Newsletter
February 2003 www.eacnet.org
_______________________________________________________________
In this edition
REPORT OF THE JOINT by
Stewart Wilson
EAC/COSCA Conference Honorary
Secretary EAC
Edinburgh 2002
REPORT OF THE JOINT
CONFERENCE HELD IN
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND by
Patricia Kennedy
2002 Member
Executive Council IAC
of
the International Association
for
Counselling and the
New
Zealand Association
for
Counselling
PRIVATE LINES
by
Mika Haritos-Fatouros
President
EAC
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
”THE NEWNESS THAT WAS
IN EVERY STALE THING.” -
Archetypal Inheritance and
the Irish Psyche. by
Reamonn O’Donnchadha
Psychotherapist
Author
“The Confident Child”
University
Lecturer teaching
counselling
and psychotherapy on
the
graduate programme of Dublin
Business
School
________________________________________________________________
WHO’S
WHO IN EAC 2002-2003
OFFICE BEARERS NATIONAL
REPRESENTATIVES
Mika Haritos
Fatouros |
President
|
Elsa
Bell |
UK |
| Jenny Anagnostopoulos
|
Secretary |
Colin Kirkwood |
Scotland |
| Ann Lindsay |
Vice President |
Marcel Fabriek |
Netherlands |
| Aldo Dinacci |
Treasurer |
Ann Frey |
Ireland |
| Stewart Wilson |
Hon. Secretary |
Silvia Raimondi |
Italy |
| |
|
Galina Makarova |
Russia |
| |
|
Chrysoula Yarilaki
|
Greece |
________________________________________________________________
HOW TO CONTACT EAC
PO Box 78017 Phone/Fax
E-mail
Web
Ag. Dimitrios
17310 003010
975 60 47 eac@hol.gr
Athens
GREECE www.eacnet.org.uk
________________________________________________________________
REPORT OF THE JOINT EAC/COSCA Conference Edinburgh
2002
The joint EAC/COSCA Conference held in Edinburgh
on 20/21 September 2002 “Erogenous Zones,
Forbidden Zones - Where Counselling Fears
to Tread” attracted around one hundred delegates
each day. Unfortunately due to difficulties
with publicity etc. EAC members present were
fewer in number than the Conference organisers
had hoped, however those who travelled to
Scotland found the event useful and stimulating.
There was an atmosphere of excitement throughout
the 3 days of the Research Conference and
the Joint Conference with a constant “Buzz”
of conversation, networking and debate. Fine
weather, the scenic backdrop of Edinburgh
University and a great deal of energy amongst
the Conference delegates made this an outstanding
event.
The EAC/COSCA Conference was preceded by a
joint Research Conference held by COSCA and
the University of Abertay Dundee on 19 September,
which opened with a presentation on the “Psychological
Origins of Institutionalised Torture” given
by the President of EAC, Professor Mika Haritos
Fatouros. This created an immense impact
on the conference delegates, being quite the
most powerful Conference opening ever attended
by the writer. Over the remainder of
the day papers were presented on a broad range
of research issues including the provision
of voluntary counselling in Scotland and how
to manage research which doesn¹t work
out!
The joint Conference which followed, included
keynote talks with titles as diverse as “Erotics
and Ethics; The Dilemmas of Passion
For The Therapeutic Couple”, “Statutory Regulation
of Counselling and Psychotherapy - Corset
or Liberty Bodice?” with workshops dealing
with a wide range of issues including sexual
abuse in therapy, working with gay and lesbian
couples and sexual addiction.
EAC held its 9th Annual General Meeting which
was well attended and painted a picture of
stronger finances, organisational development
and membership growth which bodes well for
the future of our important organisation.
Stewart Wilson
Honorary Secretary EAC
REPORT OF THE JOINT CONFERENCE HELD IN
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND 2002
of
the International Association for Counselling
and
the New Zealand Association for Counselling
The theme of the Conference was “Counselling
in the New Millennium Facing Differences:
Respectful Practice.”
The opening ceremony which incorporated a
traditional Maori welcome set the note for
the entire conference. A strong sense
of the past and the early roots of counselling
coloured the entire proceedings. The
openness and friendliness of the hosts fostered
a constant buzz of interest among the 350
(approx.) attendees. The standard of
the keynote speakers was high e.g. Jeffrey
A Kottler (Bad Therapy: learning from our
failures) of California State University,
Robert A. Neimeyer (a new paradigm of bereavement
counselling), University of Memphis, Margo
Rivera (gay relationships) from Canada, Tim
Bond (Ethics and Restorative Justice) of Bristol
University, to name just a few. The
large number of workshops explored the theme
of differences in race, age and colour. There
were also at least two that explored spirituality
and counselling, a subject of growing interest
worldwide. As a member of the Executive
Council of the IAC, I led a global connecting
group on the theme of Relationships. The
group of 15-17 met each day of the Conference.
