Contexts Editor
Clumsily crashing my bike into a Leon cuneta (roadside drainage ditch) on the 8th August this summer, I could well have intruded upon one of the myriad fosos comunes containing the remains of the 130,000 victims of the Spanish civil war and franquismo, often buried in horribly random roadside graves and still awaiting identification and a proper burial. Perhaps not unrelated to this, it is the strange way of many men, when they reveal their vulnerability in unintended and humiliating ways, that they seek to disguise their hurt and recover their dignity way too prematurely – so, in this case, I jumped to my feet before I knew I was okay. Above me in the road a good Samaritan had stopped in her car to check on my well-being: ”¿Estas bien?” And again, before I even knew whether I might need her help I answered, “Si si, gracias, estoy bien.” She drove off. Then it occurred to me I might not be okay. Turns out, I’d broken my collar bone, and my summer of getting in shape was over. Some time later it occurred to me that something like this scene had been repeating itself during the last few years of my Symposium dominated life, particularly with my GASi and management committee colleagues who have a good idea of what central involvement in organising the GASi Symposium entails. “Are you okay Peter?” had been the refrain of my recent life. Again, I would often answer with a half-truth, something like, “yes I’m okay…actually I enjoy being busy…it’s an exciting project to be involved in…plus, I enjoy the challenge”. Now it’s all over and the Symposium has passed and there’s a Symposium shaped great cavernous hole just appeared in my life and I realise that I might be going through a process of recovery and mourning, not only for all the human contact it entailed but also for the stillborn child – the 18th GASi International Symposium in Barcelona, BCN2020 as it was most commonly referred to – that will never be. Mourning Barcelona turned out to be a core theme in my experience of the online event. And, while I feel proud and privileged to have been involved, at such short notice, in making happen such a risky and cutting-edge event, it saddens me that we will never as a society have Barcelona to remember, other than those of us who went through the organising struggle together. I send out my thanks and deepest gratitude to all the colleagues who I fought alongside and against, in GASi, APAG, SEPTG and BES, over a period of 3 years and 9 months. Un abrazo muy fuerte a ellos y ellas.
Life continues and in this issue we have some important reflections on the GASi Sunday Online Large Group, an experience which I believe helped sustain many of us during the early months of the pandemic and the concomitant GA shift to the new virtual frontier. In particular, Dr N Yoganathan links the experience with some very personal experiences growing up in Ceylon/Sri Lanka related to adapting and surviving in an ever-changing political reality. Also, Elisabeth Rohr talks us through her experience of the group and provides us with her current thinking on the experience, above all, she reflects on the chat function, a new and on-going virtual terrain for GASi conflicts. This issue also offers a paper by José Miguel Sunyer, recent recipient of GASi Honorary Membership for his tireless work over many decades in linking Spanish group psychotherapy to a wider GA world, relating his work with large and small groups in a university based training in group psychotherapy. The paper is made available in the original Spanish, as well as English. I have also included a paper of my own, in which I explore a number of metaphors for the large group that have emerged out of my experience of conducting large groups in two university based creative arts therapy trainings in Barcelona. Finally, coinciding with a current discussion appearing on the GASi Forum on the same theme, the latest concept drawn from the group-analytic dictionary project is that of exchange, outlined for us by Orit Mass-Goldman, who is introduced by Carla Penna.
PeterZelaskowski
peterzelaskowski@gmail.com