We are closing down general dynamics Sydney and putting the webpage into “mothballs” status. This means that the information on it will remain accessible for now but there will be no new information going up on it, nor will there be further group emails.
Over the seven years since Lorraine and I came up with the idea of general dynamics Sydney, the level of group activities across many Sydney organizations, in my view, first increased then decreased.
The Australian Centre for Integrative Studies (ACIS) has ceased its annual mini group relations conferences. This is despite their high point in 2015 of hosting the very successful International Transactional Analysis Conference in Sydney, with a distinct group focus.
The Building Bridges initiative of the Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (ICAPP) – featuring international superstars live in person, live via video link, or on video – collapsed during, or immediately following, the event hosted by the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts in 2015. The wreckage completely disappeared from view. For example, the group email communication between the eleven members of the panel, representing the organisations working on the bridge, ceased completely, as if the collapse could not be named, let alone discussed, or addressed.
The Work in Progress meetings, originally for Sydney members of the Australian Institute of Socio Analysis, struggle to find work in progress among its aging members, putting their primary task at risk.
The disappearance of the group activities of the Couple and Family Psychotherapy Association of Australasia (CAFPAA) is particularly striking, with the late cancellation of their 2018 experiential conference due to numbers. This followed the high points of, for example, their 2014 conference with international superstar Mary Morgan; moving into a post-charismatic leader phase; and the publication of their book, Working with developmental anxieties in couple and family psychotherapy: The family within (Routledge, 2018) edited by Penny Jools, Jenny Berg and Noela Byrne. The book was to form the basis of their 2018 conference.
It might be worth recalling in this regard that the very first event of general dynamics Sydney, in 2013, did not proceed, due to not getting the number of registrations necessary to proceed with the event as designed (i.e. both small and large groups). Despite our original intentions, we never offered another “stand-alone” group event. (Propaganda Now was a workshop we conducted at the 2015 International Transactional Analysis Conference in collaboration with our colleagues from Work In Progress and the ACIS; our co-sponsorship of the Sydney presentation by Bruno Boccaro was with our colleague from Work in Progress and the Catholic Institute of Sydney).
However, in very sharp contrast, the Sydney activities of the Australian Association of Group Psychotherapists (AAGP) have increased over the same period, 2012 to the present. We now have in Sydney a monthly Group Interest Group, an annual three day Large Group event, and an annual Open Meeting. These events are very lively and well–attended, and organised by Sydney members of the AAGP and their colleagues. Lorraine and I both participated in the 2019 Open Meeting last Saturday, where she was one of five women facilitators.
So, you might be asking, how are the Sydney members of the AAGP defying the trend and managing to attract enough interest from people in Sydney to make large group events viable? Well, they’re not really. The increase in Sydney members of the AAGP, and the increase in their activity, has resulted in Sydney events becoming a more important part of the AAGP calendar of membership and teaching activities. For example, the very successful Sydney Large Group event with overseas superstar Teresa von Sommaruga Howard, coming up now for its 6th consecutive year, attracts people from all around Australia and New Zealand, as well as AAGP students, for whom it is part of their training. It is unlikely to be viable if it only drew registrants from Sydney.
So, can it be said that the increase in group activities of the AAGP, and the decline in group activities of other Sydney organizations, has resulted in the concentration of Sydney people, interested in the study of groups, at AAGP events? No, that does not appear to be the case. We don’t see people who participated in group activities of the other organizations now attending AAGP events. Nor do we see people identified with organisations focusing on individual or dyadic psychodynamics starting to attend AAGP events in any significant numbers.
We still see those interested in individual psychodynamics and those interested in group psychodynamics leading “separate, aloof, existences” in Sydney, as we noted in 2012. In fact, the separation has probably increased. And the aloofness between people identified with the AAGP and those identified with other professional groups has probably also increased.
But, my goodness, the energy, collegiality and boundary pushing/push-back of participants at Sydney large group events of the AAGP is something to experience. It is quite different, for example, from what I saw at the large groups of the Group Analytic Society (London) winter workshop in 2001, despite, or perhaps because of, the presence of international superstars there. The same energetic quality was evident last night, with fourteen people turning up at the Group Interest Group, which has been meeting monthly since September 2014.
As for Lorraine and I, since the last experiential event we jointly put on in 2015, we have focused our respective energies into our separate writings. Lorraine’s new book, From Cradle to Global Citizen, was recently launched at Gleebooks to a room full of friends and colleagues. I, on the other hand, have published on The persistence of magic and religion in contemporary medicine and psychotherapy. Both writings are concerned with the links between individual and group dynamics.
See you around,
Henry Luiker
27 March 2019