Summer School 2025 – Reflections and readings

Before

It was a 2 km walk on the road, around twenty minutes, up and down the country, by countless yellow mowed meadows and sheep pastures, through a little forest at around half of the way, almost as an island on the combed and waved surface. Coming on the other side of it, in a distance, on a small rise of the land, an unassuming structure could be seen, surrounded with people who seemed as a colony of ants. The road went down for a few minutes and when it came up again, I got a sight of monument-like stack of stones, rising from the land, among a swarm of people circulating around it. From that distance, it seemed huge. Coming closer, it just rose to extraordinary proportions. Audio guide made several explanations. I joined the flock of mostly orderly moving people, a fish among others in a bowl, while I watched, listened, trying to feel something, not knowing what that should be. With all the un-ordinariness of what was in front of me, I struggled to find it special or endearing. It has metamorphosed, from magnificent fantasy I had about it, into a great monument with exact and limiting sight-seeing schedule. At the end of the circle, I tried various moves, like making some distance and then turning to walk closer, keeping the view at the wholeness of it; repeated it with eyes closed; stay in one point firmly and with quieted mind, searching for sensing anything other than voices and continuous movements of people; turning my back to it and then turning again to face it. After a while I sighed and left, this time avoiding the road, walking instead on the path through pastures, searching my way around the small collections of ship shit and groups of their woolly makers while they also avoided me, and while strolling, I pondered about those people of the past who felt something so powerful they had to make it, maybe in order that someone would see that they do also.

It was just in front of the forest island that I turned around to see it for the last time. And there it came, the aw, as that stone construction, arranged in a circle of huge sarsen pillars, which holds more of them inside in a horseshoe placement with blue stones among them, standing in touch with celestial movements so that the ray of sun finds its way two times in a year through the middle and all the way to the other side, with all the centuries and ages of building history and perseverant existence, as if holding the centre through all the turmoil of the times, while it seemed at the same time, in the here and now, that to this landscape of meadows, pastures, sheep and their droppings, it is its ordinary part.

Summer School

1. Necropolitics and Skin

It was the second time that I was listening about Fanon. While my attention to it the first time was fleeting, this second time, presentation of Erica Burman triggered interest about his work. The first day after the Summer School, in my free time, I read “The Wretched of the Earth” and came to a paragraph depicting colonial occupation through a feature called “spatialization”. The words, I thought, written in 1960, grapples with the demarcation gaps between two political and social orders: 

»In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son … and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behaviour … (are) expressions of respect for the established order, (which) serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers … separate the exploited from those in power.«

It is different in the colonies, says Fanon (ibid):

»… the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action, maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination…«

Fanon depicts the place where colonised people live, and his description has razor blade relevancy to these days (Fanon, 1991, pages 37-39):

“The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees.”

The text brings clear, sharp images and it seems as if screaming to me. I found the comment from Mbembe (senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research in South Africa), (2003, page 26-27): “… (this) is the very way in which necropower operates… In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”

Mbembe correlate Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation with the late-modern colonial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, with three major characteristics in relation to the working of the specific terror formation that Mbebe calls “necropower” (Mbebe, 2003, page 27-29):

“First is the dynamics of territorial fragmentation, the sealing off and expansion of settlements. The objective of this process is twofold: to render any movement impossible and to implement separation along the model of the apartheid state…”

Then, Mbebe continues, there is 

“… a regime of vertical sovereignty… through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of the airspace from the ground… combined with the (adapted) tactics of medieval siege warfare… An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy’s societal and urban infrastructure network … the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources…”

Mbebe points out (ibid, page 27-29): 

“As the Palestinian case illustrates, late-modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical (political government over human life as defined by Foucault (1978, page 139)), and necropolitical…”

In the following text, Mbebe examines what is the effect and consequence of described powers on the receiving end (Mbebe, 2003, 35-36):

»… two apparently irreconcilable logics are confronting each other: the logic of martyrdom and the logic of survival. In examining these two logics, I would like to reflect on the twin issues of death and terror on the one hand and terror and freedom on the other. In the confrontation between these two logics, terror is not on one side and death on the other. Terror and death are at the heart of each.«

About survival writes, for example, Canetti (1981, pages 227-228): »In survival, each man is the enemy of every other… But this other must not disappear completely; his physical presence as a corpse is indispensable for the feeling of triumph…«, while Gilroy about martyrdom (1993, page 63), in his The Black Atlantic, explains in gruesome examples how human beings, deprived of essential humanity, can »…turn towards death as a release from terror and bondage and a chance to find substantive freedom…«.

