1, 2016.
  12. ↑ Karen Brecht, Volker Friedrich, Ludger M. Hermanns, Isidor J. Kaminer, Dierk H. Juelich (eds.): Here life goes on in a strange way ... On the history of psychoanalysis in Germany. (Library of Psychoanalysis). Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8379-2096-3 , p. 7.
  13. ↑ Karen Brecht, Volker Friedrich, Ludger M. Hermanns, Isidor J. Kaminer, Dierk H. Juelich (eds.): Here life goes on in a strange way ... On the history of psychoanalysis in Germany (library of psychoanalysis). Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8379-2096-3 .
  14. ↑ Official website of OFEK , accessed December 26, 2015 (English).
  15. ↑ Rafael Moses. Short CV at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, accessed on December 26, 2015. Also: Sigmund Freud Lectures Hermann Beland: Rafael Moses: a Cain interpretation. In: PCCA (Ed.): Newsletter 1–2015 . Retrieved December 26, 2015 (English).

  16. ↑ H. Shmuel Erlich: The difficult situation of the Jews living in Germany. An open letter. In: Psyche 53.1999 , pp. 1188-1190.
  17. ↑ Hermann Beland . In: PCCA website . Retrieved December 25, 2015 (English).
  18. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 25.
  19. ↑ Ingo Way: Endure tension. In: Jüdische Allgemeine. August 2, 2007, accessed December 25, 2015.
  20. ↑ Shmuel Erlich, Mira Erlich-Ginor and Ursula Kreuzer-Haustein: Shaping the Future by Confronting the Past: Germans, Jews and Affected Others. In: PCCA (Ed.): Panel, International Psychoanalytic Congress, Berlin 2007. Accessed December 25, 2015 (English).
  21. ↑ For the composition of the staff, see - on the PCCA website - 1994 , 1996 and 2000 . Retrieved December 26, 2015 (English).
  22. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 208.
  23. ^ Anton Obholzer as the new director of the conferences on the PCCA website, accessed on December 26, 2015 (English).
  24. ↑ Veronika Grüneisen: Letter of Chairperson . In: Newsletter . No. 1 , 2014 ( PCCA – Grüneisen [accessed January 12, 2016]).
  25. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 209.
  26. ^ Recipient List. Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA), 2019. In: The Sigourney Award. 2019, accessed on June 19, 2020 .
  27. ↑ PCCA : Past Conferences. Conference I: 1994, II: 1996, III: 2000. Retrieved December 26, 2015 (English).
  28. ↑ Eric Miller: Developing the Conference Design . In: Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - Poisoned with milk. 2009, pp. 39-48.
  29. ↑ he participant and supervisor group
  30. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 44.
  31. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 49.
  32. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 51.
  33. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 51, p. 60.
  34. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 71.
  35. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 82.
  36. ↑ See also the post-war period in Germany and the founding of the state of Israel
  37. ↑ PCCA : The PCCA Conferences. The Program. Retrieved January 1, 2016 (English).
  38. ↑ Eric Miller: Developing the Conference Design. In: Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - Poisoned with milk. 2009, pp. 39-48. See also: Kreutzer-Haustein (1994), Kreutzer-Haustein (2001), Nedelmann (1998)
  39. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 111 ff.
  40. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 130 ff.
  41. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 138 ff.
  42. ↑ Go or not - the long way to the conference. In: Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - Poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 76 ff.
  43. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 84.
  44. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 98.
  45. ↑ For the Germans z. B. Sigrid Chamberlain: Adolf Hitler, the German mother and her first child. About two Nazi education books. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 1997, ISBN 978-3-930096-58-9 . On the publisher's website with table of contents, table of contents and reviews, accessed January 3, 2016.
  46. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 150.
  47. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 151.
  48. ↑ Haim Dasberg: Myths and Taboos among Israeli first- and second-generation Psychiatrists in Regard to the Holocaust. In: Shalom Robinson (Ed.): Echoes of the Holocaust. Bulletin of the Jerusalem Center for Research into the Late Effects of the Holocaust. No. 6, Jerusalem 2000, pp. 26-36. (P. 28, English).
  49. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 165.
  50. ↑ Mira Erlich-Ginor: The Conference Experience as a Collage - A Concept and Its Problems - An Introduction. In: Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - Poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 53 ff.
  51. ^ H. Shmuel Erlich: After the conference. Lectures, discussions, effects. In: Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - Poisoned with milk. 2009, pp. 204-205.
  52. ↑ Erlich et al .: Satisfied with tears - poisoned with milk. 2009, p. 207.