Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

34 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
Post-Symposium Thoughts of the Co-Chair of
the Management Sub-Committee
By Pieter Hutz
First, I want to say that I agree with actually every sentence in the two
reports Kurt and Gerda have written (the one as Co-chair of the
symposium together with Gerda and the other Kurt alone as chair of
the LOC). Both Gerda and Kurt mentioned actually all the important
aspects of the symposium and I just want to add some remarks and
additional aspects, some from the point of view of the D3G and some
from a personal point of view.
The great development our symposium took can be valued on
the background of the very difficult situation in the beginning, and for
a better understanding I shortly want to outline it. There was a strong
wish of Robi to have the symposium with the Berlin Institute of Group
Analysis (BIG) and to have it in Berlin. The D3G as an organisation
was not seriously involved in the early process. This surely has to do
with different aspects and an important one was, that the D3G itself
was ambivalent and did not seriously face this ambivalence for some
time. We needed time to get clear whether we wanted to participate or
not. When we became involved (and involved ourselves actively) it
was not an easy situation for any of us! Not for the BIG, not for the
society (mainly Robi) and not for the D3G. There were two red threads,
the one was struggling about the title and the other one about the role
of the D3G. Perhaps the struggling about the title also was a way of
demanding a role as the national organisation of the German Institutes.
At the end of all this fighting D3G entered into the contract
which already existed between BIG and the GASi and we all agreed
to creating a situation of equal partnership (I wrote in my welcome
speech about this). If one takes a look at this very difficult situation,
which could have ended in a disaster, we altogether (in the beginning
it was mainly Robi, Kurt, me and Thomas) did a wonderful job in
preparing, organising and, last but not least, having this wonderful
symposium.
As a conclusion to the whole process one can say we all were
very courageous in choosing a theme for our symposium with so many
demanding historical, political and social implications. Especially
given it was organised in Berlin, the capital of “several Germanys”
which in fact is one Germany with a conflictual and contradictory
history and presence. The different kinds of tensions in this process
became part of the relationship between those who were organising