There is too much to follow searching for the history of man opressing, using, abusing, othering other man (Mbembe, Gilroy, Black Past). Among others, it is Arendt, through the history of oppression leading to holocaust (Arendt, 1973, page 221), who provides critical occurrences of colonialism in Inidia and Africa from late eighteen century towards the first world war: 

»Lying under anybody’s nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism. ‘Administrative massacres’ were proposed by Indian bureaucrats while African officials declared that ‘no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed to stand in the way’ of white rule.«

Arendt again (ibid, Preface to Part One, page xiv):

»Twentieth-century political developments have driven the Jewish people into the storm center of events; the Jewish question and antisemitism… became the catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement and the establishment of the organizational structure of the Third Reich, in which every citizen had to prove that he was not a Jew, then for a world war of unparalleled ferocity, and finally for the emergence of the unprecedented crime of genocide…«

And lastly (ibid, page 290):

»… like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs… For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals.«

What is this, I thought, and while reading, finding my reaction close to one when I read the horrendous news lines on my phone. It is about instinctively putting distance between the meaning I perceive and emergent emotional response brewing within me.

I had to stop, and turned instead to Burman’s lecture and her article of 2024 entitled “Fanon, temporality and pedagogy: Combatting racist (non-)relationalities of self and other«, which start with a statement: »‘Self’ and ‘other’ are central to conceptualising and enacting relationships,« then widening discourse (Burman, 2024):

»… under Western modernity, these notions … are tightly boundaried around the individual. Within so-called traditional societies and cultures, typically more fluid, shifting and collective forms are also at play… Thus, self and other can sit alongside each other in more than a binary relationship… The analysis below explores spatiotemporal relations implied, presumed, or set in play in self-other relations via Frantz Fanon’s writings…«

Further, she points out the term »othering« as the label for a relationship of uneven attributions of value; originating from Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, it was taken up by and extensively discussed regarding gendered relations by de Beauvoir, who wrote (2010, page 306):

»The Other is singularly defined according to the singular way the One chooses to posit himself.«

Burman continues: 

»…othering has come to be seen as central to interpersonal and institutional practices of dehumanization and inferiorization… Dynamics of othering were also elaborated by Fanon, especially in Black Skin White Masks.«

Fanon, at least at the very beginning of the mentioned book (1986, page 9-10), shows no sign of philosophy:

»The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon… Or too late. 

I do not come with timeless truths.

My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances.

Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said…

… Supply a single answer and the colour problem would be stripped of all its importance.

What does a man want?

What does the black man want?

At the risk of arousing the resentment of my coloured brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.

There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born…«

In further text, Fanon (1986, page 10-11) does shifts to careful consideration about a human:

»… Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding.

Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him… 

The problem is important. I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of colour from himself…«

And than he distances somewhat from direct, emotional language, from fervour as he calls it (ibid, page 11):

»… This book should have been written three years ago… But these truths were a fire in me then. Now, I can tell them without being burned. These truths do not have to be hurled in men’s faces. They are not intended to ignite fervour. I do not trust fervour.

Every time it has burst out somewhere, it has brought fire, famine, misery …. And contempt for man.

Fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent.«

So distancing myself again from feeling too much, I grasp the intellectualizing approach about »othering« (Brons, 2015, page 70): »… if Hegel is right, then something like othering takes place in any encounter between two intelligent, interpreting creatures.« In the context of feminist and post-colonial thought, points out Brons (ibid), 

»… such politically charged self-identification by means of distantiation from the other was further developed as the notion of othering. Like Hegel’s text itself, othering (in this context) is simultaneously psychological and political – an accusation of othering is an accusation of political incorrectness, almost of thought-crime.«

Lastly, from a web page of Science direct (HYPERLINK “https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/othering”https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/othering):

»Otherness is the result of a discursive process by which a dominant in-group (‘Us,’ the Self) constructs one or many dominated out-groups (‘Them,’ the Other) by stigmatizing difference — real or imagined — presented as a negation of identity and thus a motive for potential discrimination.«

From here, I search the path back to Fanon. Song writes about influence exerted by racist environment on the individual who is under the influence of oppression (Song, 2017, p. 58): 

»Fanon intuits the dire consequences of a racist milieu, where oppression does not only refer to the present. Mundane, daily perceptions of race, as sedimentation and historicity of colonialism, have a temporal impact. Black individuals who confront colonial historicity recognize its insuperability by intuiting their inhibited potentialities as already has been and internalize and perpetuate the historicity as what will be.”

