European Association of Psychotherapy Conference

Held by UKCP in Cambridge between 13 - 16 July, 2006.

Article by David Hudson

The conference was much richer, varied and more fun than I had expected. It was the first major psychotherapy conference I had attended and my first impression was that it was smaller, in terms of the number of people, than I anticipated. I suppose, after the global spectacle of the World Cup, my vision was of mass movements of therapists across Europe towards Cambridge.

On Saturday, the opening event was by Filz and Pritz, which I imagined to be a comedy juggling act but actually were speeches by two of the most eminent therapists there. In fact Alexander Filz did provide an unintentionally comic start as his English was not congruent with the understanding of his listeners for the most part, and we struggled to make sense of his speech. He had brought a young interpreter with him who unfortunately spoke English even less well with the result that Filz would say something half comprehensible which was translated into mostly opaque statements and which was then recorrected by Filz leaving us hopelessly confused and bemused and in awe of what language can do to our minds when words are juggled so comprehensively.

In contrast, one of the most moving speeches of the whole conference came from the General Secretary of the EAP, Alfred Pritz, who spoke of events in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian conflict. His stark question to us was, ‘where were you during the war and what did you do to help your fellow therapists?’ Although he spoke calmly one could feel the depth of his passion for psychotherapy to be politically situated, and not assume a spurious neutrality. The possibility or otherwise of therapist neutrality is something that we usually discuss in terms of one-to-one therapy.

Pritz is from Vienna and visited Bosnia at the height of the fighting; therapists living and working there were glad of his support as many felt that the world had forgotten them, and felt isolated and cut off. He told a story of when he visited Croatia and the head of a psychiatric institution turned up for work one day in a Nationalist uniform with a gun strapped to his side, and ordered the exclusion of Serbs and other nationalities from the hospital, and cut off all contact with non-Croatian colleagues. He continues to work there now, minus the gun and uniform. It was hard to believe this was not 1930’s Nazi Germany but actually took place in the 1990’s in a place which may soon be part of the European Union.

I was left with a sense of not doing enough, and that contact with therapists in other parts of the world could be a way of influencing conflicts in a small but cumulative way. Later I made friends with a Serbian Gestalt therapist who wept as she told me how alone and despairing she had felt during the days of the NATO bombing, and how demonised she had felt by the West; not all Serbs are nationalists.

Pritz’s speech received a standing ovation and Andrew Samuels suggested the EAP draft a letter to express our concern at the ongoing war in Iraq. Samuels himself gave the first lecture of the conference which was about the political nature of being a psychotherapist. There was a sense, throughout the conference, of a need for therapists to be more socially and politically aware and active. If therapists are suffering oppression in Europe it is now ‘at home’ for all of us. The question is, ‘what do we stand for?’ in every sense.

Later in the evening, Brian Keenan spoke about how he endured three and a half years of imprisonment by various Lebanese military groups, and how he contacted a source of spiritual strength that kept him alive, and even experienced moments of bliss which other captives have spoken of, which he would never have had on the outside. He writes of this in his moving book, An Evil Cradling.

One of the most fascinating lectures was by Gerald Edelman, who spoke with a lightness and wit about the complexities of his theory of ‘re-entry’ which took away the need to assume a superordinate self. Having read Daniel Stern’s and Allen Schore’s work, I was somewhat familiar with the general territory but Edelman’s talk was like being whisked through a landscape of neurons, synapses and frontal lobes on a whirlwind tour leaving me exhilarated and breathless and eager to understand more.

Edelman was accosted, as many speakers were to their surprise, by George from a tiny village outside Aberdeen who looked and sounded like a young R. D. Laing, and who made passionate interventions (without the aid of a microphone), contentious and challenging, which some members found disturbing but which others, including myself, found invigorating and anarchic. I got to know George during the time there and found him engaging and humorous. Surely the world of therapy can stand some passionate individualism.

Mary Sullivan introduced Brett Kahr (they are both former members of staff at the SPC), who talked about the influence of the media and his experience of working as a radio therapist. One of his achievements was persuading his boss to extend the time of a radio ‘session’ from 2 minutes to 5. This was considered to be stretching the attention span of an average Radio 2 listener beyond reasonable limits, and probably constitutes the briefest time-limited therapy in existence. Other aspects of working in this field were pointed up by his story of how a woman caller launched into a graphic description of oral sex during one ‘session’ and Brett was subjected to the sight of his boss jumping up and down indicating ‘cut her off!’ Castration in the service of censorship.

The theme of therapy in different media was continued by Emmy van Deurzen and Digby Tantum. She spoke of her initial suspicions of therapy via the internet but that now she was a fanatical convert. They demonstrated some of the programmes they had set up, some of which were impressive as academic teaching tools, but in the sphere of personal development I found the enterprise more suspect, as an increasing amount of self-disclosure seemed to take place, from tutors as well as students, which did not appear to me to be well-enough contained in the internet context.

The morning workshops were some of the most involving events at the conference. The first I selected was Claudia Herbert’s of the Oxford Trauma Centre, about the installation of a safe space for those suffering from trauma using EMDR. Another energetic and pulsating workshop was on African dance and it was a release to witness therapists letting their hair down together. A psychodrama workshop was held by a Serbian therapist which encouraged us to explore our ‘roots’ by enacting an improvisation around where our parents, grandparents etc were originally from.

At the end of the conference there was a talk by Bill O’Hanlon, an engaging speaker from the U.S., about his inclusive therapy which seemed to strike a chord with many of the delegates and inspire them, no mean feat after three and a half days of talk. Bill gave an example of his work in the story of a woman who said that she had to tell him something in order for the therapy to proceed further, but that it was impossible. The next session she summoned up her courage and opened her mouth to speak, then collapsed back into the chair; this procedure went on for twenty minutes. Bill tried several interventions, ‘this seems very hard to say’, ‘you really want to tell me this but it’s difficult’, but nothing worked until he spontaneously came up with an alternative, although it made no sense to him at the time, which was, ‘perhaps you can both tell me and not tell me at the same time’. After a pause the woman began to make Tai Chi like movements with her hands and every now and then gave an energetic spasm when she gripped her hands tight together. In this way she managed to say and yet not say her story of abuse, which she later became able to symbolise in words.

All in all it was a very stimulating experience in a Cambridge that resembled Florence in the heatwave, well-organised by the UKCP, with a warm and friendly atmosphere. If any of these snapshots excite readers to know more, I am happy to give what other details I have.