When the International Dialogue Initiative first began its training program, we did so at the request of a mediator who felt that something “clinical” was missing from his training. That insight led us to think more deeply about the nature of a society’s trouble and the implications for intervention. To the degree that past trauma plays an active role in current conflicts, groups can indeed be said to be “ill” with intense feelings and potentially irrational reactions, even though the individual participants, of course, are not. We wanted to explore the idea that it was this “illness” that needed “clinical” understanding, without which negotiations and other interventions may become stalled or go terribly awry. This led the IDI to create its Case Conference Workshops.
SAVE THE DATES
The 3rd IDI Case Conference Workshop will be held online on April 21-23, 2022.
To register, please go to:
https://www.internationaldialogueinitiative.com/training/upcoming-workshops-3/
These Workshops are built around two-hour Case Conferences in which members present their work in some detail, then, with the group’s help, use concepts, like Large Group Identity, to understand the conflict and its implications for intervention.
Though the Workshop includes at least one lecture (as well as self-reflection groups), we are not aiming for academic learning. Rather, we choose cases that are “alive,” meaning that the presenter is actively engaged in an intervention and struggling with that engagement in some way. In our experience, these struggles may capture something important about the societal dynamic, to be understood in the immediacy of the work.
Presenters put together a short document – in clinical terms, a case abstract – giving some background for the case presentation: the basic problem; its history; the groups involved and their large group identities; the intervention and how that is going. In the presentation itself, we hear the story of what the presenter is struggling with, and then invite members’ associations. This opens up the material and often leads to the more emotionally-laden issues embedded in the presentation. The goal of this in-depth discussion is to develop hypotheses about the psychology – the dynamics embedded in traumatic history – that is being lived out in the current conflict, and perhaps in the intervention.
There have been two Case Conference Workshops so far, and they have been extraordinarily rich experiences. Here are a few comments from participants.
From a Japanese psychologist: “The absence and suppression of anger in Japanese people leads to their projecting their own aggression and violence onto others. This seems to have strongly influenced Japan’s inability to recognize itself as a perpetrator after World War II. Guilt is so strongly repressed that it is very difficult to experience and therefore is easy to project onto others, making them the perpetrators and ourselves the victims. In reality, however, both the perpetrator’s self and the victim’s self are within each individual. (This topic was presented) at the 2019 International Psychoanalytic Association (and) at the International Dialogue Initiative’s Case Conference, and the international support we received was a great boost to our activities. We are now examining the repetition of victim myths in Japanese society from the perspective of the social unconscious. In order to get in touch with the deeply repressed anger and guilt in Japan, it is essential to have international support to provide a warm and neutral observation of what is happening within us.”
From a leadership coach and researcher: “Dr. Vamik Volkan emphasizes throughout his work the importance of recognizing past and present historical events and cultural elements in the effort to understand human psychology. Participating in the clinical case workshop provided me the opportunity to experience what it practically means to work with this insight. I experienced how suspending judgement and taking a listening stance can help provide a contained space for reflection. The workshop provided helpful guidance for working with the impact of unspoken traumas like the Cultural Revolution and the 1000-year-old practice of female feet-binding in China.”
From two Finnish psychologists: “PlanWe is a Think-and-Do Tank that has studied the work of the International Dialogue Initiative and has been greatly inspired by it. The IDI Case Conference helped us a lot with questions of organizational leadership, integrity and neutrality, while staying in touch with our own large group identities. PlanWe works in the context of the climate crisis with a multidisciplinary team, which includes psychotherapists. Its goal is to spread the reality principle, as well as well-being and realistic hope on an international level. Many of our activities aim at reducing obstacles and gridlocks in co-operation between different agents. Creating spaces in the everyday context for constructive and impactful dialogues with multiple points of view is one of these activities.” (Learn more at www.planwe.world)
In a case example involving the Ukraine, debilitating feelings related to “amputation” seemed to be felt by those involved in the intervention, which may have led them to undervalue the fundamentally important work of relationship-building and trust-building they had already achieved. In the conversation, we began to see the potential relevance this kind of feeling – and the defenses against it – for a key segment of the larger society. Recognizing the historical and current import of these feelings was freeing to the presenter; he no longer felt weighed down by them nor – and this is a crucial insight – inclined to interpret them personally. Instead, because he had come to know the problematic feelings first hand, he could now see what they might mean more broadly and how he might pay attention to them in the intervention.
A colleague in international work talks about these kinds of interventions as “preparing the ground” for more official negotiations of any sort. In our experience so far, the Case Conference Workshop shows us one way to prepare that ground, that is, by attending to the key emotional issues that may certainly impede intervention but also illuminate the historical dynamics. It has been startling to us to see how much those emotional issues find their way into the intervener, through whom, with help, something essential to real progress might be unlocked.
We want to thank all of our workshop participants. We look forward to the shared learning from future Case Conferences, as we apply this powerful methodology to the struggles of groups in conflict and those who try to help them.
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