Dear colleagues:

Reading through the latest reports from IARPP chapters throughout the world, it’s apparent that most of our activities have continued to be conducted remotely. Likewise, due to a combination of the current surging of coronavirus variants, the reluctance or refusal of so very many people to get vaccinated and/or wear masks, and the disparity of vaccine availability from country to country, it is likely that many future months will require us all to continue meeting virtually.

However, in a few intrepid instances, local conditions were sufficiently safe for masked, vaccinated IARPP members to risk a return to large in-person gatherings. For the first time in two achingly long years, members of the Israel chapter were able to come together in June for their annual spring conference and greet one another in person and indoors. A rare gift in these challenging and troubled times. Curious to get a sense of what this experience was like, I asked several participants for their impressions.

“We felt as newcomers to a deserted land,” Rina Lazar told me. “The land where people really interact one with the other. It was like a legendary island in the midst of an almost chronic threatening reality. The feeling of togetherness was a joyful one. Hope and anxiety were both in the air. Nothing is for sure. Today, as Covid-19 hits back, the conference seems like a mirage”

“There was something that felt both totally normal, yet so profoundly unique,” said Limor Kaufman. “Making sense, rational, yet somewhat irrational, risky, courageous; energizing, enlivening and overwhelming. In the big conference room, I felt cautious about not getting too close to the person sitting by my side, yet enjoying the feeling of looking at them, smiling under my mask, seeing their smiling eyes. Experiencing the profound experience of the risk and the physical intimacy of breathing the same air.”

Noga Guggenheim, a former member of the Israeli committee who now lives in Switzerland,  traveled to Israel especially for the conference. “How good it was to come back home,” she says. “It was an amazing, unique experience.” She adds, “The great dance party set us all free, and when one of the musicians said, ‘I did not know that psychologists like to dance,’ we replied, ‘We are RELATIONALS!’”

“For me,” Mitchel Becker tells me, “there were two simultaneous experiences. One was the deep appreciation for the friendships that we have, that place of warmth and security that is a basic part of our professional being – for some of us, a returning to home. The second was a pleasant surprise: the new generation of professionals. Being in Covid isolation, I had forgotten that a part of our ‘normal times’ social world is inviting new, previously unheard voices into our circle. I enjoyed the presence of new others and remembered this new-old phenomenon of mutual hospitality.”

From one Noga to another – this one Noga Ariel-Galor: “After two long years of creating a collage of ‘talking heads’ through Zoom, we were finally able to get together as a feeling, breathing, embodied community, welcoming both familiar faces and newcomers, all eager to engage in the clinical and critical thinking of Relational psychoanalysis and be reminded of the core concepts that extend far beyond the pandemic crisis. You could feel the breath of fresh air even through our face masks! For me it was proof that we could have ‘both/and’: not disavowing our current crisis but confronting it cautiously and making room again for the subjects that have long captured our imagination and intellectual rigour. There is life and growth alongside loss and disease. This bitter-sweet realization was as hopeful as it gets.”

All expressed gratitude to Ilana Laor who, along with all the many committee members, forged the initiative and the courage to organize this in-person event while ensuring and maintaining the health of all the participants.

Another unique event, also held in June, was the inaugural conference – this one virtual – of GRILPP, el Grupo Relacional Ibero Latinoamericano de Psicoterapia y Psicoanalisis (the Iberic Latinamerican Relational Group of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis).

As you will read in various chapter reports herein, GRILPP is a new consortium bringing together all the IARPP chapters from Spain and Latin America – Argentina, Buenos Aires, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Mexico Contemporary and Peru – for “new and creative combinations that allow us to join through a shared history and a shared language,” as their mission statement puts it – “a choir to embody relational thinking with a voice of its own.” The proliferation of Zoom meetings, allowing colleagues to dialogue and dwell together across great distances, is indeed one of the pandemic’s silver linings, if not without its limitations. As many voices in these chapters’ reports attest, this remote conference, spanning three continents, was a richly gratifying experience, and next year’s follow-up is already in the planning stages.

The June event that would otherwise have united us all, our Annual Conference, must of course wait yet another year. May conditions enable to meet in person next June in Los Angeles.

Meantime, the world continues to parch, burn, melt, and flood; its peoples increasingly yielding to authoritarian pseudo-solutions and the fantasied comforts of disinformation – “a layering of cataclysms,” to borrow from Francisco Gonzalez and Rachael Peltz in the most recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues (2021, p. 409).

If there are any other silver linings during this dark time, let us hope that psychoanalytic thinking might help forward increased awareness and action around power relations, structural inequities and social justice in our communities and indeed the world over. Psychoanalysis is increasingly turning its attention outward, beyond the “melancholia of private practice” (Beth Kita’s piquant phrase, as quoted by, again, Gonzalez and Peltz). In both theory and practice, clinicians are increasingly engaging with the community, the collective, the world – a reclaiming of the more radical aspects of Freud’s project: a psychoanalysis for the people (Freud, 1919; Aron and Starr, 2013; Tubert-Oklander, 2014; Gatzambide, 2019; Layton, 2020; among others). Let this be another plug for the latest Dialogues issue’s (2021, 31:4) focus on community psychoanalysis. I’ll take whatever silver linings I can find, and this is an expansive one.

I encourage you to share news of your latest books, papers and presentations in the next edition of The IARPP Bookshelf. Keep your colleagues abreast of your contributions and activities. Submission deadline for the October edition of the Bookshelf is Sunday, September 26, 2021. Kindly include the following materials with your submission:

• Title of your recent or upcoming publication or presentation
• An abstract or brief description of its content
• Link to a publisher (if applicable) so that members might access or purchase a copy
• Book cover photo or artwork (if applicable)
• Digital photograph of yourself (jpeg format)
• Professional contact information as you would like it to appear publicly for our readers (email and, if you wish, mailing address)
• Book authors: please provide a brief bio of 75-90 words.
• Presenters: please spell out organizations’ acronyms.

Submissions should be emailed to Matt.Aibel [@] gmail.com.

Wishing you well,

Matt Aibel

Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York and Northport, NY
Email Matt Aibel