Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

68 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
My Feedback on the GASi Symposium
By Edmond Dufatanye
It is a pleasure to be allowed to provide feedback to GASI as a nonmember.
As it was my first participation, I was so curious to know
how the symposium is organised and what participants do. If I start
with the new things I have experienced, the leaderless group was the
first thing. I did not participate in it as I had not chosen to take part
and it happened at the same time as my small group. The large group
was surprisingly extremely large. There were a lot of interesting
presentations happening at the same time. It was not easy to choose
the appropriate one without having to sacrifice other presentations that
were also interesting. On this regard, I wonder if the presenters are
willing to share their power point presentations.
These are my general insights
You asked what participating in GASI meant to me. My participation
in GASI in Berlin meant a lot.
1. Berlin as a city with a history of world war was not to me something
I thought about before I came to the symposium. My last lecture in
history was 15 years ago. In the groups, I got to know how different
participants were linked from their ancestors to world war and to
migration, therefore to Berlin. From this perspective, I did think that
no one may have not been at certain point a migrant. Do the great great
great sons or daughters of migrants become migrants? Politicallywise,
they are not but when they analyse themselves and their family’s
history, they may find themselves to be migrants. Migration is part of
a human being and as one of the GASI participants said; our first
migration started when we came out of our mother’s womb. I may
have linked this with the symposium theme. I was also among those
who crossed many borders to attend the symposium.
2. The symposium as a gathering of more than 23 nationalities was
something particularly meaningful for me as someone who comes
from Rwanda, a country that recently experienced the genocide
against the Tutsi while the “never again” statement had been voiced
by the so called strong nations. There is a feeling that emerged from
my unconscious. The day when I had that feeling I was in a large group
and did not express it. The same night, I had a dream. In my dream, I
was walking and got in a group of young people, these people looked