GROUP RELATIONS: AN INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCING GROUP RELATIONS INTO A NEW ENVIRONMENT
by Robert M. Young
I think it might be helpful to say something about the introduction of the group
relations perspective and group relations events into a new environment. Indeed, most of
the preceding chapters were written as a part of that process. In 1992 I was invited to give two seminars in an annual Psychoanalytic Week
which had been established in Sofia, Bulgaria, on the initiative of David Reason, a member
of staff at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury
where I was then a Visiting Professor. The setting was truly bizarre. Our sessions were
held in the bar area of the Palace of Culture, a truly imposing, huge concrete edifice in
the centre of a capital city which is, to put it mildly, not well-known in the West. We
were treated well, the people who attended the sessions were thoughtful and enthusiastic,
and I felt that my presentations on weeks theme of Psychoanalysis and
Culture went down well. (They are reproduced in this volume.) At a certain point I was approached by the person who, it turned out, had created the
space for these annual meetings, a psychiatrist named Toma Tomov. He was a gentle,
unassuming man, and it took me some time to discover what a remarkable person he is. He
asked me what I would do if faced with the problem of how to introduce psychoanalysis into
Bulgaria. I dont think that he told me then, but it later emerged that there is no
psychotherapeutic training at all in the Bulgarian psychiatric or clinical
psychologists trainings. Nor are there any psychotherapists in the country. Indeed,
the whole of medicine included no clinical supervision. There were practically no
psychoanalytic or psychodynamic texts in the country, and so on and on. Bulgaria is a country of eight million people. University education is by rote
learning. Toma had taken a leading part in setting up a new university, called the New
Bulgarian University, based on a whole new way of thinking. The head of the university,
Professor Bogdan Bogdanov, and he had managed to get this going in the climate following
the end of Soviet and communist regimes in 1989. Toma had gathered around him a number of
young people, some psychiatric trainees, some psychologists, others from various fields.
He had established a Psychoanalytic Club with half a dozen members. However, they had no
clinical programme, no supervision and practically no books. What had struck him most forcibly in my presentations was the material in my second
seminar about group relations. He felt that this was exactly what was needed in Bulgaria -
a way of bringing people together, eliciting their most primitive anxieties and exposing
them to critical scrutiny in a containing setting. We rapidly became collaborators in an effort to set up training programmes in
Psychoanalytic Studies, Psychotherapy training and Group Relations. The university had
been set up by the Open Society Fund, a charitable organization established by the
multi-millionaire currency speculator who had made a billion by betting against the
British pound on Black Wednesday in 199?. Among his many charitable activities, Soros had
given over a hundred million dollars and set up a Central European University as well as
the NBU. The head of the university, Prof Bogdanov, was also the main representative of
Soros charities in Bulgaria, and Toma had his confidence. The upshot of all this was the first group relations conference in Eastern Europe. Here
is what I wrote about the conference in the Kent Centre Bulletin
(Spring 1993):
GROUP RELATIONS CONFERENCE IN BULGARIA
On December 18-22, 1992, there was a new and inspiring event in Bulgaria, which its
sponsors and participants believe could make a significant difference to the development
of democracy in the country. It was sponsored by George Soros, a Hungarian and a Jewish
refugee from the Nazis who was inspired by Karl Poppers contrast between
totalitarian or closed societies and democratic or open ones which
he encountered is an undergraduate at the London School of Economics. He emigrated to
America and went on to make a fortune from investments. More recently, he made a billion
dollars last November from speculating against the pound. Among his other philanthropic
activities in Eastern Europe through the Open Society Fund, he is supporting
psychoanalytic studies in Bulgaria and the work of staff members of the Centre for
Psychoanalytic Studies at Kent. There is a strong and developing link between the Centre and the New Bulgarian
University in Sofia. It has grown largely through relationships built up by David Reason
with people in Sofia who are interested in psychoanalysis and related subjects. There was
a week-long conference on Psychoanalysis and Culture last Easter, which
included contributions by Nicola Worledge (a Kent graduate student working on
psychoanalysis and aesthetics), Dave Reason and me. Each of us gave lectures and led
discussion groups, and I gave a clinical supervision. (See her account in Bulletin no. 4, 1992, p. 6.) As a result of the success of that conference, an ambitious programme was conceived
which is intended to involve four closely-related activities: training in psychoanalytic
psychotherapy and in group psychotherapy, a graduate degree in psychoanalytic studies and
a regular series of conferences on group relations. I have been appointed by the New
Bulgarian University as co-ordinator of the overall programme. David Reason has spent the
autumn term in Sofia lecturing, giving seminars and individual tuition and providing
invaluable help to the New Bulgarian University in setting up teaching programmes and
other aspects of open-ended and experiential learning. This has been particularly useful,
since the teaching of university subjects in Bulgaria has hitherto suffered from rote
learning and has not been good at fostering creativity and individual initiative. Part of
the raison dêtre of the New Bulgarian University is to foster more
democratic and innovative ways of teaching, learning and doing research. The creation of
the university, Daves visit and our conferences have been funded by George
Soros aptly-named Open Society Fund. It is not easy to convey the problems which lie in the path of setting up the
programme, which has been developed by Professor Toma Tomov, the Deputy-Director of the
