Robi Friedman’s Lecture at the Launch of the Press Irene Group Translation of the Book: “Group Analysis in the Land of Milk and Honey” (edited by Robi Friedman and Yael Doron) to Czech.  

Thank you Helena Klimova and your wonderful colleagues of the Press Irene group for doing the translation work. Thank you also for inviting Yael and me to talk to you, helped by the translation and friendship of Denisa Shuckova. It is a Hanukkah or Christmas present for us to be able to discuss the book with you, as well as what was left out from it as well as its relevance to the 7.10, the black Saturday. I also want to thank Earl Hopper for his efforts invested in the English edition of “Group Analysis in the land of milk and honey”. And finally, I thank all those who have joined us, from Vamik Volkan and friends of the IDI and colleagues from Germany, Denmark, USA, Turkey and Israel.

This book is about working in groups with a special mix between two perspectives: one is the professional perspective of group therapy, especially the group analytic view of the world. The other perspective is that this work was created on the fundaments of Israeli social/political context. It means that on the one hand the book’s authors seem to belong to the same club as most of us here, approaching relations and communication in groups in a more or less group-analytic way, assuming there is a consensus on the approach first conceived by S.H.Foulkes (who was born five hundreds of kilometers from Prague). On the other hand, all these professionals are Jews, belonging to a majority in our country. But one of the characteristics of this is that in the land of milk and honey (Yael and I were more cynical than humorous when we made up this title) one can forget one’s own Jewishness. In my life, having chosen Israel twice as the place where I want to grow and where I wanted to raise my children, this identity is somewhat hidden in the book, except for Suzi Shoshani’s chapter about immigration and feeling at home, which stands out these days.  The contents of many chapters are such as you would expect in a relatively liberal, democratic country similar to yours. When the authors wrote their chapters, similarly to this country, they were not worried about their everyday existence. They didn’t have any premonition of losing their existential security by neighbors invading our country and giving us the “Bucha” treatment.

Thus, your Israeli colleagues in the book first deal with the basic principles of group analysis. A small group of participants gather in a unique space, where they gradually learn to communicate as freely as possible. In difference with talking with one individual, a friend, a child, a spouse, a therapist, when sitting in the group, verbal and non-verbal “free floating discussion” is used to grow and help others grow. By developing our “insights”, our “outsights” and trying to apply the ensuing changes in our Self to the group’s interactions, participants often cure dysfunctional relations. Avi Berman’s description of the basic elements of a group-therapeutic process, Miriam Berger’s understanding of societal development culminating in democracy and also Yael Doron’s approaching the personal and social unconscious as a “black hole”, all are part of the mixed narrative of group analysis.

I would say that much of Group Analysis is about the development of trust in a safe space. The safe space is created by the group conductor and maintained by the group as a whole. Because trust has two basic aspects of human interaction: it is both learning to trust that our own feelings, our wishes and anxieties, are really based on spoken and unspoken interactions with others. Many of you, as I, had to learn in my own group analysis that I “know” what’s going on in our relations and I can progressively rely on the interpersonal and transpersonal communication between me and other members. The other aspect of trust is also experiential: we learn that the group is a basically well-meaning or humane approach. The strongest element of life is often trusting that no one will destroy this safe space by rejecting others. In our minds, which is always both personal and social, we all want to be included and need it existentially. We try to avoid spaces of exclusion and rejection and often escape from such spaces. Maybe this tendency to avoid and escape, which often is connected with denying and repressing, resulted catastrophically in the horror of the 7/10. We feel best in relations which communicate that taking part is granted and that an unspoken promise of non-rejection is sensed. I looked it up again and saw that all the chapters include some of these elements.

