Dear Friends of PCCA
This is the third Newsletter of 2019, and I am very happy to be able to report about some very positive events in the life of PCCA:
First of all, we are more than happy about the latest news which we just received:
PCCA has won the Sigourney Award 2019!
Psychoanalysts among us know that this is one of the most prestigious prizes in the psychoanalytic world. In this Newsletter, in the article written by Shmuel Erlich, you will find more information about the application procedure and what this success means to PCCA and for our future work.
Further, this year’s key event was marked by the successful conference “80 Years Later: Will History Repeat Itself? The Fallout of The Holocaust Over Those Affected” directed by Mira Erlich-Ginor, which took place in Platres, Cyprus, September 11th – 16th 2019. The venue meant a return to the place where we had held four of our series of conferences in the past, between 2004 and 2010; 25 years after the first conference in Nazareth in 1994 – and 80 years after the beginning of WW II. You can read Mira Erlich-Ginor’s Director’s Report on the conference in this Newsletter. And you will also find two letters written by members who have shared their reflections with us after the conference.
Maybe, after 25 years of conference work, now is a good occasion to express our gratitude towards our main sponsors who mostly stem from the worlds of the different psychoanalytic societies (especially in Germany – DPG and DPV – and in Israel – IPS – but also from other European countries) and from the Group Relations World with which we are connected (especially the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations), who have once again proved their continuous interest in and support of our work.
Concerning the purpose our Conference Work, we have been encouraged by the resonance we received from conference members, and in addition we think that the actual situation in our societies in Europe and beyond deserve it. Therefore, we have begun the preparations for the next conference (the third within three years!), which will again take place in Den Dolder, the Netherlands in 2020, directed by Louisa Brunner. The title will be: “Walls – Open, Closed, Sliding? Europe and our World Today”. In this Newsletter you find the first announcement.
And finally, we have held our latest annual Board Meeting in Berlin, around the historical date of November 9th, from Nov 8th-10th 2019. The meeting was an intensive work meeting, where we discussed our projects, mainly the conferences, the last one and the one to come, but also the next book, that our colleagues Fakhry M. Davids and Veronika Grueneisen are preparing to be published in 2020, hopefully. We also discussed our structure of PCCA, our development as an organization, where we want to go in the future, including questions of succession. We were lucky and grateful that Olya Khaleelee, one of our Advisory Board Members, helped us to work most efficiently through our agenda.
It was moving to meet the day of November 9th, a date so relevant in so many ways to our work, including the remembrance of “Kristall-Nacht”, and including the anniversary of the falling of the Wall. As our focus will be on “Walls” in the conference in 2020, we visited an exhibition in the museum of the Gropiusbau in Berlin: “Walking Through Walls”. It became a very intense event for us, especially confronted with an installation, where loudspeakers marked a chorus of a group of African refugees, singing the German National Hymn in their different African languages, a specific way to appropriate this national symbol.
Our dinner on November 9th was planned in the restaurant on top of the “Reichstag”; the way led us through the Tiergarten, the park around the Reichstag, with many fences and police force, responsible for the security of the visitors to the Brandenburg Gate. We were wandering for a long time, not able to cross to the other side… but finally, we managed to view the celebratory fireworks from the top of the Reichstag…
Our continued work took up many of these mixed and very divers feelings of that night, including our dreams. A good piece of work, in order to move PCCA and its cause forward.
I wish you all the best in reading this Newsletter, and I hope you will stay in contact with us. Maybe we will meet in Den Dolder next year!
Dorothee C. von Tippelskirch-Eissing
Chair person of PCCA