university and our main Bulgarian colleague and mentor, Dave Reason and me. For example,
there are practically no books and teaching materials in these fields and no foreign
currency to buy them. Individuals and institutions in Britain have begun to make gifts of
books, periodicals and off prints, but the need is very great. Moreover, there are no
qualified psychotherapists in the country. Since undergoing individual psychotherapy is a
central feature of training as a psychotherapist, a way will have to be found to provide
therapy for the trainees. Either someone will have to live there for a number of years,
someone will have to fly in every week for three days, or trainees will have to come
abroad for their therapy. Experience has shown that people who go abroad rarely go back,
and no qualified person has yet been found to go there for years or for forty-plus
three-day periods per year. I believe, however, that this problem can be overcome and that
visiting teachers will also be found who will be interested in being among those who will
go out and give lectures, seminars and supervisions for the requisite thirty weekends per
year. We are in the final stage of preparing an overall budget and applying for major
funding for the various modules of the programme. People who have been approached to take
part have been very enthusiastic about the programme, which promises to provide the most
comprehensive training in Europe. One aspect of the overall scheme which we could get on with is group relations, since
it could be launched without the overall project being established. This is because the
usual mode of teaching in this field is an intensive conference which can last for days, a
week or two weeks. The approach was evolved by Wilfred Bion (see his Experiences in
Groups, 1961) and others and developed at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
under the leadership of A. K. Rice. It involves the intensive study of authority,
leadership and autonomy by individuals taking part in a temporary institution. This is
achieved by members monitoring their own experience in the process of taking part in the
individual, group and institutional dynamics of the conference itself. That is, it is a
particularly intense form of experiential learning which concentrates on interpreting the
constantly shifting, dynamic unconscious processes which mediate the relations between the
individual and the group in the here and now. The group relations model is an
equivalent to the psychoanalytic method as a tool of social and cultural enquiry, and the
members of the conference are encouraged to make links to their wider experiences in
organisational and social life. When Professor Tomov first learned about this approach he
immediately saw its promise for facilitating change from the rigid bureaucratic methods
which prevailed under communism. Although there is now an annual two-week group relations conference at Leicester and
frequent ones on the Continent, in Israel, America, Australia, India and elsewhere, there
have been practically no previous group relations events in Eastern Europe. The only one
we have heard about went so badly that a leading figure in the field was led to warn us
off from attempting it. Indeed, our Bulgarian colleagues got cold feel in the penultimate
planning stage and had to be persuaded to see it through. The sense of risk and weight of
responsibility on the shoulders of Toma Tomov were very great, and the British team
approached the event with considerable trepidation. The Director of the conference is one of the leading figures in the field, David
Armstrong, Director of the Grubb Institute in London [He has since moved to the Tavistock
Centre Consultancy Service.}. Both he and Gordon Lawrence, Director of Imago East-West
[and now Visiting Professor at Cranefield University], have decades of experience
conducting group relations conferences. Miranda Feuchtwang, a child psychotherapist, has
also been a staff member of a number of such conferences, as has Paul Hoggett, who
specialises in group work with local government officials [and has since set up an Ma in
Group Relations at the University of the West of England, where he is Professor of
Plitics]. Tara Weeramanthri, a consultant psychiatrist, has had considerable experience in
working with the Leicester conference model (the main paradigm in the field). I had been a
member at a Leicester conference and have been trained as a group psychotherapist, but
this was my first experience as a staff member. There was, of course, the problem of languages. This was solved by appointing a
Bulgarian colleague to work with each member of the British team. They were interpreters
at the same time that they were trainee staff members. This combination of roles was a
tough one to carry out, since staff members are the objects of intense projections in all
the conference events, and the people involved had no previous experience. The Bulgarian
staff included three psychiatrists, Vesselka Christova, Kimon Ganev and Toma Tomov; three
psychologists, Zlatka Mihova, Vesela Slavov and Nikola Atanasov; and a postgraduate
student in English, Milena Nedeva. The British staff were very impressed by the alacrity
and insight with which they got on with it. The setting was surreal. The conference was held at the Palace of Culture, an
extraordinary kind of institution found in the centre of every capital city in Eastern
Europe. It is massive, lavishly appointed and festooned with striking and imposing
artefacts which had been commissioned by the communist regime carvings, sculptures
and a huge colourful mural which embraced all of history and all of symbolism and formed
the backdrop to all events in the room where plenary meetings took place. There is a
particular penchant for elaborate chandeliers among the official architects who design
these palaces, and I found myself irresistibly drawn to counting the burnt out bulbs when
the dynamics of the conference threatened to overwhelm me. The setting was made more
remarkable by the fact that one result of democratisation and embracing the market economy
and free enterprise is that the palace had been opened up to hundreds of stalls selling
the most awful junk which comes from the West or from new enterprises zillions of
plastic toys, hair sprays, portable cassette decks, perfumes, along with cars and tv sets.
