So Long, and Thanks for All the Pharmakós

Transformations of Me: Five Talks at a Four-Day Symposium, One Fire, and an At-One-Ment, With (Mostly Harmless) Interruptions

A Dramatic Trilogy in Five Parts

Somewhere in the small print of academic life there is an unwritten rule that submitting five conference proposals is a form of prudent cowardice: you assume four will be rejected, and you quietly hope the fifth survives to justify the effort. I wrote all five in the spirit of a man buying five lottery tickets purely to prove to himself that he wasn’t the gambling type. The GASi reviewers, apparently unfamiliar with this arrangement, accepted every single one.

This is how a person ends up spending the whole of a Greek August (a resource famous throughout the Mediterranean for being non-renewable and, in my case, non-negotiable) inside the basement of his own office, preparing five talks while the summer went on gloriously without him on the other side of a small window. I would like to report that I minded less than I expected. I minded exactly as much as I expected.

There was a second handicap, self-declared at the top of every one of the five talks like a disclaimer nobody had asked for: I am not a native English speaker. I said this in Athens, in an amphitheatre named after a man with his own complicated footnote in Greek history, to a room that, as far as I could tell, had not been especially worried about my grammar in the first place.

Day One.

My most anxious slot landed me in the largest hall of the symposium, the Evert amphitheatre, to present “Mirror-image pharmakós: parallel atmospheres and the transgenerational transmission of Civil War trauma”: thirty-seven interviews’ of families who had spent three generations mirroring a wound none of them had chosen to inherit. Try as I might, I could not ignore the irony of discussing the Civil War in a hall named for a man who had played his own complicated part in that war and the decades after it. The following morning I learned that the Evert amphitheatre had caught fire. I want this on record, ideally before any editor starts asking questions: I did not do this. Civil war, Evert, fire… I think, by any reasonable measure, I was on topic. The talk itself went well, and once it was over, so did the anxiety, more or less on schedule.

Day Two.

This day asked more of me, and, unusually for conferences, I asked more of it first. 2026 makes Vygotsky’s Psychology of Art one 101 (not 100), which is the code number for basic understanding of a manuscript waited 46 years for an English readership, and outlived its author by 37 of them. I confessed this small piece of arithmetic to the room at the start of the sub-plenary “Art as Pharmakós,” chaired by Lilian Markaki alongside my colleague Manolis Katsikas, because nobody else seemed to be marking the anniversary, and it felt, oddly, like a debt I owed a man I’d never met. A text that arrives a century late and is somehow still exactly on time struck me as the least absurd thing I said all week.

Straight afterwards came the workshop I had designed specifically for this symposium: “Transformations of ‘O,’” built around the old proverb ὁ τρώσας ἰάσεται (i.e. the one who wounded shall heal) and the myth of Telephus, whose wound by Achilles’s spear would not close by any ordinary means. Participants built fictional villains, then discovered, card by card, what those villains actually needed underneath what they said they wanted. It went well enough that I am still slightly stunned by my own evaluation forms: “you brought the myths alive,” someone wrote, and someone else, more soberly, “clearness of Bion’s theory.” One participant confessed to a “scapegoat complex”, one they said they recognised as reflected in the concept of pharmakós. Another, perhaps having attended one pharmakós-adjacent session too many that week, wrote only: “I am currently pharmakós saturated. Too much.” I have never received a more honest piece of feedback in my career. People asked for the workshop materials afterwards; I duly sent them to the addresses I had been given, more than half of which bounced back undelivered. The myth of Telephus took three thousand years to reach a lecture hall in Athens; the GASi mailing list, rather more efficiently, failed to reach anyone at all. If you were in that room and never got your copy, it is not too late: dtachmatzidis@uowm.gr.

Day Three.

This one put me, briefly, in two other people’s shoes, or rather, two other people’s data. I chaired and opened the sub-plenary “The Group as Pharmakós,” presenting my own paper on the Civil War and the Polytechnic Uprising as twin, silently transmitted traumas, and then delivered, in their place, the papers of two of my undergraduate students, neither of whom could travel to Athens. For 20 minutes I was Georgia Papatsouni, reporting the first validated scale for Volkan’s concepts of chosen trauma and chosen glory in a sample of Pontic Greeks, concepts that still score above 4.4 out of 5 more than a hundred years after the events in question, and found myself quietly moved by one respondent’s line: “I didn’t know it. I see it has affected me a lot.” For another 20 minutes I was Eirini Charokopou, reporting that all fourteen Greek clinicians in her sample, all of them treating civil-war-era intergenerational trauma, used body-centred or EMDR approaches, and that trauma, in one of their own phrases, “unblocks because someone dares to tell it.” Being asked to speak for the silenced while literally reading their findings about silence out loud is, I am fairly sure, exactly the kind of joke Group Analysis would insist on making at its own expense.

Day Four.

I was tired in the specific, bone-deep way that only five accepted proposals can produce, and mostly looking forward to go home and explode quietly in a burst of self-reflection. My last talk, “Two Truths and a Lie,” described a first Large Group session of twenty-two trainees on Zoom: 90 seconds of silence, broken when one member said, “I am so glad to see my group here,” followed by a simple icebreaker game (two truths and a lie) that led near-strangers to reveal a kitchen they called “exploding,” a suitcase they called “suspicious,” plants they called “murdered,” and a death confessed twice, only in fantasy. A game built entirely on lying, it turned out, produced more honesty than a straight round of introductions ever would have. By the end of ninety minutes the group had found real cohesion. Coherence, in Schlapobersky’s stricter sense, would have to wait for another session and, I suspect, so would I.

Four days, five talks, one pharmakós working quietly on me the whole time: equal parts remedy and poison, held together the way Bion held the two halves of “at-one-ment” inside a single hyphen, refusing to let either half win. I came home considerably more tired than I left, and, I suspect, will spend most of September discovering exactly what the trip actually did to me, which is presumably the entire point of a symposium about groups mirroring each other into new shapes.

So long, then, and thanks for all the certificates of attendance… which, now that I mention it, I never actually received. Are we, in fact, getting certificates of attendance?

Dr. Dimitris Tachmatzidis

Department of Psychology, University of Western Macedonia

P.S. Next time, at the 20th GASi Symposium, if you see I’ve submitted five proposals again, please kindly reject all of them, under a single note: You really need therapy!