Counselling theory and practice in couple
work was demonstrated to be of a uniform standard
wordwide. A lacuna emerged in the training
of sex therapists. Literature was promised
and since despatched between members of the
group. This is one more demonstration
of the value of global connecting groups at
international conferences.
The theme of Restorative Justice was driven
mainly by the expressed need of New Zealanders
to redress the inequalities in their society
due to the displacement of the native Maori
in the time of colonisation. It was
very impressive to see the honour given to
the native culture.
Enormous sums are being invested in educational
programmes in order to re-empower the Maori
people. Land, which was held communally
anyway, cannot be given back. Now a
deprived but once powerful people are being
enabled to take their rightful place in society.
A large group attended the Conference
from Samoa and from the Fiji Islands where
similar inequalities are expressed.
The International Association for Counselling,
minimally grant aided by UNESCO and the WHO,
concentrates on strengthening the profession
of counselling worldwide. It is particularly
interested in supporting the establishment
of counselling in the third world and in former
Eastern Block countries. For example,
this year, as well as co-hosting the NZ Conference,
this year it brought together, in Kenya, 120
counsellors from a number of African countries.
The first pan-African Association for
counselling was set up. Training in
counselling programmes are going ahead in
Chile, Kenya, Korea and Sri Lanka.
Patricia Kennedy
Member Executive Council IAC
PRIVATE LINES
- by MiKA HARITOS-FATOUROS - PRESIDENT
EAC
Mika Haritos-Fatouros is professor emeritus
of Psychology of the Aristotle University
of Thessalonika, Greece and is former Dean
of the School of Philosophy of the same University.
She was born in Athens and educated
in London University. She trained in
Cognitive-Behavioural Psychotherapy at the
Departments of Psychiatry, Oxford and London.
She is former president of the Scientific
Committee of the Greek National Observatory
for the Rights of Children and former member
of the Executive of the International Association
of Counselling. She is president of
the Committee for the National License of
Psychologists, Consulting Body to the Minister
of Health. She is active in the women's
movement and now president of the Scientific
Committee of the National Centre for Research
on Equality Issues. She is president
of the Greek Association of Research and Therapy
and a member of Amnesty International.
She has been working and lecturing at the
USA, Europe and Australia. Her publications
include books, articles and technical papers
on: Psychotherapy and Counselling, on women,
and on refugee and migrant problems. She
is mostly known for her work on the making
of the state torturer. Her latest books
on the subject re : “The Psychological Origins
of Institutionalised Torture”, Routledge,
london, 2003. “Violence Workers” : (co-author
with M.K. Huggins and P.G. Zimbardo), the
University of California Press, 2002.
How do you see yourself?
Competent and overworked although i am
fairly free to do what I like.
What is your favourite book?
”The Oldest Dead White European Males”
by Bernard Nox, 1993.
What is your favourite film?
”Weathering Heights” with Sir Laurence
Olivier and the film “Amen” by C. Gavras.
Ways you relax?
Swimming with my goggles watching the
fish in the calm waters of the Aegean sea
on my island home ŒPeristera¹ and
afternoon siestas.
What makes you angry?
The ways politicians around the world
deceive us.
What makes you sad?
The prospect of a new war. The killing
and abuse of children.
What would you do if you won a million
euros?
I would buy a small boat and go around
the Aegean islands with a company of good
friends.
What would it surprise people to know about
you?
I think I must have been a dyslectic child
and was more than once expelled from school
for being very naughty.
If you weren¹t doing what you are
doing what other profession would you have?
I would have been a historian or a biologist.
What other question would you add to this
list?
Hobbies! Gardening, but I never
have time to do it; walking on hills
around Athens and Thessalonika.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS....
JOINT
IAC/EAC CONFERENCE
THEME
: “A World of Change - A
World in Crisis”
-
The Counsellor and Social Responsibility
International
Conference Centre Geneva,
Switzerland
April
14 - 17, 2003
For further details on information and registration
visit IAC website : www.iac-irtac.org
“THE
NEWNESS THAT WAS IN EVERY STALE THING.”
Patrick
Kavanagh
Archetypal
Inheritance and the Irish Psyche.
By : Reamonn O¹Donnchadha
Introduction
The notion of archetypes and the inherited
potential to respond in a certain way to particular
environmental situations was part of the work
of Carl Jung. He posits the notion that
certain potentialities for behaviour exist
in the unconscious of the person to be activated
in certain circumstances. These he designated
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious and
he further suggested that these universalistic
traits were the result of testing during the
life of the individual, selection and transmission
on the basis that they were found to be successful.
