IDI Fellow Regine Scholz Presents at Sarajevo Conference

In May 2014, IDI Fellow Regine Scholz traveled to Sarajevo to work a seminar entitled “Trauma and Group Identity.”  Her remarks on that conference, along with a link to her paper, follow.

Richard Beck, a colleague from New York and Chair of the task force for Trauma and Disaster Management of the International Association of Group Psychotherapy and Group Processes (IAGP) – who knew that I had been working in Belgrade – invited me to become member of staff at a seminar on “Trauma and Group Identity”, organized by the group analytic section of IAGP and held in Sarajevo from May 9th to May 11th 2014. I accepted without hesitation – going to Sarajevo 100 years after the beginning of World War I, 69 years after the end of World War II and 20 years after the worst times of the siege of Sarajevo was a must. If there is something to understand about trauma and identity I thought this would be the right place.

The workshop was under the patronage of the Ministry of health of Bosnia and Herzegovina and opened by a welcome address of the Deputy Minister of Health, Goran Cerkez, MD, MS.

There were 40 participants, mental health specialists (group analysts and psychotherapist of different orientations) from Bosnia and Herzegovina, all working with traumatized people whilst carrying their own histories full of horror. During the war most of them were children or adolescents, some were young adults, old enough to become fighters. There were no colleagues from the Republic Srpska – the part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is mainly inhabited by Serbs – among the participants, though they had been invited.

During these intense 2 ½ days four papers were worked through in six small groups and four large groups. The small groups were led by Gerda Winther (Denmark), Richard Beck (USA), Ljiljana Moro (Croatia) and myself (Germany). The large group was conducted by Ivan Urlic (Croatia) and Mina Gorgun (Turkey).

 The lecturers were:

1. Esmina Avdibegovic: The Development of Group Analysis in Bosnia and Herzegovina with an Emphasis on the Development of the Group Identity after the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
2. Richard Beck: Only the Lonely: Trauma and Group Identity
3. Regine Scholz: Collective Trauma, Memories and Identity
4. Ivan Urlic: Ethnic Groups and Coexistence: Is the Culture of Forgiveness and Reconciliation Possible

From Esmina Avidbegovic we learned how building up group analytic training directly after the war, and dedicating yourself wholeheartedly to this task, acted as a survival mechanism. Richard Beck focused on the essential though often neglected self-care of the helpers. I tried to connected different types of collective trauma to different types of memory – hoping to find hints for better fitting treatments.  Ivan Urlic elaborated on the question of forgiving the unforgivable, i.e. the question of how people can go on after these atrocities.

For me the most striking experience during this workshop was the amount of silence. I have never heard a silence so loud. As a group analyst I am used to sitting quietly in a group, waiting to see what will come up. But this was something else. Slowly it revealed itself as a mean not only to protect oneself – from guilt, shame, rage, despair, revenge – but to protect the community by encapsulating the traumata, thus making possible, to a degree, the ability of perpetrators and victims ( and people being both at different times and situations) to live together.

When finally the silence gradually was opened up a bit, it turned out that most of the participants had mixed ethnic backgrounds and felt forced to choose one in the beginning of the nineties. That again made me think about the various ways identities are constructed socially.

Initially, there was a reluctance among participants to acknowledge ethnic/religious differences, as they were acutely sensitive to the dangers of such acknowledgement. Only little by little could they come to admit their backgrounds and welcome the richness of their diversities. This process was accompanied by slowly daring to hope that there might be a future, whether in Bosnia-Herzegovina or abroad. The past was not spoken about at length, only briefly and allusively – perhaps because it was too dangerous for participants, both internally and amongst each other, perhaps because they didn’t expect to be understood by somebody from abroad. For example, nobody mentioned that the snipers during the siege of Sarajevo were Serbs. Also we (the staff from abroad) only learned very late that the area around the venue of the event – the Holiday Inn – was a death zone during the siege, due to the snipers in the hotel.

All these topics with the related emotions and much more were present in the silence of the large group, which only came to life when the different languages could be spoken – later translated by somebody into English. Then the group reflected carefully on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the war time until the present. A deep unconscious longing for a paternal authority to balance the multiple ethnic ambivalence was palpable – as well as the mistrust displayed towards any kind of authority. And an intense fear, the fear that the war might come back, dominated the large as well as the small groups.

The latter reminded me of the atmosphere of my childhood in the 50s and 60s in Germany. My parents took a loan to buy a radio (which at those times was very expensive), because they considered it absolutely necessary to be informed as soon as possible in case there should again an outbreak of the war.

But things are not that simple – and sometimes even more cruel. Two weeks after our workshop the whole region – especially Tuzla, where many of our participants came from – drowned in the floods that washed away many of the new build houses.

 

Interested readers are invited to contact Dr. Scholz via this website for more information.  Dr. Scholz’s paper, “Collective Trauma, Memories and Identity” may be read here: Sarajevo_ed

Unless otherwise noted, IDI Blog Posts represent the opinions and/or work of individual IDI members working independently and do not necessarily represent the opinions and/or work of the IDI as a whole.