Minorities, for that reason, never simply experience racial discrimination as something that is going on now. Song writes (ibid):

“… being discriminated against is always a process in which one’s future becomes inhibited by past ‘sedimented’ experiences. As a result, we can anticipate the consequences of the racist perceptual field, that is, the functions of racial epidermal schema and colonial body images.«

Erica Burman  (2024) follows Fanon’s discussion of racialised trauma, which:

»… fixes the subject, in terms of becoming zombified and petrified, as well as being thrust into the existentially abjected zone of nonbeing… In trauma, time becomes fixed, stuck or even disappears, such that the distressing experience seems endless.«

With that, I remembered the large group of Summer School 2025. Participants with skin of different colour spoke about their experience with (some) people with white skin colour. Some said “I had my share of racist comments”; “a child started to cry upon seeing me”; “look at their eyes and their faces, you can see how shocked they are when they see you”…

There were also other experiences of pressure or conflict that happened in the large group and in the median group of which I was a member; some have been worked through, while others could not be fully addressed. A woman was harshly stopped by the male convener; just when small countries started to have voice, more important issues came forward (I acknowledge it was extremely important to work through them, what I want to point out is how coincidentally those issues appeared); exposed was dilemma regarding personal value of people who have not concluded training of group analyses, even though they can offer their knowledge to people in another ways. My “contribution” to oppression was a directive opinion about someone, prescribing the person some task; and demand to another member of median group to be a good group member. If there were more, I am not aware of them…

What I was hearing, experiencing and feeling through Summer School’s various activities started to intertwine with what I was reading in the last few days, blending, rising and recombining into an overwhelming pressure that found its way under my skin, influencing my senses about myself; it continued also during those nights, which prompted my brains to make strange dreams of my skin tingling, stretching tight around my body and loosening again, changing into some other skin, or it was maybe touched by different skin of another colour. I tried to stay with what was going on in me and with me, and felt as if being inflated, invaded, permeated with content and perceptions from those five days and afterwards readings, struggling to hold my centre amidst the surge of bodily sensations and emotions that I didn’t know I was able to generate or I even didn’t recognise as my own, and hoping it would pass, recede, deflate somehow, some day.

2. Basaglia and Pink Floyd

Maria Puschback-Raetzel brought forward the importance of students and their needs. She delineated a schism in the process of studying, on one side those in established roles, teachers, trainers, managers – those who are in position of power and possession of knowledge; on the other side, students, those who do not know, who are expected to adapt on many levels (that is to take information and to  follow the established routines of learning); in the end, teachers inspect and decide upon appropriateness of both content and manner of the reproduced passive knowledge.

The goal, according to the lecturer, is to change such a rigid pattern of studying. Speaking specifically about group analysis, it is regarding the training and how it is organised; it has to do with the load of work to be done, which is immense, long-term and on at least three interconnected areas simultaneously (theory, personal process, training practice with supervision). She mentioned the term the Laius complex, which in its broader meaning (Levy, 2011), »includes any wish on the part of one in authority to symbolically murder or diminish a subordinate.«

I follow Maria from the Summer School in Rijeka, which is six years ago. She offered, time and again, a word, experience, proposals from the student’s point of view. I felt proud that she finally got the place and time to speak.

We watched a video of Trevor Noah. Apon later viewing the video, I picked some wording as for example (Noah, 2017) »I do not condone, I understand« (conquering, annexing, looting), but in colonisation »you force people to become you«. It went on with some witty representation of dialogue between oppressor(s) and those-to-be-oppressed. I thought it was awkward as the training of Indian students of group analysis is done by English trained teachers (I learned later that the staff is international). The message, though, was clear and on point: If you as the student do not submit yourself to the demands, norms and roles of the established structure, if you do not become they, you are… So to speak… Eliminated by them. And that exactly is the experience in our small community of Group Analysis in Slovenia. For some generations a repetitive pattern of splitting roles spiralled – teacher who knows/student who behave – and to worsen that, one teacher was prevented by English supervisor to eliminate a student, and that same student became just like his teacher, trying to eliminate a student in next generation… It is fairly difficult to deal with repercussions of that in the community’s matrix. I privately call this pattern »the curse of ‘P.’«.

