Dear Colleagues,
What a pleasure it was to see, meet, and reunite with so many of you at our Twentieth IARPP Conference in Mérida, Mexico two months ago. Nearly 300 IARPP members came from all over the world, representing 19 countries – including 40 or so enthusiastic Méridianos attending their first international conference – to bring our collective theoretical, clinical, intellectual, historical, cultural, humanistic and gustatory attention to the project of thematizing “The Quest for Belonging and the Co-Creation of a Therapeutic Home” in the homeland of the ancient Maya civilization.
The conference’s dual concerns of Home and Belonging offered quite an elastic theme with a seemingly limitless array of interpretive possibilities. This might have produced an intellectually diluted or cacophonous collection of papers, yet instead I found the kaleidoscopic unfolding of the conference materials to be enriching and embracing, their subject matter ranging generatively from individual cases to considerations of groups of people to meditations on all humanity and our non-human environments.
We encountered psychological states along a continuum from the secure base of belonging, to the grievous affront, insult, and trauma of invasion or expulsion from one’s home. We apprehended the toxic nourishment of some family homes which both sustain and corrupt, and we reckoned with the realization that much of what we thought about home may have always been a kind of fantasy.
We contemplated dwelling places that have been with us for centuries, like the Mayan ruins, and remnants of Fascist architecture still extant in Italy which today stand as a warning of what could yet again be; we also considered allegedly temporary structures like refugee camps as well as the brief installation of a co-created play tent. We were given many opportunities to reflect upon the complexities of our own homes – those from which we’ve come; those we create for ourselves, our families, and our communities; those we co-create with our patients; those we construct within our professional communities, including IARPP itself; and the increasingly precarious home, Mother Earth, on which we all variably live.
And we shared in the many delights offered by our home away from home, Mérida, Mexico, which the gracious hosts of our Conference Committee and their many local emissaries did so much to show off to excellent advantage. I was grateful for the whole experience, and I was invigorated by the many ways the conference impacted my clinical work in the week/s following.
Today, from the significant heat of a midsummer New York morning, I’m pleased to share with you: 1) a letter from our President; 2) a mosaic of conference impressions gathered from seven members who attended in person and one who joined us remotely; and 3) a number of updates from various IARPP committees.
Until next time,
Matt Aibel
Editor, The IARPP Bulletin
Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York, NY, USA
Email Matt Aibel