The conference was held on the fifth level, and I experienced it as floating on a sea of
tat, while seeking to foster a more worthwhile set of values for this dramatically and
confusingly changing society. I find it hard to express what happened, but it was very moving and heartening. The
sixty conference members were bewildered, didnt have much idea what to expect and
felt ambivalent about the British experts who had jetted in for the event. On the one
hand, they were keen to learn, especially since Western ideas of management are de
rigeur; on the other, they were understandably resentful of what might be a new and
subtle form of cultural imperialism. But what transpired was truly remarkable. One member
of staff said it was the best group relations conference she had ever attended. Once the
members got past their first layer of defences, my experience of them was that their souls
yearned to be free of the suspicions, cynicism, spying and despair that has made up so
much of their lives under the old regime and in the chaos of recent events. They found it
particularly hard to find a way of being between the position of isolated individual and a
member of the mass. That is, the task of forming groups with clear aims, boundaries and
territories was especially appreciated. One participant expressed this as the result of a
society whose members are in transition from serfdom to citizenship. Bulgaria was under
Turkish hegemony for five centuries, followed by Russian, German and then Soviet control.
Nominal and fledgling democracy has been in place since 1989. People spoke with great clarity and simplicity and quite soon found the conference
events very facilitating and relevant to their lives and work. I felt that the emotional
atmosphere of the conference was unusually free of bull-shit, when compared with what
happens in Britain, where there is often layer after layer of conference-wise defences and
tricks interposed between the aims of the conference and the insides of the members. When
we came at the end to the applications groups where members describe their
circumstances and seek to apply what they have learned at the conference each
member spoke of truly daunting life dilemmas on the part of professional people attempting
to find authenticity and dedication in settings which could easily go either way: to
integrity or toward destructive splitting and opportunism. The problem of trying to hold
things together intellect and feelings, job form and content (in a society of
sinecures) was especially striking. In the final plenary a member said he felt he
was left standing helpless in the middle of a large field. This was interpreted as less
forlorn that it might appear to be at first glance. To be able to stand there and bear
that experience without running away from it into an instant, perhaps superficial,
solution means that though he may have felt helpless, his situation was far from hopeless.
His ability to have that experience, to contain it and reflect on it struck us as a real
benefit of the conference. There was a press conference on the following day in which participants and journalists
agreed that the use of the group relations model has immense promise for Bulgaria and
other Eastern European countries and could make important contributions in a number of
settings - medical, commercial, governmental, psychiatric, educational, and in working
with minorities (there is, for example, a large, alienated Gypsy population in Bulgaria).