A case of “...if it works for me then
I want it to work for those who come after
me”. This paper examines the idea of
archetypal transmission of behaviours, attitudes
and psychological traits in the context of
the Irish psyche. I take the term Irish
Psyche to mean, not necessarily some static
measurable empirical entity but rather to
the concept which Kenny (1985) refers to as
“...a fluid evolving process within which
the individual behaves and exists...” and
moves to growth. The paper proposes
the idea that the collective psyche of the
Irish can be seen within the same conceptual
framework as the idea of the individual psyche.
The writer takes the view that the psychic
makeup, the psychopathologies and in particular
the unconscious aspects of the Irish psyche,
as exhibited by the nation collectively, can
be addressed in the same way as if they were
to be found in a particular individual.
I will therefore address the issues on the
basis of the following positions: that the
collective psyche of the country, Ireland,
is a holistic psychical entity and that whatever
happens in one area of the psyche influences
what happens in all other areas. This
notion of intra psychic influence applies
over time as well as over space.
That the traumas of history had effects, collective
and individual, which were experienced, assimilated
into the unconscious of our ancestors and
then transmitted to the following generations.
That it is only the conscious constellation
and examination of the unconsciously transmitted
psychic contents that can prevent them from
being passed on to be unconsciously and unquestioningly
assimilated and by the next generation.
In addressing the issue of the archetypal
transmission of the trauma involved in domination,
invasion, oppression, resistance and famine,
it is inescapable that it would be almost
impossible to undo the effects of these experiences,
and also that there are negative as well as
positive inheritances.
The original constellation of these behaviours
were in the interests of the survival of both
the individual and the collective, and so
they were viewed as being “successful” behaviours
and therefore both worthy of transmission
and unnecessary to question.
Invasion
At the conscious personal level when an invasion
takes place it has many effects. Initially
there is the instinct to resist, to fight,
to take on the invader, or to run away. The
decision to fight or fly is probably more
instinctive and inherited and perhaps unconscious,
than it is a conscious decision. Where
the invasion is successfully repelled and
defeated the effects are increased confidence,
a new sense of worth and enhanced self esteem.
But where the invasion succeeds in taking
over the person/country a different scenario
presents itself. Invasion of the person
as in robbery, break-in or rape is a brutalisation
of the sacred space of the individual and
is experienced as complete spiritual annihilation.
It engenders feelings of shame, powerlessness,
subservience and usually repressed anger.
Invasion of a country has the same effects,
but the consequences are experienced at both
the individual and the collective level. In
other words there are national collective
and universalistic feelings of shame, inferiority,
powerlessness and subservience, in addition
to the feelings experienced by each individual.
In both cases this constellates at an overt
conscious level as a passivity, a superficial
compliance and unquestioning obedience, which
masks an unconscious resentment, unhappiness
and depression. The invasion of a country
is akin to the total take-over of the person
which occurs where there is idealisation between
child and mother, or total submergence of
the young child by the brutal father. In
short the personality, the psyche of the “victim”
is taken over by the emotional and psychological
dominance of the invader. The anger
and resentment which are naturally generated
by the invasion, the need to fight back, the
instinctual and necessary need for revenge
are consigned to the unconscious. This
repression of the more healthy response to
stand up for oneself, means that there is
a permanent psychopathological matrix of depression,
anger and resentment which underlies and connects
to all our conscious world and the way in
which we live in that world. As long
as this remains bubbling under the surface,
its effects are being constellated in the
shadow of the psyche. Just as with the
person who is dominated by the controlling
parent, the collective survival message is
transmitted as being best served through the
passivity, compliance and emotional subservience.
The survival message, of “keep your
head down”, “do what you’re told”, “don’t
question authority” is at once in conflict
with and contaminated by the unconscious reality
within.
Plantation
The plantation/eviction archetype is built
on and transmitted through the notion of separation.
The connection of the person to the
earth and the sense of connectedness which
is essential to this, is broken when plantation
is forced. It is a forced uprooting
of the individual, and which carries all the
force and numinosity of a deep emotional trauma.
The uprooting of the person at the individual
level represents a tearing away from the mother
and has the same effect as the forced separation
of mother and child as in the separation suffered
by aboriginal children in Australia, children
who are forcibly taken from parents. The
“plantation
uprooting archetype” has traumatic effects
because of the way in which it combines eviction,
uprooting with replacement and loss of identity.
Not only is the uprooting archetype constellated
in the separation trauma but it is added to
by the sight of a replacement in the position
of authority once occupied by the Irish. As
part of the enforced survival strategy, the
child attaches itself closely to the abusive
mother, both to avoid more abuse and to somehow
satisfy its nurturant needs.
Famine
The failure to produce, the failure to look
after oneself and ones dependants, the failure
to provide, generates feelings of inadequacy,
shame and uselessness. It represents
a failure of the masculine principle and results
in a complete loss of self-respect, destroys
any sense of self reliance and generative
pride. This attack on the masculine
need to produce led to a diminishment of the
notion of masculinity and a negativing of
masculine traits.
