GASi President

When Are We?

It’s the winter solstice, in the Northern Hemisphere. My phone and computer tell me that it’s time to send a New Year’s Greeting to GASi.  Meanwhile, at some point in the last months, my internal clock has gone haywire.  Assumptions that I didn’t know I was making, about time and space, have been exposed as they are disrupted. Imaginary futures, which offered guiding beacons for present action, have dissolved into the mist.

History gives us stories about such times, after they are over; this is what it feels like, when we are in the midst of one of them. Structures that seemed to offer security crumble and voices that were not served by those established structures begin to make themselves heard.

In this moment what message can we find in the opening of a new year? To anchor myself, I’ve settled for the familiar device of both looking back and looking forward.

The past year, in GASi, contains shadows of suspended rituals: the Foulkes Lecture and Study Day – postponed – and the Barcelona Symposium – cancelled – while the London Quarterly Members Group was unable to meet in person. The spaces, where we would have met, stood empty and silent.

We strove to make good these losses: we improvised the 1st Online Symposium, seeking to preserve the trilingual spirit of Barcelona; the QMG organisers did their best to maintain their established format, online.  We discovered the inclusivity of regular online members’ meetings, with the weekly members group that ran for 3 months, between April and June. There was relief for some of us, in these ghostly encounters, which allowed us to experience, in a new form, the international character of GASi. Two very different webinars, by Haim Weinberg and Morris Nitsun – the first an introduction to conducting groups online and the second an exploration of a group analyst’s commitment to the work of painting – showed us a medium for members to share their experience and knowledge, to be further explored and developed.

The Management Committee began to meet more frequently and will continue to have monthly meetings. Drawing on the experience of the 1st Members Gathering, in July, we shall be convening trimonthly Seasonal Members Gatherings, where members will be able to meet, in Large and Small Groups. The next of these will be on 13th March, from 1300 to 1730 (CET)

We hope that Sue Einhorn’s Foulkes Lecture, postponed this year, will now take place, online, on May 21st, 2021, while Regine Scholz’s lecture will be the following year. The 2021 Dublin Summer School has been postponed until July 2022 and we shall be organising an online event, in its place, this July.

The 18th triennial symposium will take place, in Belgrade, in Summer 2023.

As an ongoing facility, we want to support the creation of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) within GASi, to allow groups of members, with particular practical, theoretical and research interests to pursue these together. We are creating a page on our website, where nascent SIGs can be announced and joined.

Finally, I am delighted to let you know that our long search for a Treasurer has ended – Renate von Hodenberg has been co-opted onto the Management Committee and taken up the role of Honorary Treasurer.

So, we continue to seek the possibilities of the moment.  Our primary task is to hold all the parts of the group together, both in mind and in meetings of minds. When we do achieve such meetings, what can emerge is a recognition that what first appeared to be ‘unprecedented’, only seemed so because of our capacity to forget.

Happy New Year to us all.

David Glyn
dearjee@gmail.com