Like the 20+ authors who offered their articles and turned this rare cooperation in one Institute into a fascinating project, when these terms of trust and growth happen, we all regard groups as “objects of desire”.  The authors wrote about the basics of modern life in a liberal society, like equality, gender equality, relations to authority, immigration, trans-cultural conflicts and intra-group aggression. There are articles by colleagues who make a connection between healthy and sick bodies (and antibodies) and healthy and sick groups. Others, like our late Eric Moss, wrote about aging in our profession and in the institutional community, a discussion you will not easily find anywhere else. All are influenced by the socio-political aspects of living in Israel.

Some chapters discuss the group’s boundaries, which there is no space to describe in detail. For example, Marit Milstein talks about the pain of departing and arriving participants to our ‘slow-open groups’, a topic which is seldom discussed. I’ll finish this part by reporting that you’ll find in the book Ido Peleg’s group analytic application to mental health hospitals, Gila Ofer’s approach to social dreaming, and authors discussing how group-analytic therapy helps those suffering from the Holocaust through generations.

Balint (psychoanalyst): “Maybe someone who undergoes psychoanalysis is healthier, but someone who undergoes group therapy becomes a more ‘human being’. Balint not only speaks of a clinical uniqueness of group therapy, but provides a title for the group analytic matrix – the communicational and relational culture of a community – described in our book. In this matrix “people heal each other” (Amichai) in the belief that even the worst group can, with proper work, become a good group with people who can love and fight in a humane way.

And then, the 7.10 exploded into our borders and into our minds.

We all, who have tried to look at the bright side of humanity, encountered Hamas with an “existential surprise”. Hamas groups killed in a way which no one thought possible before. What was beyond imagination was not the killing alone, it was not only the taking toddlers and the real old hostages. It’s the “how” which we have never expected. We know that the rape, and other atrocities they inflicted and filmed were both improvised and planned. We had to witness a category of a Soldier’s Matrix which no one in our book had described, with atrocities which were not even imagined in the book.

Actually, the intensity of the cruelty, sadism and hate are so uncontainable that for me they can explain why the unspeakable (unthinkable) terror is denied by so many in the world. Unfortunately, it will only be recognized when it knocks on their door, as it happened to us.

By the way, I think that the “how” of their killing is a shock, which can be compared to the shock of the West when the civil society after the end of WW2 had to watch the gas chambers as an instrument of annihilation in the news projected before the films in cinemas. Witnessing the unspeakable dread makes group therapists ask again Primo Levi’s question: is this a man? The unspeakable terror, which is filling people in Israel, Jews and Arabs, in panic, will have its impact on the world. In my groups, children of my Arab patients shared nightmares in which they wished for a strong Jewish army to protect them from Hamas. Others, more than a few “normal” people, go to sleep with a gun under their pillow to defend their family in Haifa neighborhoods against another feared Hamas invasion. Now this terror is also fueling a war to annihilate those who wanted to annihilate us, which by itself takes a monstrous toll of civilian and military people. The Hamas soldier’s matrix has awakened the Israeli soldier’s matrix, which was only 2 months ago a soldier’s matrix of the kind you are also used to: a soldier’s matrix which doesn’t want again to become a soldier’s matrix.

After the black Sabbath, as the 7.10 is called in the media, our inner and outer world has turned upside down. Personally, I call it the “cursed Sabbath”, because my beloved son in law, Ido, died in the first hours of the defense of a village next to Gaza. He left Noga, my daughter and my three grandchildren, to mourn. Nothing in my life in Israel has prepared me for this personal and family tragedy.

Back to my groups, the 7^th September transformed trust into mistrust, and the former feelings of equality of differences and respect for differing voices was suddenly not there anymore. It was almost the end of October when my group-analytic groups gathered in my practice. I have learned during the years to rely on my groups, that the external social reality is optimally represented. But now Jews attacked the two Arab women in the group, sharing rage and disappointment and showing how in times of war, we start to lose our shame, guilt and empathy. The Arab women, who came to the group hoping to feel more secure than in their other meetings with Jews, were frightened. The atmosphere seemed not of a small group, but of a large group, which has the ability to threaten inclusion and secure relations. No liberalism any more, for about an hour. Unexpectedly, for a “’weaned” group, as Foulkes would say, both some Jewish and the Arab members clearly expected me to take an authoritative position in this “fight”. I thought that this was also a sign of the bad times we are going through.

