by Dorothee C. von Tippelskirch-Eissing
Dear Colleagues, Supporters and Friends of PCCA!
We had planned to send you our 1st newsletter 2020 earlier this year in March.
But we had to discover and to acknowledge that we needed more time in the midst of the Corona Crisis to think about our situation.
On one side it seems that life is slowed down, there is much less activity – on the other side, we have changed to other communication forms as everybody else, to more meetings online.
We have had several Zoom Meetings of our Management Committee and of our Board in March and April. The most important decision that we had to take has been to postpone the conference 2020.
We had started to prepare and opened the registration for our conference
from August 27th – August 31st 2020,
once again in Den Dolder
and under the Directorate of our colleague Louisa D. Brunner:
“Walls – Open, Closed, Sliding? Europe and our World Today”.
In this newsletter you will find a letter from Louisa.
We just could not imagine how to go on planning this conference and asking you and others to register for a conference in such a situation of uncertainty: Who may be able to travel? When? and how? And where to?
The decision has not been easy, but we can only say at this stage, that we continue to meet and think about possible scenarios and follow the situation in our different European countries and beyond and we will keep you updated when we think we will be able to go on with the planning of a conference.
In our meetings we discussed our different experiences in Corona times. As we all come from different places, we exchanged our experiences and thoughts. What can our Group Relations method add to the thinking and understanding of the virus?
What could we offer?
We have shared our experiences in Germany, Israel, Italy, and the UK, where we are living, including the experiences from other countries, we have been related to. Some of the collected experiences of our colleagues in the Group Relations World you can find in the compilation that we share with you in this newsletter.
As those of you working with patients may experience the different meanings of Corona in each individual treatment, we can see how our collective history and context changes the meaning of Corona. In Israel Corona seems to be linked for some with the Holocaust, thinking of possible “triage” scenarios evoking images of “selection”, for some people in Germany elements of the actual reality with the restrictions remind of restrictions in the GDR.
It seems that we are approaching another period in many countries with different stages of leaving the shut-down step by step and at the same time returning again to our discussions and discourse concerning the actual situation. Not to forget those countries who use the Corona situation in order to suppress democracy.
In this “new world” under the Corona virus threat, whatever has been relevant a while ago seems far away. Nevertheless, we want to share with you as well some of the reactions and congratulations that we have received after our amasing success of receiving the Sigourney Award 2019.
We had hoped to receive the Award in a ceremony at the EPF conference in Vienna this year, and we had hoped to see many of you and enjoy the ceremony together. Also, this ceremony has been postponed, we will keep you updated when and where we will have the ceremony.
You find several contributions from our colleagues in this Newsletter.
We apologize that due to a technical problem only now you will be able to read the full text of a contribution Ingeborg Tiemann had sent to us about her unique experience participating in our Cyprus Group Relations Conference 2019. You will find an interview by Oren Kaplan with Gila Oren, as well as a text “My PCCA” by Christoph Freytag, and some links to articles we have found interesting for our group.
We wish you all well in this strange period that brings to all of us uncertainty and worries how our life will be changed by all this.
We hope to find a good way in a not too distant future to offer to all of you another opportunity to explore together what we will have experienced and to develop our understanding of the world.
Berlin, May 10th 2020
Dorothee von Tippelskirch-Eissing
Chairperson of PCCA e.V.