Abstract
Dear colleagues and friends, members of the International Group Analytic Society, it is a joy to greet so many here in London—this is the biggest audience we have ever had. It is a tribute to our Foulkes’ Lecturers John Schlapobersky and Gwen Adshead and maybe also to GASi. Our Society is a meeting place for colleagues who think and work in a group analytic direction. We are busy organizing group analytic events, like the Summer School, where students and others meet for learning and experiencing in small and large groups in Prague. We publish the International Journal for Group Analysis, and we also organize a Winter Workshop in London this November, which will be preceded by a presentation of the Group Analytic Dictionary. We publish these and many other events on our website, groupanalysis.com —events like the Quarterly Large Group in London, a group which is ‘coming out the Shadows’ after Lisbon in Aarhus. And in two years we will have our next Symposium in Berlin, which we are already busy organizing. We have again grown in numbers this year—and we hope to continue to do so—so anyone who is not a member of the Group Analytic Society here or amongst your friends . . . please join us.
One of our gems is this Annual Foulkes lecture, which will be the first one to be recorded and posted ‘on line’ internationally. As I speak I have already received messages from Belgrade and Israel that they are following our event.
Our lecturer today is John Schlapobersky, a group analyst at the Bloomsbury Practice that he established in 2009 after many years at the Group Analytic Practice. He served this society first as scientific secretary from 1985 to 1990 and then as chair of the Scientific Committee for the London Symposium in 2011.
He is a training analyst at the Institute of Group Analysis London where he has been a teacher and supervisor for three decades. He has contributed to its curriculum, training handbook, the programme of dissertations by which graduates complete their training, and helped establish its masters programme at Birkbeck College. In the international arena he was one of the founding members of EGATIN, the European Group Analytic Training Institutes Network, served as its first secretary and set up the first Russian workshops for the Society in Moscow. More recently he established the Trans-Atlantic Dialogues for the American Group Psychotherapy Association that compare European group analysis with North American models of practice. Since the 2nd Lebanon war (2006) he runs a yearly clinical seminar in Haifa for senior group analysts. He regularly delivers keynote presentations and conducts large groups at psychotherapy meetings and conferences and is a prominent GA ambassador.
His concern with human rights led to his arrest and deportation from his country of origin, South Africa. He was released to Israel, and after some months he moved to the UK, where he helped to establish the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture where he was a founding trustee and worked for more than 20 years. During the war in the former Yugoslavia he helped to establish a campaign for an end to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia that was called the Sarajevo Charter.
He edited and published Robin Skynner’s selected clinical articles in two volumes, published his own article, The Language of The Group (2004), in the compilation by Dennis Brown and Louise Zinkin, The Psyche and The Social World (2004), and he wrote the chapter with Malcolm Pines in The New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry called Group Methods in Adult Psychiatry (2000). His own first book is due out in a few months, From The Couch To The Circle: Routledge Handbook of Group-Analytic Psychotherapy (2015).
Our respondent, Gwen Adshead, is a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist. After training at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Institute of Group Analysis, she worked as a psychotherapist at Broadmoor High Security Hospital for nearly 20 years. She now works in a medium secure unit. Gwen has also trained in mentalization based therapy at the Anna Freud Centre; and in mindfulness based CBT at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre; and has run a variety of groups for offenders using these techniques as well as group analytic therapy. Her current interests include the relevance of attachment theory to group work, therapeutic groups for mothers with personality disorder, and group psychotherapy for offenders with psychotic illness.