Upon watching the video and searching about rebellion against institutions, I fell into the rabbit hole of internet, some anti-psychiatric stuff, poking into the Basaglia’s grotto, and crawl out the other way, watching Pink Floyd’s »The Wall«. It was frustrating, painful, even if at times interesting.

Basaglia was born in Venice in 1924; he died at the age of 56 because of brain tumor. In a presentation entitled »La psichiatria italiana dopo la riforma« (Italian psychiatry after reformation) (Mazzeo, 2003, translation E.K.) writes about Basaglia:

»He was trained at the neuropsychiatric clinic in Padua, where he was a university assistant. The University of Padua is a highly stimulating cultural centre, home to the first Faculty of Psychology in Italy, and a Faculty of Philosophy very well-connected with the main contemporary European philosophical currents… Toward the end of the 1950s, he was appointed director of the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia; I don’t know if it was his own decision or a ‘professional exile’ due to his political and scientific choices.«

Basaglia’s daughter spoked about those times in an interview intitled »Franco Basaglia, my father the revolutionary« in 2024 (Fiori): 

»The first time my father looked into the Gorizia mental asylum, he was repelled. He couldn’t bear the sight of the humiliated bodies, the piercing stench. And it was thanks to my mother’s support that he chose to stay. And to give life to the work that would restore bodies, voices, and dignity to the patients.«

She added in the same interview (ibid):

»He had the strength of his convictions, but also the strength of his fragility. He did nothing to hide it. And that was the key to everything.«

Mazzeo (2003, page 3) continues:

»He went to England to visit the Maxwell Jones therapeutic community, and in 1962… he launched the first anti-institutional experiment in the field of mental health care in Gorizia.«

Among other things, he wrote in 1968 (in fact he dictated his thoughts which his wife Franca would type) (Basaglia, 2015, page 9):

»The Denied Institution is therefore the record of an ongoing discussion and reflection by everyone with everyone (patients, staff, doctors, psychologists, nurses, social workers, volunteers, visitors) on all the problems that arise when doors and gates are opened, but also when minds, affective capacities, reason, and ethics are opened.«

And finally (Basaglia, 2017, page 393):

»The therapeutic community seeks to be… a place where all members (and this is important)—patients, nurses, and doctors—are united in a total commitment where the contradictions of reality provide the fertile ground from which mutual therapeutic action arises.«

The reality today in Italian psychiatry is variegated, dependent on many local realities. There was a kind of silence regarding Basaglia for many years; one of the psychiatrists who follows his way of work and thought, Colucci Mario (Colucci, Di Vittorio, 2024, page 48), writes about “… the erasure of his thought… a sort of ‘silence of the orphans.’” However, last year was a 100 anniversary of his birth and there were many discussions and lectures discussing again about that period and his work.

Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” (Waters, R., writer; Parker, A., director, 1982, MGM) is about war and losses it causes, discrimination and oppression that is imminent in rigid systems of school and society, while some individuals try to make sense of (or try to escape from) it in different ways.

While watching the movie, I was hit by its tremendous symbolical signs and messages. It was as if I would be taken to a pervasive emotional journey that shattered me in various ways. Life, sexuality, death, rebellion. The losses of war and what they do to the persons who survive. On both sides. The strange concert-turning-rally and marching hammers made me shiver and remembered me of various totalitarian regimes, clear or hidden, be it black, brown, red or orange, and I even lived in one; many people still do, succumbing or resisting under its pressure, surveillance, constant assault on them or their loved ones. Those children with bricks at the end of the movie… What and how to build after we destroy the only structure there is?

“Is there anybody in there… Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying …I have become comfortably numb.«

3. Rwanda, War machine and Ubuntu

Marie Louise had a personal and touching presentation. As she was delivering her lecture, I admired her open approach. She told us, directly and simply, her honest and devastating truth about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and her searching for meaning that ensued afterwards. She said:

»Survivors endured unimaginable trauma. The genocide broke the social fabric of the society. Deep pain remained and constantly repeating question: Why?«

 She had been offering herself to those who suffered the same as she had, and by doing so, her suffering was less hurting. She had been coming forward with listening to others, bearing their pain and fear, sharing tears or, at times, numbness that came with too much of battered past and scarred future. 