A week-long conference is planned for Easter, and all who attended the one in December are
greatly looking forward to it. The group relations approach offers the best synthesis of
management thinking with integrity and psychodynamic authenticity in dealing with the role
of the individual in groups and institutions. In fact, the next conference was cancelled, in spite of all our efforts. The reason is
envy and spite on the part of other academics at the NBU. A way was found to bring some of
the young people who had acted as staff to a group relations conference mounted by the
Grubb Institute on London. A group Relations Club also met regularly to read, discuss and
plan future events. We then managed to get a grant of $100,000 from the Open Society Fund
and to mount another conference in July-August 1994, which was as remarkable, in its way
as the first one. It was held in the newly-acquired premises of the NBU, a disused
facility which had formerly been used for the education of Communist party officials. The
rounds were sorely neglected, and the rooms were hot, but the proceedings were
electrifying. I recall most vividly an event in an exercise in which the membership were
asked to form groups to interact with the staff, who were designated as
Management. One young psychiatrist well known to all of the staff, whom
I had supervised and with whom I was on affectionate terms came before the
staff/management group and said that since we were unwilling to meet with them and were
completely intransigent, so that there was no possible way forward. When it was pointed
out by the Director of the conference that they had asked for no meeting and that we had
therefore made no response of the kind he described, a deep frown came across his face. He
was silent for a long time and then said that we had utterly shattered his world view.
That is, he had to acknowledge that his characterization of us was pure projection, albeit
firmly based on his experience growing up in the culture and society of pre and post 1989
Bulgaria. There were many comparable experiences in the various small and large group experiences
of the conferences and in the application groups at the end of the week. People found it
hard to the point of impossibility to imagine that groups could be formed for good and
proactive reasons, that institutions could permit progressive and constructive things t
happen, that anyone outside ones own family and closest friends could be trusted. This was especially evident in the large groups, where various people were repeatedly
accused of playing cynical or comical or otherwise disruptive roles. Still others told
moving stories about how it was pointless to hope, to build, to seek change. IN the
application groups, people told poignant tales about why their jobs were pointless, their
initiatives thwarted, their positions based on fragile patronage. When the conference ended the staff were heartened and felt sure that the next
conference would be able to build quite quickly on the experiential learning of this and
the previous one. Then we learned that the rest of our grant had disappeared; it was
simply gone. There was a heated showdown between advocates of our programme and certain
responsible officials which might have led to catastrophe, but it didnt. Instead, it
led to the creation of a new Institute of Human Relations at the NBU, with an ambitious
programme and full backing for grant application to funding bodies in the West. One
crucial meeting is worth recalling. A significant figure with access to significant
resources had agreed to meet with us. The meeting was scheduled for Saturday morning.,
Gordon Lawrence and I flew in from London, but fog prevented us from landing at Sofia, and
we were diverted to Burgas on the Baltic. In order to get to the meting on time we had to
take a taxi and ride all night through the fog. We got to Sofia in time to sleep for an
hour and got to the meeting. The grandee did not turn up. We were assured that this did
not mean that the grant would not be forthcoming only that he wanted to make it
clear who was more important. We swallowed our understandable reactions and set about
explaining the proposal to a group of people who knew about it already. The potentate
turned up an hour late and explained disarmingly that when he agreed to meet us it had
slipped his mind that ht had promised his wife that he would look after the children that
Saturday morning - hence the transparent bag containing goldfish which as suspended from
his hand as he came into the room and which remained there throughout our deliberations. We then had to find a problem to solve, which we duly did. It had been proposed that we
should channel our application via a group which had already received money from the
granting body. However, Gordon Lawrence pointed out that this would have the undesirable
result of distorting that group and making them responsible for a very large grant, with
the inevitable result that their governing body would become a honey-pot which would be
over-run by ambitious people. We decided against that path, something which led to serious
ructions that very evening when we met with the group concerned: their new director wanted
all that money to go though the organisation, but she was dissuaded. The funding administrator warmed up and even began to make suggestions about how we
could make application for even more substantial funds if we would look into certain
problems concerning the substantial minority population of gypsies and their relations
with the police, which, in fact, we already intended to do. It was later explained to me
that since the government was inevitably going to change very soon from the
recently-elected former communists to a more liberal coalition, this person had a strong
incentive to make a significant gesture in the direction of institutions associated with
the opposition so that he could be seen as even-handed and could retain his position as a
member of the new elite (replacing the party apparatchicks) who controlled the wellsprings
of Western aid. We have since made the relevant applications and await the results. We have also set up an Institute of Human Relation in the New Bulgarian University, of
which Toma Tomov and I are co-directors (the first time, I am told, that a foreigner has
held such a position). Professor Tomov has since become Head of the Department of
Psychiatry at the premiere medical school in the country, The Medical University of Sofia,
and I am Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies at the Centre for
Psychotherapeutic Studies of the University of Sheffield. Gordon Lawrence is on the Board
of Directors, and he and I and David Armstrong, who directs the group relations
conferences of the Institute, have been made professors at the NBU. This East-West
cooperation is substantial and bodes well for the development of applications of the group
relations perspective in new settings. For example, the Institute of Human Relations is
now offering group relations MA to people throughout Eastern Europe. We have set up a
Community Studies Course to propagate this way of working. I reproduce below an excerpt
from the project proposal which has been put forward jointly by the NBU and the Geneva
Initiative in Psychiatry (GIP). I believe it conveys the relevance of the group relations
approach to the particular historical and emotional setting in which attempts are being
made to create democracies in Eastern Europe. Of the three main ingredients of the course, the group relations conferences (1 to 2
week residential events) will be held on the NBU site in Sofia; the long-term small groups
with permanent membership (8 working weeks spread over a two-year period) will be run by
visiting teams at various locations in Eastern Europe as contracted; and the academic
training will be by distance learning. Training will be provided in English, Russian and
Bulgarian.
