Maelstrom, Deconstructed

As soon as the dates were announced—even before the event description was published—I quickly and enthusiastically gathered a group of younger colleagues and trainees who were, or might be, interested in a Summer School experience. Part of me, though, carried worry. The group that had accompanied me the previous year came back bruised. Some young trainees returned with unprocessed terror, and I felt somewhat responsible for having taken them along.

The general relational climate within GASi had evolved, but heavy and hard-to-process emotions were still—logically—present in the field. This time, I knew the group needed better preparation. Mixed feelings—curiosity shifting into anxiety and back again—had to be named, acknowledged, and made speakable.

By the time the title of the gathering was released, flights and accommodation were already booked. That was when panic began to ripple through our small group. How do we prepare to hold the centre in the maelstrom? We held a briefing. Trusting the process can be reckless, but in this case I chose to trust the group—their capacities, their resilience, their hunger to learn.

Then came a deeper realisation: it wasn’t really a matter of choice. We are already caught in a vast and violent whirlpool. What better training, then, than to face it together?

I speed-read Poe’s short story. As a reader, it is natural to identify with the protagonist—and of course, I did. Poe’s mastery made it effortless. At the same time, the idea that there was a centre to be held shaped my arrival in London: I came ready, when the moment arrived, to leap from the mast to the barrel. The title itself carried responsibility—to remain mindful, to reason carefully, to avoid losing ourselves in the process. For me, there was an added layer: ensuring that my closest companions would not drown.

And then the Summer School began.

On the very first day, my autonomic nervous system was fully alert; my vagus nerve was firing like a warning bell. I tried to stay steady, keeping an eye on my smaller group, but inside I felt seasick— torn between the urge to dissociate and the pull toward connection, curiosity, and the strange desire to fight, whatever that meant. The process of disidentification had begun. In Poe’s metaphor, I was no longer the protagonist. Perhaps I was the lost brother, or the panicked one.

My thoughts turned dichotomous: Am I in or out? Do I stand with or against? Do I speak or keep silent? Am I being responsible enough?

On the second day, the tsunami—first whispered about in the Social Dreaming Matrix—finally hit me. It did not subside on the third, nor the fourth, nor even the fifth. I could feel my centre shifting, dissolving, rearranging itself.

Thanks to the participants, the convenors, and especially the speakers—each bringing their own unique style, lived experience, and insights—I was confronted again with something as simple as it was profound: imagining the centre as a single, fixed point is a very limited perspective.

We were in London, in the “centre” where, over eighty years ago, group analysis was born—yet we were discussing the strength of the outskirts. For me, holding the centre began to mean holding multiple centres. Though I had long identified intellectually with a decolonised position, something shifted at a deeper, felt level.

I was no longer only the protagonist of the novel; I was, simultaneously, the brothers too. Responsibility, knowledge, and care no longer belonged just to me. They were shared, diffused, carried by the whole group—not only the Italian one I had brought with me, but the larger, international community we were part of.

My relationship with Poe’s story cracked open. Suddenly, I was the companion watching the whirlpool in dread. I was the unbelieving sailors. I was the maelstrom itself: Edgar Allan Poe, the barrel, the story being told, the shipwrecks scattered across the sea floor.

I arrived home after five very intense days carrying the same sensation I often have after long travels abroad: feeling somehow less at the centre, less centred—and yet, paradoxically, a little more. Perhaps this has something to do with involved detachment.

My small Italian group also returned safely, enriched by the journey. Small bruises belong to the adventure itself, and they are already looking toward Greece 2026.

Thank you to all my fellow group-analytic sailors for those days at sea.