Dear Colleagues,
Recently, many voices and strong emotions have emerged in our community. They concern the situation in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the statements and discussions within EAGT around these conflicts, and also the decision of the Gestalt Institute of Ireland not to attend the conference in Dubrovnik. We want to respond to them openly.
Before turning to the organisational questions, we want to speak about people. The suffering caused by war touches many of us very personally, whether through the war in Ukraine, the situation in Gaza, or other conflicts that have affected our communities. Among our members are people for whom these are not subjects of debate, but matters of family, community and existence. We see this pain and do not want to reduce it to a dispute over documents.
Because much uncertainty has arisen among members around this matter, we want first to clarify the process. The statement on Gaza was published by the HR&SR Committee on its own behalf. At the beginning of the year, a group of members addressed the community in an open letter calling for an official EAGT position. The President of EAGT responded to this letter in his commentary “On responsibility, plurality, and our role as EAGT”. Both texts became the basis for the conversation at the March GMM, to which we devoted an entire afternoon. Time for this conversation had been planned before the letters appeared. It was a long and difficult conversation. It showed how delicate this issue is and how deeply different the experiences, perspectives and convictions within our community are. It also showed something important: when we spoke mainly at the level of positions and declarations, we became divided. When we moved towards the lived experience of war and suffering, we were able to meet as people.
We also want to clarify why the Committee’s statement did not become an EAGT statement. A clear majority of the General Board did not support the statement in this form, and it therefore could not be presented as the voice of the whole organisation. Underlying this decision was the conviction that organisational responsibility is not identical with individual moral expression. An individual therapist, a training institute or a local community may take a clear political stance. EAGT represents multiplicity: people living and working in very different geopolitical, historical and existential realities. A declaration that for some members is an obvious moral duty would, for others, mean that the organisation was speaking against them. In such a situation, it could not legitimately be presented as the voice of all of us. The disagreement within the General Board was not about recognising human suffering, but about the form of the statement. The same criterion answers the question about Ukraine: that statement was formulated in a way that members of the General Board could accept as a shared voice. Later, however, EAGT withdrew its publication, because it carried serious risks for our colleagues and institutes in Russia, including the possibility that their work could no longer continue. That experience taught us that organisational responsibility requires looking at the consequences of our actions for people in every part of our field. Organisational restraint is not moral indifference.
On this matter our community is more deeply divided than on any other in recent years. For some of you, the Committee’s statement was too cautious and insufficient. For others, its language was unacceptable and made them question whether there was still a place for them in EAGT. We came close to losing part of our community. This shows how fragile our shared field is, and why the role of EAGT, as an organisation bringing together people with such different histories, is above all to maintain a structure capable of containing conflict without disintegration and of holding difference without demonisation. Our choice is to stand for the possibility of contact across difference.
We respect the decision of the Gestalt Institute of Ireland and receive it in the spirit in which it was written: as a boundary and a form of contact, not as rejection. We understand that for an Irish institute, questions of colonialism, occupation, displacement and self-determination carry particular historical significance and shape its field. The same is true across our community. Europe carries many historical wounds, and each of them shapes how we experience the conflicts of today. The invitation to a deeper encounter with difference is one we want to take up together with all our members.
The conference takes place in Dubrovnik, a city that itself carries the wounds of the war of the 1990s. It was designed as a space for encountering difference: between cultures, nationalities, views, people and emotions. Its aim is to create room for meeting and disagreement, dialogue and co-creation, tolerance and coexistence. The programme also includes formats such as Open Spaces and Home Groups, which allow participants to explore differences, tensions and difficult topics together through dialogue and contact.
We do not expect that we will all agree, nor that the conference will resolve the differences between us. We do hope, however, that Dubrovnik will be a place where we do not try to remove difference, but learn to be with it, and seek the level of meeting that we began to find in March. This year, “Bridges of Difference” is for us not only a title, but a practice we ourselves must take up.
EAGT Executive Committee:
Michał Lewandowski, Sofia Verulashvili, Olaf Zielke, Ien van Duijnhoven
