Le rouge et le noir:
un certain hommage ā l’amour
Pain, destruction and death accompany one man’s destiny from which he apparently only hardly escapes (remember the famous quotation of the chorus in Sofokles’ Edipus). The traumatic me-mory may be transmitted afterwards from generation to generation. What can be done?In London a part of the global community of group psychotherapists of the IAGP - 800 people, at least those who could afford economically to attend - dedicated a one week conference on this subject. Starting with Moreno`s famous Who shall survive? questions were raised like how can therapy deliver our groups and us from the fatal repetition of traumatic events, which kind of therapeutic interventions are
able to restore the uniqueness and dignity of a human being after the impact of torture and unthinkable cruelties on it, is there release for our children and hope to stop the transgenerational chaining of trauma? The attempts to answer were given - 1. by the spirit of encounter bridging differences between colleagues from a diversity of cultures, approaches and personal backgrounds in a truly morenian way - 2. by sharing rich professional competence and personal experience as the basic therapeutic strategy itself and as a self healing project for those who are normally supposed to contain and integrate the revealed traumata - 3. by addressing first
security, than mutual validation, than rewriting trauma experiences including feelings of guilt and shame as the basic therapeutic sequence on individual level - 4. by acknowledging the long lasting dimension of treatment and the reinforcement of hope in a dialectical way.
Therapy covers only a small part of the rehabilitation process. But no healing will be achieved without love and if red is the colour of the blood it is also true that it targets as well on l’amour. Sigmund Freud wrote in his last years about his hope that Eros were stronger than Thanatos, Moreno on the other hand augured that the total amount of positive energy might overcome the total amount of negative energy in the universe. And Malcolm Pines added that we need poems to survive. Let’s say poems of love. And let’s hope so together.
Jörg Burmeister