This was the path of healing for all community. She said, while presenting hand-made baskets of Rwanda as a metaphor for the community of sharing and working together:

»Each thread in a basket is a voice of one individual, woven in it to become the collective voice of the community holding all of them.«

And with another metaphor, paraphrasing Winnicott and his understanding of a container:

»For the people who carry immense grief, the community offers as a bowl which can hold their bitter tears long enough to mature into water for the seeds of hope.«

Many of her messages, which I felt were some kind of offering for our community of Summer School, rose to my understanding only after rereading my notes and other information about Rwanda and its history. I tried to understand the contradictory realities of the small, young country.

On one of the many web pages presenting Rwanda (Women Work to Weave a Lasting Peace) describes it:

»Rwanda, a tiny land-locked country in eastern Africa, tragically is best known for the horrific genocide that occurred in 1994. Nearly a million people, or about 10% of Rwanda’s population, were killed… In the immediate aftermath of the genocide, females represented 70% of Rwanda’s population…«

How that horrifying slaughter came to pass?

Mbembe (again, the same, yes – 2003 , page 32-35):

»… (I)n Africa during the last quarter of the twentieth century… the erosion of the postcolonial state’s capacity to build the economic underpinnings of political authority and order… (caused many African states to) no longer claim a monopoly on violence and on… their territory… Alongside armies have therefore emerged what… we could refer to as war machines… made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances… War machines… rapidly become highly organized mechanisms of predation … The ways of killing do not themselves vary much… In the case of the Rwandan genocide… what is striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand, and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something.«

Hunt in her book Rwandan Women Rising (2017, page 34), exposes the influence of colonial white rulers in the middle of 20th century, who preferred one of the ethnic minorities because of »Caucasoid traits popular in the new biological anthropology«. The consequence was that »(r)esentment soon metastasized into campaigns of violence targeting Tutsi«, which, combined with the existence of war machine armament and organisation, culminated in genocide spree (ibid): 

»Killing squads went door to door, hill by hill, on the hunt for those they deemed ‘cockroaches.’«

That was one ethnic group over the other. Isn’t this the »othering« process that Burman wrote about while studying Fanon? Wasn’t that the same as happened close to my country, in Balkans? About which, it was Slavenka Drakulić who wrote (1993, page 145):

»I understand now that nothing but ‘otherness’ killed Jews, and it began with naming them, by reducing them to the other. Then everything became possible. Even the worst atrocities like concentration camps or the slaughtering of civilians in Croatia or Bosnia.«

It was in the aftermath of such a vast tragedy that another followed in Rwanda (Nogueira Pinto, 2024, para. 1-4):

»The tragedy was so vast that it directly involved most Rwandans as victims, perpetrators, accomplices or witnesses… two million people, including many who had participated in the Hutu-led killings, fled Rwanda… The human carnage in Rwanda was accompanied by the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure and the collapse of its economy… the ruling party has defended a model of consensual democracy, which is intended to prevent ethnic polarization by focusing on inclusion, rather than competition…«

Marie-Louise said: 

»After some time had passed, the women were faced with a decision of either collapsing of inconsolable pain, or moving on together to rebuild their lives.«

This aim is depicted on one of the many web pages presenting the country (Women Work to Weave a Lasting Peace):

»Rwanda is now a country in which women are rising to the forefront of economic, political and social institutions.«

The consequences were however vast, profound, also on the field of mental disorders, which is an important issue to deal with, as they are doing in Ubuntu Centre for Peace, and Marie Louise describes it in her presentation (published in the Contexts).

Healing, underlined Marie Louise, is not just individual journey. In the ubuntu philosophy, they say:

»Your pain is my pain, your healing is my healing.«

Ajitoni writes in an article about ubuntu (2024, page 1):

»The philosophy of Ubuntu highlights the belief that an individual’s identity and sense of self are deeply rooted in their relationships with others and their contribution to the collective well-being of the community. Historically, Ubuntu has been integral to African societies, guiding social interactions, governance, and conflict resolution. It has served as a moral compass, promoting values such as empathy, compassion, respect, and mutual support.« 

Werth put the meaning of ubuntu in every-day-use (2021): 

»In Africa, our philosophies are practical. My resources are your resources. Ubuntu means paying it forward, not keeping score, not behaving as if my resources given freely must be repaid by the person who received it. And not expecting it to be repaid. Only having faith that when I need it, someone else will give me ubuntu.«

4. Northfield all over again?

Christos Kanana presented his experience with support group for unaccompanied refugee minors that he founded in an Open Accommodation Centre in Greece.

