Group Analytic Society (London) presents the
2011 Symposium

Keynote Speakers


Biographies of Keynote Plenary Speakers and Large Group Convenors



E. James Anthony, M.D., D.P.M. (born 1916) was the co-author, with S. H. Foulkes of Group Psychotherapy: The Psycho-Analytic Approach in 1957, re-issued in 1965, reprinted in 1967, 1968 by Penguin and subsequently by Karnac. It remains one of the defining, most influential texts in the field.

He began his career as a child psychotherapist and psychiatrist in London where he also trained as a psychoanalyst. He studied child development under Piaget and, after leaving the Maudsley Hospital, occupied the Ittleson Chair of Child Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis. He is the author of pioneering books and papers on group analysis, psychoanalysis and child psychiatry. His collaboration with Foulkes, who became his training analyst, began at Northfield Hospital during World War II. He joined Foulkes to become a Founder Member of the Group Analytic Society in 1952 and delivered the Second Foulkes Lecture in 1976.

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Justice Albie Sachs was formerly Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He is the author of The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966); The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (1990); and The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law (2009). His career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen, when he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1953. The bulk of his work as an advocate involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence. He himself was raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement and eventually placed in solitary confinement without trial for two prolonged spells of detention. In 1966 he went into exile.

After spending eleven years studying and teaching law in England he worked for a further eleven years in Mozambique as law professor and legal researcher. In 1988 he was blown up by a bomb - placed in his car in Maputo by South African security agents - and lost an arm and the sight of an eye.

During the 1980s working closely with Oliver Tambo, leader of the ANC in exile, he helped draft the organisation's Code of Conduct, as well as its statutes. After recovering from the bomb he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. In 1990 he returned home and, as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the ANC, took an active part in the negotiations that led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994 he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court. In addition to his work on the Court, he has travelled to many countries sharing South African experience in healing divided societies. He has also been engaged in the sphere of art and architecture, and played an active role in the development of the Constitutional Court building and its art collection on the site of the Old Fort Prison in Johannesburg.

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Gwen Adshead is a forensic psychiatrist, group analyst and psychotherapist who has worked at Broadmoor Hospital as a consultant forensic psychotherapist for the last ten years. She trained at St. Bartholemew's and St George's Hospitals, and at the Institute of Psychiatry and Institute of Group Analysis. Her main areas of interest are the attachment histories of those who hurt others; moral reasoning and ethics in mental health practice; and psychological therapies for people with personality disorders.

Her paper will describe the work of a group analyst in long-term residential secure care providing psychodynamic psychotherapy to people who have committed serious acts of violence. She will explore their identity as antisocial; the role of therapy as a pro-social process, and the challenges to this process. She will look, in particular, at the language of people who live an excluded life drawing on material from different therapeutic groups in the hospital.

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Robi Friedman is in private psychotherapy practice in Haifa, Israel. He is Chairman of the Israel Institute of Group Analysis, former President, Israel Association for Group Psychotherapy and former Head of the Counselling Centre, Technion, Haifa University. He is Joint Director (with Lord John Alderdice & Dr. Vamik Volkan) of IDI - International Dialogue Initiative - for Dialogue between Muslim & Western Societies. Editor (with Malcolm Pines and Claudio Neri), Dreams in Group Psychotherapy (2002)

His paper will address the unconscious in group therapy and the place of dreams in particular, for the benefits this can yield in the creative resolution of conflicts at the personal and political levels. He explores reflexive questioning in groups - what Foulkes called 'the required fundamental turn of mind' (1964) - that leads to growth and change. And he applies this enquiry to both the indication system he is developing for individual and group therapy, based on the understanding of Relation Disorders; and to the use of group analysis as a tool for conflict resolution in the political arena.

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Elisabeth Rohr is Professor for Intercultural Education at the Philipps University, Marburg, Germany. She is a group analyst engaged in profit- and non-profit, national and international organisations. Her main research topics are: Christian Fundamentalism in Latin America; identity conflicts of female, adolescent migrants in Germany; female body modifications; and clinical supervision. She has established a group analytic supervision training in Guatemala over the last ten years.

Her paper will describe the transformation of a culture of conflict into a culture of recognition in Guatemala. She will discuss the challenges involved in developing a group programme in a post-conflict society still divided by deep scars in its social fabric left by the aftermath of war. Groups cater for large numbers of orphans, war-widows, injured and displaced families. Dealing with the horrors of the past through indigenous organisations inevitably replicates some of these divisions in tensions amongst the workers. Supervision of the group workers allows the sharing of anxieties, doubts and differences in a protected space, re-establishing trust and opening perspective for a more constructive way of solving conflicts.

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Molyn Leszcz is Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Mount Sinai Hospital, Professor and Head of the Group Psychotherapy, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto. His academic and clinical work has focused on broadening the application of psychotherapy within psychiatry. He co-authored with Irvin Yalom, the 5th. Edition of The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (2005). He co-chaired the Science to Services Task Force of the American Group Psychotherapy Association leading to the recent publication of Clinical Practice Guidelines for Group Psychotherapy for which he received the Alonso Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy. He has been awarded Fellowships by the Canadian and American Group Psychotherapy Associations.

His paper will offer relevant and accessible approaches to evidence-based practice in group psychotherapy. The contemporary demand that psychotherapies be evidence-based has generated concern and resistance about the imposition of models and undervaluing of traditional and well-practiced approaches. The presentation explores therapeutic groups and their evaluation in mental health practice; in their use as an adjunct to treatments for breast cancer; and in hospital responses to pandemic threat and other situations of extreme stress.

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LARGE GROUP CONVENORS
Bryan Boswood was a Training Analyst at the Institute of Group Analysis, London and was its Chair, 1984 - 1988. He has been in practice at the student counselling service for London University and then at the Group Analytic Practice for many years. He has been involved in group-analytic training in London, Oslo, Israel and, more recently, at the Turvey Centre for Group Psychotherapy and Group Analysis South West in the UK. He is a former President of the Group Analytic Society, 1990 - 1996.

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Margit G. Jørgensen MD is a member and former teacher at the Institute of Group Analysis, Kobenhavn, Denmark. She worked for many years as a chief psychiatrist in the Danish NHS and is now in private practice. She is a training analyst at the Danish Psychoanalytic Society and a full member of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

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