Living, Experiencing, Reflecting, in the Midst of an Unfolding Global Turmoil

July, 10th ,17th ,24th 2020

Wherever we are in the world, we are all at various phases of the evolving COVID-19
crisis.

The world as we knew it has been thrown into turmoil. In a very short time, we were put into the most unusual situations: millions were told to stay home, facing contamination, sickness, and death; we began to experience people as potentially dangerous and we learned to keep those closest to us at arm’s length.

These drastic measures put our economies on hold, leading to a global economic crisis resulting in loss of jobs and assets and precipitating deep financial insecurity.
These developments sharpened existing social divides, increasing levels of extremism, scapegoating, xenophobia, and racism. In some countries, the danger of COVID-19 became a vehicle for furthering authoritarian control as leaders used the shock effect to consolidate political power.

COVID-19 can be seen as a combined natural and man-made atrocity: though its inception was biological, the various human interventions shaped it and exacted their toll on our lives, our freedom, and on the economy.

To date, more and more countries are gradually returning to “normal” and loosening the most severe measures. The acute danger and extreme mitigating steps are now over, yet the economic and social aftereffects are still in the making and will likely remain with us for a long time. What kind of changes will they produce in how we consider ourselves, our social environment, the planet, our developing technology?

Now is the time to begin to reflect and make sense of our experiences: what has been happening to us and what are we learning from this unusual event?

We are offering our PCCA community a virtual event that will make use of PCCA tools to better understand the times we live in, our experience of these times, and what we can take from our experiences into the future. PCCA’s focus on the impact of human suffering and atrocities on our lives and our societies is uniquely suited to help us reflect on our experience during the COVID-19 crisis.

Primary Task

This series of virtual meetings will provide an opportunity to explore, share and reflect together on the effects of COVID-19 as a collective global trauma on us as individuals and as citizens of our societies.

Events

Plenaries

Each meeting will begin and end with a plenary to cross the boundary into and out of the event, and to reflect on the experience of the event.

Social Dreaming Matrix (SDM)

Participants (members and staff) will share their overnight dreams for everyone to make wider associations which may relate to the current socio-political environment, the COVID -19 pandemic.
3 Hosts will facilitate the work in the Matrix.

Breakout Groups (BUG)

These groups will provide opportunities to explore, share and reflect on personal and social experiences during COVID-19 and its aftermath. Members will be allocated to the same group for the three meetings.
The groups will be composed of 5-7 members with one consultant.

Time table (Times stated in Central Europe Time*)

*21:00-24:00 Melbourne; 16:30 – 19:45 India; 14:00-17:00 Israel/Russia; 13:00- 16:00 Central Europe; 12:00 –
15:00 UK; 7:00-10:00 Canada and USA East Coast

Staff

Event Director

Mira Erlich-Ginor, | MA |Training and Supervising Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, Founding Member and past-Chairperson, OFEK | Initiated and participated in the “Nazareth Project”, working with trans-generational transmission of trauma in Israelis and Germans, Founding Member and Secretary, PCCA| Co-author of “Fed with Tears, Poisoned with Milk”. She directed several conferences on behalf of OFEK in Israel and on behalf of PCCA in Cyprus. She worked in conferences in Israel, UK, USA, Scotland, Lithuania, The Netherlands. Past European Representative, IPA Board | Israel.

Consultants

Eliat Aram,PhD, is the CEO of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, UK. Her GR career spans over 20 years of conferences in the UK (The Tavistock Clinic, the Grubb Institute) and abroad (India, South Africa, France, The Netherlands, Cyprus, Israel), across cultural and geographical boundaries. She has been very fortunate to develop a capacity to understand the local context of where she works and to immerse in its vicissitudes. Eliat has shaped, influenced and sometimes directed the Tavistock Institute’s flagship Leicester conference since 2007;
directed the AK Rice Institute annual residential for three years 2016-2018 , Teachers College Columbia University’s Fall GRC since 2013, Tavistock Institute China GRC since 2019, and directed conferences in Lithuania (2012) and Argentina (2013). Issues of leadership, authority and learning in a complex, often unknowable world are of daily concern, challenge and excitement for her. She is excited to get involved in the PCCA online event in these extraordinary times.

Moshe Bergstein| PhD |Psychotherapist and Training Psychoanalyst | Israel Psychoanalytic Society| Teaches in various post-graduate psychotherapy programs and in the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute| Member of OFEK
|Israel.

Shmuel Erlich is Training and Supervising Analyst and former President of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. He was Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis and Director of the Sigmund Freud Center at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is Founding Member of OFEK and PCCA and has directed many of their conferences. He has published on group and organizational dynamics, and authored two books: The Couch in the Marketplace: Psychoanalysis and Social Reality, and Fed with Tears, Poisoned with Milk: The German-Israeli Group Relations Conferences. He is in private practice in Tel Aviv.

Bettina JesbergM.D. (Psychiatry and Psychosomatics) is practicing psychoanalyst in Berlin, member, training and supervising analyst of PaIB (Psychoanalytical Institute Berlin,)DPG (German Psychoanalytical Society)-IPA and DGPT. She is a supporting member of PCCA and (co-) founded several working groups on a National and European level (“Rencontre Franco-Allemande”; working group in DPG on “Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy of Psychosis”; “Market Place”, now “Psychoanalysis in the society” in DPG; working group on “Dealing with historical, political and social issues in the cure”).

Oren Kaplan(PhD, MBA) is a professor of Psychology and Business, a Clinical Psychologist and Economist, a former President of College of Management, Israel, member of OFEK, Board member PCCA.

Allan Shafer,D Litt et Phil, Clinical Psychologist, is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a socioanalytic organization consultant in private practice in Melbourne, Australia. He is a former President of Group Relations Australia and has directed or consulted on the staff of group relations conferences in Australia, the UK, India, China, Israel, Poland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. He was associate director of the Tavistock Institute’s 2019 Leicester Conference.

Edward R. Shapiro,M.D, formerly the Medical Director/CEO of the Austen Riggs Center and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center, is on the Board of the A.K. Rice Institute (AKRI) and the International Dialogue Initiative, and on the Advisory Board of Partners Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA). He is a Principal in the Boswell Group and the author of Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders and Citizens (Phoenix, 2020)

About PCCA

Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA) was founded in 2007 to carry on with the work that started with the Israeli- German the Past in the Present Conference, the so called “Nazareth” series, Conferences.

PCCA is a charity registered in Germany, Tax no. 27/675/54264

PCCA works towards developing strategies to engage with the legacy of past atrocities that can contribute to opening up the possibility of a more hopeful future. The aim of the organization is to work through the effects of the Holocaust and of past and
present national and international conflicts that lead to destructive escalation, in the service of a better understanding among national groups worldwide.

PCCA was awarded the 2019 Sigourney Award. Reason for the award: “A panel of distinguished judges found that PCCA’s work in pioneering community-based psychoanalytic/social intervention to address the residual effects of trauma and atrocities, stood out as an outstanding contribution to psychoanalysis and its ability to reduce human suffering and understand human affairs”.

Zoom Details

1. Link will be send before the event
2. Connect with both video and audio
3. Use a computer or tablet with a stable internet connection. Use only one device
4. Choose a private space
5. When you are not speaking, please click “mute”
6. Before joining take time to check your connectivity, lighting, microphone and video
7. Come in a few minutes before the beginning time