According to some available information about migrations, between 2021 and July 2025, there were 5,526 unaccompanied migration children placements in Greece, out of which 483 found a place in Open Accommodation Facilities  (Emergency Accommodation Facilities ΙΙ, 07. July 2025, Factsheet). On the web page  Safe Areas for Unaccompanied Migrant Children they write:

»These children arriving on the Greek border islands face particularly precarious circumstances. Many have been subjected to trafficking, abuse, exploitation, and violence, rendering them exceptionally vulnerable. Consequently, these children require immediate and comprehensive care, protection, and access to a range of essential services. Furthermore, guidance on their rights and opportunities for integration is paramount when they are eventually placed in long-term accommodation facilities.«

Christos described his work in the refugee camp with a group of minors. It was fairly quickly confronted not only with harsh reality of children’s ruthless travel to there, their uncertain time of staying and path forward, lacking service for the minors in the camp, but also with strict preventive measures that were suddenly imposed by health politics as a consequence of spreading COVID-19 pandemics just at that time; because of all that and especially of the latter, the group was meant to be disbanded.

What happened instead was that not only the group survived, but its participants even found a way to invite new members, so the group »illegally« flourished.

Christos described that his proposals what the group could do were not always accepted. So he followed what the group needed; at the beginning only a place to meet and something to eat; than to plan some activities; after several months of such meetings, the minors could tolerate some free floating discussion. The translator got the role of a cultural mediator and symbolical figure of someone important in the history of the members of the group.

Christos told us some vignettes from the group, and one was about the empty chair when a regular member was missing; it stirred the dynamics, some difference among the present members was shown, and the group could open the theme of missing persons in the life both of the group and its members.

The dynamic of the group hatched its matrix and developed into the group analytic one. 

Christos told us that he shared the family customs and practices with the boys of the group; he said (or at least that is what I remembered): 

»When someone of them was telling the story of his family reunions, it remembered me of my family; I was already there, I knew the culture.«

For me, it was an endearing narration of Christos’ careful nurture of a group that was slowly developing, delicate in its needs in spite of brutal personal histories of its participants and elementary provisions by the camp’s structure.

Listening to Marie Louise Mukeshimana and Christos Kanana narrating their experience with the use of well known, basic principles of group analysis in unusual context, I was astonished to see certain corresponding characteristics of the described group development. I will try to summarise those following my notes and memory and hope to not get too far from the presentations:

The survival demanded not only resilience but at some point a choice: adjust and grow or paralise and collapse.

When people come together, matrix of that group develops by itself.

The group has a life of its own.

Containing the members’ refugee history, loss, insecurity.

The aggression was always outside, expressed towards others; violence was outside.

Group as a container.

Socialisation through the group.

Cultivation of Trust (refugee and traumatised population have limited, fragmentated capacity for trust; therapy should be done in group).

The group is the one to devise how to respond to events that unfolded or to topics that were brought to the group (instead of the conductor).

Food and body being together after isolation.

Secure presence of members even if change were made.

Multiplicity of relationship (constellation of relationships).

Exploring what we experience instead of demanding explanation and/or instructions.

Importance of the empty chair to open the theme of missing people.

Development of group culture, traditions and rituals.

The conductor has to earn respect of the group.

Internalised image of the Group as a whole.

Not group analysis at all, but at the same time proper GA.

Versatility and Adaptability of Group Analysis.

Importance of the supervision: Christos (and if I understood well, it was similar with Marie Louise) underlined how it was the holding and containment, offered in supervision process, which supported his emotional resilience and authentic professional development. Supervisor as an observer helped to hold, to contain issues, themes, emotions, and also dynamics, not to rush to premature reaction or to search for immediate resolution. That made possible to see clearly the emotional issues; to trust group process while reflecting on it. Such an approach enabled to navigate between detachment and involvement.

5. Bhagavad Gita

Indhu Rajagopalan presented some of the teachings of Bhagavad Gita and compared them with the symbolic and practical messages from Adgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom story, and later also with the theory and practice of group analysis. While she rolled the slides, she mentioned how much the core meaning of the 700 verses became important also personally, for her own searching for the psychotherapy method she could relate with best when applying it in the work with her clients.