One of the most immediate and damaging reactions
to the trauma of the famine was the silence
(Herman 1992) and the repression of any form
of expression of feeling. This “necessary”
silence allows the victim the time and space
to come to terms with what is happening and
in the interests of survival to take on the
new role of compliant. But in turning
this “...retreat into silence and withdrawal,”
(Antze and Lambeck 1996) into a survival mechanism,
which is valued and therefore transmitted
to the next generation, we are turning these
characteristics into a valued way of being.
It is the silence and the guilt which
is being transmitted rather than the experiential
memory, or the positive ways of being which
preceded the trauma.
Domination
Peck (2000), suggests that prolonged military,
political and cultural domination creates
“...patterns of helplessness and passivity...”,
which in turn influence the way in which the
individual and the collective engage with
their environment. Domination is the
political equivalent of bullying and has the
effect not only of generating passivity and
helplessness, it leads to a culture of learned
helplessness, where it is perceived as being
a normal, even a desirable way to gain influence
over one’s environment. Domination of
the individual by a perceived more powerful
and apparently superior outsider leads to
not only powerlessness and passivity as perceived
legitimate responses, but also to loss of
esteem in relation to what is considered to
be one¹s own already existing life systems.
Domination implies superiority, it implies
diminishment of the existing value systems,
and it carries both implicitly and explicitly
the intention of extinguishing the existing
system, be it in the individual or in the
collective.
The juxtaposition of the words “subduing”
and “civilising” (Hume) in recorded history
suggests that they are one and the same thing
and carries an implicit diminishment of the
act of resistance and rebellion. to
go underground psychologically as Kenny (1985)
says a form of ...”constriction...”, where
the person who is faced with unsurmountable
environmental situations will reduce the range
of environmental experiences in an attempt
to find a way of coping. In other words
the solution is to go underground, to engage
in a form of personal withdrawal into the
self and away from contact with the environment.
If we transpose this personal withdrawal
and examine the effects of a national constriction,
a withdrawal to the collective unconscious
we see that consciousness becomes a place
to be avoided and unconsciousness a place
of refuge and survival.
Events such as 1798, the Battle of Kinsale,
the sacking of Drogheda never passed into
history because they never passed out of the
inherited experience and knowing of the people.
The ancestry of the Irish psyche is
not recorded history, but experienced and
remembered emotionally tinged traumas. The
recording of history in words is in some way
a weakening and a dilution of the reality
and the experience. The experiential
dimension of our psychic ancestry cannot be
expressed through the physical recording of
events. The true memory of where we
have come from is in the “now recall” of what
I know and is encapsulated in the difference
between words and experience, between knowledge
and knowing. Recorded history is akin
to an event stripped of all its emotional
attachments. The point here is that
what is passed on is the truth as it is now,
what is written is the truth as it was then.
An aspect of all this is the way in which
current experience infuses our experience
of recovered memory. The resistance
in Irish society to neat categorisation, the
“it’s only wrong if you’re caught” mentality
and our ambivalence to authority are examples
of how current attitudes are infused with
the emotional memory of injustice.
The recent emergence of ramps on many of our
urban roads, as well as the “points system”
of penalising drivers who break the law are
examples of how it is only if we have that
we will obey the authority.
The constellation of the isolation archetype
in the recent sacking of a school principal,
the sending home of Roy Keane from the World
Cup, sending young women abroad for abortions,
all have echoes of the expulsion of St. Colmcille
for writing a book. The notion that
if we cannot see it, it is not there and does
not require attention, the repression of the
shadow was seen in the ability of the southern
unconscious part of the psyche to ignore the
violence in the northern conscious part. The
essential link between the conscious and the
unconscious is surely exemplified by the lessening
of violence in the north and the concomitant
upsurge in violence in the south.
References
Caruth,Cathy,(1995) Trauma: Explorations in
Memory. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins
University Press.
Herman Judith(1992) Trauma and Recovery.New
York:Basic Books
Kenny Vincent(1985) ŒThe Post Colonial
Personality¹, Crane Bag,No.9
Kirby,P.,Gibbons,L.,and Cronin,M.,(Eds)(2002)
Reinventing Ireland
London:Pluto Press
Peck,Deborah(2000) An Gorta Mor: The Great
Famine and its Aftermath, doctoral dissertation,
Massachusetts Professional School of Psychology
A NOTE FROM THE EAC SECRETARY...
Dear Member,
My name is Jenny Anagnostopoulos and I have
taken up the post of Secretary of EAC since
January 2002.
I am in the process of compiling and recording
a complete updated list of EAC members. It
would be most helpful if you and/or the National
Associations could let me know of any changes
of name and address of existing member(s)
and any new members who wish to join EAC.
Thank you for your cooperation!
Greetings!
Jenny
