The Willingness to Remain in Relationship
With some hesitation, I admit that the world’s greatest challenges have always intimidated me. For a long time, it felt easier to look away than to stay with the helplessness that war and injustice stirred in me.
One of the things I value most about IARPP is that it has helped me face these realities. Not by making them less painful or providing answers, but by teaching me to stay with them. Through an international community of clinicians and scholars, I have learned that even what feels overwhelming becomes more bearable when we face it together.
The Toronto conference, devoted to the theme of hatred, allowed me to take this one step further.
For a few days, I found myself in a room with people from parts of the world marked by very different conflicts. Listening to their stories, their questions, and the ways psychoanalysis engaged with their experiences made the conference theme deeply tangible.
There were moments of intense debate. Wars that rarely make the headlines were remembered with grief, anger, and a profound sense of injustice. They are no less important simply because they receive less attention. It mattered to me to hear those stories and allow unfamiliar forms of suffering to find a place within me. Equally important was seeing every people, every community, and every lived experience given a voice. At a time when suffering is so often measured by its visibility, this struck me as one of the conference’s greatest strengths.
Through these encounters, hatred came to mean something different to me. Not so much as a concept to understand theoretically, but as something that begins to take shape whenever we stop recognizing the other as a person and begin seeing them only through the pain they carry, or the pain they come to represent for us.
It also showed me another possibility: that dialogue can survive difference, disagreement, and the wounds we each carry.
Perhaps the opposite of hatred is not naïve harmony or the absence of conflict. Perhaps it is the willingness to remain in relationship even when the other unsettles us, hurts us, or challenges our deepest convictions. It is the decision to keep thinking precisely when certainty would be easier.
This is what I am taking home from Toronto. More than any presentation, I am taking with me the experience of an international community that continues to make room for the world’s suffering without giving up the effort to think together.
As a clinician, I return home reminded that our task is not to resolve conflict or offer quick answers, but to protect a space where difference, suffering, and complexity can remain in dialogue rather than turning into exclusion.
Perhaps this is one of the most valuable contributions relational psychoanalysis can offer today: to continue creating places where what divides us can become an opportunity for encounter, dialogue, and thought.
Alice Sommatis, Psy.D.
Chieti, Italy
Email Alice Sommatis
Toronto Conference Reflections:
The Capacity to Hate – Après Coup – Rina Lazar
Candidates Committee – Ashleigh Ide
The Willingness to Remain in Relationship – Alice Sommatis
Child, Adolescent & Parent Committee – Sara Biondi & Rodolfo Pérez Sánchez
Stirrings – Jamie McMillan