There are countless presentations of what Bhagavad Gita is about, and while reading the notes and then some books, I tried to simplify it:

In ancient times there was a kingdom inherited by Pandu, who died before the events narrated in the verses. He had a brother who was born blind, and so could not inherit any land. Pandu had in his life five sons, the oldest being Arjuna, who became the lawful King after his father died. Pandu’s brother (the blind one, Arjuna’s uncle), had one hundred sons (so Arjuna’s cousins), and eventually the kingdom was divided in two equal parts, one for each of the two sets of cousins. But Arjuna’s cousins were not content; especially the eldest wanted the land of the kingdom all for himself and tried in various, unlawful ways to take it and at last he succeeded. Arjuna and supporters tried many times to negotiate for the land, but his cousins declined. Only two choices remained for Arjuna and his brothers: to fight (for their right as a matter of their duty; by the way, Arjuna was the best archer in the world) or accept defeat (for the sake of nonviolence). Arjuna faced this dilemma in the battlefield: Whether to fulfil his duty and fight until victory, killing his own cousins, or run away from war for the virtue of peace and consequently succumb to pitiful death.

Then follow the poem itself (Vyasa, n.d., page 2-3):

»The entire seven hundred verses of the Bhagavad-Gita are a discourse between Lord Krishna and the confused Arjuna on the battlefield… Arjuna’s dilemma is, in reality, the Universal Dilemma. All human beings face dilemmas, big or small, in their everyday life while performing their duties. Arjuna’s dilemma was a big one…« 

There is also another interpretation of what was Arjuna’s ailment truly about (Barnes, 2020, pages 21-22):

»What little success he had achieved was always short-lived, fleeting, and it never made him happy, not truly… Arjuna was also getting older and was now having to deal with …  a body that was wearing out, working its way towards death, which frightened Arjuna to no end… Finally, he’d watched lovers come and go, and he’d seen loved ones succumb to illnesses and death, tragedies that affected him more than he had the capacity to handle. What good is all this? he thought. What point is there in going on? What good is a struggle that … can never be won?«

What can a person do when confronted with such a dilemma? If that person is me, should I dutifully continue with whatever is the task of my life, or on the contrary, accept that my life will end no matter how I fight for my cause, so I should let the fight, find the easiest path on this world and better prepare for the next one?

So there, suddenly, is the image of a turtle, as Indhu Rajagopalan showed us. When in crisis, it pulls its limbs inside the armoured shell. So should do we, when pressed with the situation that is perceived as unsolvable. It is not, however, a passive state of surrender. The idea proposes what Arjuna did in the carriage with his charioteer-turned-god, Krishna, as the latter, symbolically, drove (with) the prince across the paths, pitfalls and doubts of his inner world.

One of the teaching tells about ego mind of material world, a demanding and low one, which clings to the »have« and »want«. This is one of the possible modes of our mental functioning; there is another one and we have a choice, a path to get there. It happens when (Barnes, 2020, page 35)

»… you lose yourself in your work, concentrating only on doing your absolute best, releasing all thoughts of outcome, all thoughts of failure or success, (then) your lower mind fades and the higher Mind is able to edge forth—the silent, teeming void of pure potential moves in, as the ego mind moves out.«

There is one impression that stayed with me after the Indhu Rajagopalan’s presentation. I found it in this verse (Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, 1972, chapter 15):

»The Supreme Lord said: Sages speak of the eternal banyan tree that has its origin (or root) above in the Supreme Being and branches below in the cosmos, and whose leaves are the Vedic hymns. One who understands this tree is a knower of the Vedas.« (15.01)

I even had a dream about it. I was seating on an old wooden chair with backrest made of scorpion’s tail that supported me; it was tilted somewhat backwards so I was facing the night ceiling with a bright moon. This chair was placed on a tree with branches just under me, so I could res my feet on them, and I was observing tree’s roots spreading up, up in distance between earth and stars.

In one of the books about Bhagavad-Gita, it stands (Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, 1972, chapter 15):

»One who wants to get out of this material existence must know this tree thoroughly through analytical study.«

6. Whole bunch

After putting in order my notes and some further readings, there was many impressions of the presentations. One of them (even if simplified and limited) is experiencing them as a connected, continuous flow of ideas with their symbolic journey through development and change. The maelstrom told a story of destruction and bare survival told later to an interested listener; lection on Fanon told about consequences of hundreds of years of destruction and oppression of societies by others, as experienced by subdued individuals and whole nations; Bhagavad Gita’s presentation proposed personal view and innovative relevance of old recommendations, that were made a couple of thousand years in the past; student’s power presented challenges to established structure and proposed democratic and respectful ways of educational processes; and then, there were two presenters, each of them reporting about development of an group entity, where amidst the devastated environment of torn or obliterated social fabrics, new group or organisation was rising with own rules and culture which grew from within. And all that was thriving from the roots and with premises of group analysis.