Target Group
The target population for the Community Studies Course (CSC) are the numerous citizens
of Eastern Europe (EE) who identify with democratic processes and need to contribute to
change in ways considered effective, ethical and relevant to the cultural context.
Students for the programme will be recruited from among the founding members of the
burgeoning non-governmental sectors in virtually all countries of EE. They would be of
widely varying backgrounds, would be emerging from, or still struggling with, the crisis
of a lost professional life, would be badly in need of a value system to embrace and of
knowledge and skills to adjust to life under democracy. Yet, they would most likely be the
ones to have the stamina of the pioneers of Eastern Europe in the quest for the open
society.
The Problem
We believe that there are fundamental impediments to the development of an open society
which are not rational or accessible to ordinary introspection. This line of reasoning has
been dramatically confirmed in the group relations conferences held by the New Bulgarian
University and underwritten by the Open Society Fund, one held in 1992 with leading
figures in Bulgarian administration and another in 1996 with mental health and educational
workers. In the conferences there was a deep reluctance to join groups or to believe that
institutions could ever be trusted. There was in the conferences, as there is in the
society, an unwillingness to take responsibility for public spaces. Distrust and cynicism
are fundamental enemies of co-operation and of democratic procedures. Put simply, people
were afraid of being open as individuals; so they are unlikely to make significant
contributions to an open society. 'People in Eastern Europe suffer from primitive
anxieties, some common to human nature, some greatly enhanced and specific to their
experiences before and after 1989. They are not ready to learn from new experiences and to
enter into new group, social, institutional, cultural and political combinations. Instead,
they react defensively and selfishly, afraid to take the risk of trusting and working with
others for the common good. The dynamics of distrust are the dynamics of being overwhelmed by primitive anxieties.
They not only prevent optimism and positive developments; they also underlie common social
ills, the ones which hundreds of non-governmental organisation (NGO) projects in Eastern
Europe attempt to address: cynical opportunism; misappropriation of resources; punitive
attitudes toward deviance; rote learning; physical abuse in domestic settings; sexual
abuse; borderline personality disorder; bigotry and scapegoating, especially of
minorities; failure to foster rehabilitation and reparation, etc. In the case of virtually every EE-EU collaborative project an enormous amount of learning of the most unexpected kind on the part of the project
staff turns out to be necessary in order for sufficient comprehending to become possible
and common grounds for action to be established. It is almost the rule, however, that the
awareness comes too late of the need to engage with the project in such a taxing,
personal, even intimate way for real progress to be achieved This awareness is routinely
accompanied by negative feelings of distrust, disappointment and disillusionment.
