“Climate Prophets” warn of the catastrophic consequences of human behaviour regarding the earth, but we and “they” would not listen. The climate crisis narrative puts human beings in the roles of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims; none of these roles serve to prevent the threat nor to motivate people to build an effective defence for protection.

Perpetrators: humans are blamed for being the main contributors to the climate crisis by favouring greed and hedonism over responsibility and compassion: by burning fossil fuels, enhancing industrial development, producing too much-polluting waste, and overusing or abusing land, water, and forestry resources.

Bystanders: people are aware of the hazards of obesity, smoking, and other harmful personal behaviours; nevertheless, they find it challenging to manage and prevent illnesses even for their own sake. Therefore, preventing global catastrophe seems to be an impossible task to an even greater degree. Humans are no longer trusted to act and avoid societal threats. There is, therefore, an expectation that governments and regulators will take enforcement actions, thus accentuating the position of humans as dependent, passive and helpless bystanders.

Victims: The forecast of apocalyptic climate change creates a sense of helplessness, anxiety, and fear of extinction. Humans perceive themselves as victims, condemned to death.

To move away from these positions, we need another language that provides ways in which the use of personal authority or agency can enable the individual to take up a role of active citizen to confront atrocity in the service of change.

PCCA has been engaged in this kind work for many years. PCCA grew out of the recognition of a group of German and Israeli psychoanalytic colleagues that the legacy of the Holocaust seriously constrained their ability to relate to and work with each other. Experiential working conferences, sometimes called the “Nazareth” Conferences, began as a response to this challenge. Developed at the Tavistock Institute, London, the Tavistock Group Relations model, which integrates psychoanalytic and systems approaches, was specially adapted to create a setting where experiences relating to the Holocaust that are ordinarily disowned could be discovered, voiced, and comprehended.

Subsequent activities of PCCA retained their roots in the events of the Holocaust. However, they extended their work to specific groups and complex situations, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the challenges of Europe in a globalised world, and more recently, the COVID crisis, the war in Ukraine, and contemporary threats to democracy around the world.

Method

The “here and now” experiential model is a unique way to explore, learn and apply insights for understanding history and confronting the future. This type of inspirational learning derives from the idea of the “Learning from Experience Conference”, in which, for several days, a temporary educational organisation is created that provides opportunities for its participants – members and staff – to  observe, inquire, and explore personal and organisational processes as they unfold during the conference. This unique process enables participants to develop insight into how the burdens of the past are alive within us, and how to move on to a more hopeful future. We believe such individual movement fosters group movement, and PCCA’s experiential conferences will continue serving these aims.

The temporary learning organisation is designed by the collective management of the conference, consisting of experienced consultants who facilitate its process. The participants will find many opportunities to explore different types of group experiences and learning challenges through plenaries, large groups, small groups, organisational events, and review and application groups. Each of these constructs is a constituent part of the temporary organisation and the resources that the conference supplies for learning and co-creation.

Rationale

Less than a century after World War II, warning signs about extinction are seen again, both with an internal self-imposed atrocity, like the climate crisis apocalypse, or potentially with the future of an overwhelmingly powerful AI, and with the external threats of atrocity through nuclear war that have suddenly returned to the European discourse through the Russia-Ukraine and other conflicts.

This current PCCA experiential conference intends to use the tradition and methods of PCCA group relations psychoanalytic-systemic thinking, for confronting issues linked to the climate crisis and its related human factors.

Primary Task

The Primary task of the conference is: To explore, study and reveal the human factors in the generation and prevention of the self-imposed atrocity of climate change, with a view to moving forwards.

Language

The working language of the conference is English. However, in groups or situations where everyone present speaks another common language, that language can also serve as the working language.

The conference is open to individuals and professionals, with or without previous experience in this kind of work, who are concerned, curious, and ready to explore issues, dilemmas, and societal processes that have an impact on the human factor of the climate change crisis and affect humanity as a whole. Some of our PCCA participants are psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, consultants, coaches, executives in the private and public domain, social and environmental scientists or activists, and others are concerned citizens who wish to learn experientially from what this kind of conference offers.