Then, with the help of all of us, it changed. This process repeated itself 4 times now. But the feeling is that the groups were saved. For me it is a light in this darkness of the war, which sheds its shadow and so much death and misery on both sides. Barely containable for me.

But it connects me to three book chapters which deal with destructive and lethal extreme authority. These chapters openly question the assumption that the Oedipus complex describes only a child’s aggression against the father’s authority. In Hani Biran’s chapter, she calls to turn to an explorative leadership, to find the truth following Bion’s ideas of a special kind of knowledge needed to overcome traumatic social situations. Our late colleague and friend Joshua Lavie went further to describe how the Foulkesian group analytic view changes the perspective of the Oedipus myth: it’s often not the child who is threatening on the father, it’s the father who uses its power and authority to rule, use and abuse it’s “children”. Reading again my own chapter, based on the Bible story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac for the sake of his beliefs. I was surprised myself reading again of this scapegoating and hating principles where dominant lately in trying to transform Israel’s fate. A year and a half ago, Jewish fundamentalists politically and ideologically took over the government. Because half of the Israelis fought back, refusing to be sacrificed in the name of anti-liberal judicial reforms and demonstrating for more than a year in our hundreds of thousands, we were at the brink of civil war.

Then, 2 months ago we had to experience the real Abrahams, those of the Hamas, those who really put the knife on our throats and didn’t have a God who stopped them, and they cut and cut. Fundamentalism, which prefers the glorious victory of an extreme violent God, is the biggest enemy of liberal groups.

Now, what shall we do with this? We Israelis have the luck to protect Jews and Arabs in ways which were impossible under a Nazi regime, which then spread fast to many other countries. But can we live forever with the sword? When can we again put the Soldier’s Matrix to sleep and live a relatively peaceful and liberal life again? Here the concept of dialogue comes in, together with the concept of initiative.

The IDI, the international dialogue initiative, created by Vamik Volkan, represents the thinking that a liberal existence depends on dialogue and must be initiated. We also think we have some of the special knowledge of the psychological aspect of war and peace. For 3 decades I have been active in dialogues in the Palestine/Israeli, in the Islam/West and in German/Jewish dialogues as well as in other places, for example N. Ireland. When I got the IAGP prize for peace and dialogue I was asked the same difficult question which I asked myself: After the Hamas attack and this terrible war: is all this dialogue work not an illusion? It’s a devastating and disempowering question, and it’s also a right question.

My answer: I initiate dialogues, in the spirit of “love peace and pursue peace” because I have never conducted or participated in a group process in which the hate between enemies or rivals was not reduced. In N. Ireland dialogue in Corrymeela, while the wished-for handshake between the parties didn’t happen, still the increment of closeness made for some dialogue and maybe prevented hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. But the parties had to come to the dialogue, and brought with them some readiness to talk and maybe listen; they had some dialogue initiative. The second learning for me after the 7^th September. We or I must learn that those who don’t want to meet me, actually want to eliminate me. I and you didn’t want to see it. I tried and managed to talk to many Palestinian for many years, but all those who talked with me/us were not Hamas. Actually, Hamas always stopped all the dialogues in which I was involved. The third thing I learn from my groups: I trust how the dynamics developed in my small and large groups. I also trust the mix of small and large groups (the Sandwich model, applied for a whole evening once or twice a month) like the one I conduct now in the Ukraine since the first month of Russian invasion. For the first time in our knowledge a whole community of between 65-80 victims of war are in a continuous supporting and free dialogue. While there is differential suffering, and differential locations they report that they are helped to survive psychologically, as well as becoming more humane.