The Group Relations Approach and Eastern Europe
The bewilderment, incomprehension and even confusion which one experiences upon
exposure to another culture, and which may trigger a learning process or may cause
frustration and bring the project to a precipitous end, are predictable, possible to
attenuate and even to utilize for individual growth and development. This holds true for
the differences between human settings and practices in all spheres: public
administration, business, social welfare, mental health, education, parenting, the prison
system, the criminal justice system, the military. In all these and many other spheres the
human group as a mediating domain between the individual and the cultural setting can make
a big difference. One exceptionally effective way to utilize the human group in precipitating learning
appropriate to the tasks at hand, even in the lack of a clear formulation or awareness of
the learning needs, is the group relations conference. The techniques involved in working
in group relations settings make it possible to reflect upon primitive anxieties in the
circumstances in which they are evoked. It is a particularly intense form of experiential
learning. Psychodynamic consultancy, counselling and therapy have the same advantages but
spread the learning process over longer periods. Although the method was evolved several decades ago and is widely employed in major
institutions and n many settings throughout the metropolitan countries, exposure to it in
the EE setting occurred for the first time in 1992, in Sofia. Five years later a group of
over 30 psychologists, social workers, medical doctors and others centered round the IHR
have acquired significant experience with the method of group relations. This came as
result of enthusiastic experimenting with various modifications and of consistent
supervision from distinguished British consultants, whose visits were supported by Open
Society funds. The accumulation of a critical mass of young professionals with a good
understanding of the approach has lead to the development of several academic courses at
the NBU which introduce students to the field, to the establishment of: 1. an internet e-mail discussion forum (hraj@maelstrom.stjohns.edu)
2. a World Wide Web ejournal with an East-West editorship and board: Human
Relations, Authority and Justice: http://www.human-nature.com/HRAJ/home.html 3. the translation and publications of seminal literature on the topic 4. the setting up of a learned society: The Experiences in Groups Club. In the public services the new skills of civil participation has afforded an amazing
variety of applications. One example is the design of a training in psychiatric nursing
(first of its kind in EE) provided by a team from Sofia, Bulgaria to a class in Kiev,
Ukraine made possible by the mediating role of GIP and the innovative design informed by
knowledge of group relations and group dynamics. Another example is a series of
conferences concerned with inter-agency cooperation for working with mentally disordered
offenders, which brought together with help of the British Know-how Fund the police, the
criminal justice system, mental health and the non-governmental sector into a joint
project on involving the community in the containment of interpersonal violence and abuse,
a development in the hitherto rigidly-sectored institutional bureaucracy which would have
been impossible without the facilitating role of the group relations approach. Many more
such examples could be listed: introducing case-work in the social welfare sector,
empowering Roma activists to challenge the marginalisation of their ethnic group in a
constructive way, rather than a way which is paranoid and conducive to further isolation. In the light of the above developments it need not come as a surprise that the point
has been reached when it is appropriate to establish an autonomous group relations
programme in Eastern Europe. The current proposal attempts to identify the components that
need to be assembled for this to happen, to cost them and to put them in perspective. The issue is approached with the understanding that Group Relations: Eastern Europe is
an altogether new chapter in the history of human sciences still to be written; that this
can be appropriately done only within the context of Eastern Europe and, more
specifically, by close involvement with the domain that undergoes the most turbulent, yet
seldom-recognized, development - group and community life; and that the only appropriate
authors could be professionals from Eastern Europe, trained to acquire qualification of
the level of their EU counterparts, who remain in professional partnership with them, yet
have enough autonomy to stay Eastern Europeans.
The Community Studies (Eastern Europe) Training
The human science students with serious interests in group dynamics and group relations
were instrumental in setting up the Institute of Human Relations within the NBU which will
provide organizational infrastructure for training in the field. It had transpired from
the experience in the group relations conferences and related events which we have held
that, having gone through the experience, students begin to address numerous demands to
the teams for information on facts and theory in a broad range of disciplines. The Community Studies (EE) training is conceived as a public service offered by the IHR
within the academic tradition of facilitating awareness and self-study with a view of
enhancing and spreading the capacity of individuals, groups and communities to contain
anxiety vis-a-vis the turbulent realities of transition. In addition, however, this
attitudinal change will be supplemented with a systematic presentation of the achievements
of Western Civilization in the field of democratic institutions, human rights, social
policy, public administration, community development, organizational behaviour, conflict
mediation, advocacy and organizational management. Finally, the training will provide
(through the format of long-term small groups) supervision and counselling to ensure
sustainability of the newly-acquired autonomy and independence in the actual practice of
living. Throughout Eastern Europe there is an enormous hunger for this kind of translation of
the principles of open society into the reality of ones daily experiences.
Correspondingly, given the fact that the diploma will be offered in Russian and English,
and through distance learning and visiting teams, millions will have access to it. The
GIP, which has been ingeniously investing for a number of years in developing and
expanding networks of reform minded thinkers in mental health and related fields from
practically all countries in Eastern and Central Europe, will provide an effective channel
for disseminating information and recruiting students.
In my opinion, what is exciting and promising about these applications is not only
relevant to Eastern Europe but to other political, social and cultural settings, as well.
Indeed, bringing together these essays and this last chapter on the experience of
introducing group relations to Bulgaria and beyond has had the effect of greatly enhancing
my own sense of the power and potential of this way of working, of experiential learning
and of addressing in this way the profoundly disturbed feelings which come between us all
and human civility, cooperation and benign group and institutional relationships.