7. Large group

I was thinking what the large group does to its members. My impression is that it pushes identity(ies) which is (are) broader, or which surpass(es), or are older than the individual, personal identity. Each member is a node, a dot, a hinge where these identities get in contact, relate with others, prompting the here-and-now, actual relationships with other members of the group and the larger identities they carry.

It may happen that two members begin to confront with identities that are not their individual, personal ones but are instead larger-than-personal, which force their carrier into conflict against that other supra-, broader-than-personal identity. What other members see in the here-and-now is the conflict between the two members; but without recognising the context and knowledge of the broader identities, the real insight is not possible; sometimes, not even to those involved in the conflict.

There lies the responsibility of each member of the large group and especially of the conductor or convener: To notice and describe with words, to verbalise such an interaction that is hidden, not plainly evident; while of the whole group to work through it.

8. Median leaderless group

Funny to call it leaderless. Regardless its name or title, I cherished it, it was my harbour, at times a boxing ring or judo mat, and at other times a basket we all weaved.

9. Making Space Art Group

I was grateful for the activity in the art group. I could grab the clay and torture it to no end, but still something came out of it. And I enjoyed seeing others and their work, free of expectation that others have to understand it.

10. Social Dreaming

I wouldn’t miss it for the world. There were wildly different sparks I don’t know how to define, but of which I felt we shared them among us. Or maybe they shared us for them to be expressed.

11. Brighton and dance

On the trip do Brighton, I had (mostly) a wonderful time. With my friends we strolled through the town exploring it, while later, seating and eating something they call »crudities« (which are, bizarrely, vegetables), we watched the town strolling by us. We met David and Maria Jose, which was a wonderful treat. I got three stones from all myriads of them on the beach, convinced that it was me who chose them, while later, showing stones to others, a creepy feeling came that maybe they chose me.

There was also a dance. The dance floor gave up.

12. »What a mistake-a to make-a!«  (Captain Alberto Bertorelli in Lloyd, Croft, 1987 ‘Allo ‘Allo!)

I

Last large group of the Summer School. I read some lyrics and was asked to repeat them. I could not; the lines mean a lot to me, and my body became tense. So I said no. The laughter followed and someone commented: »You were much more kind in Turin.« I answered: »I will not repeat it in English. I will translate it in Serbo-Croatian language.« And clumsily, with the help of others from the region, I did.

What struck me later was that the language does not exist any more. So I am sorry for all that thing.

The lyrics in both languages, and I add Bosnian, should be as follows:

II

There was a large lawn as a part of Roffey Park Venue. I made several walking laps around it. When the last day I met some colleagues from Switzerland and Germany, I tried to tell them in German language about it. After a few awkward trials, I said something like:

»Ich habe eine Runde gegangen.«

Some of them looked at me a little bewildered, but appreciative of the effort; later, one said »well it is a ‘bin’«. I was confused by such a suggestion and found myself try this version:

»Ich bin eine Runde gegangen.«

It felt so against my English and Italian grammar (they both have ‘have’ as an auxiliary verb in such cases), that I shouted: »No! But it’s wrong!« Because even Cambridge Dictionary states that »Auxiliary be is used to indicate the continuous and the passive voice«, while »Auxiliary have is used to indicate the perfect« (Verbs: Types, Auxiliary Verbs).

Maybe I should explain that in English and Italian speaking environment, I think in those two languages. Only later, when I switched to thought processes in Slovenian (which is my mother language), I found out that here, it is the same as in German: »Jaz sem prehodil en krog.«. Then, I felt ashamed in front of my Slovenian heritage and my German friends. So I apologise; my plan is now to learn German.

After

The airport, departures shop area. Someone in the line both a set of finest chocolate called Heroes; had to even fight for them at the cashier because of Brexit. »They are for my husband,« he said, adding after a moment, »he is my hero.« Than there was a slightly longer pause, maybe with a gaze in a distance, before continuing; the voice than was calm, resolute, open, centred; and I filled that instant with thoughts about innumerable people who fought for this to happen, and about those who has never experienced it, and then with hopes for many more in the future who could say so in their life, be it regarding sexual orientation, gender, race, skin colour, age or nation: »…my ordinary hero«.

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