One group’s experience in unspoken territory.
This book was published two years on from 7 October 2023, by a group of twelve child psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists who all trained at the Tavistock Clinic (including The Baltint Consultancy’s Dr Sarah Wynick). It follows their fortnightly meetings to discuss the insurmountable difficulties of the Palestine-Israel conflict and their feelings about the unfolding catastrophe.
How will the world look back on this? Could it have been prevented? What can we say? Of course, they haven't produced answers, but they pose questions and try to examine as honestly as possible how these events affect both victims and aggressors; and what it told them about themselves and about history and politics in the world today. Is it useful to discuss such matters in a group - using the methodology they were taught at the Tavistock? Can minds be changed?
Some contributors to this thought-provoking anthology come from Jewish or Palestinian heritage, others from different but divided and conflicted backgrounds. They have connections with history going back to the Balfour Declaration and to the Holocaust: a mother who lived through Kristallnacht and came to England on the Kindertransport; a father with shrapnel injuries from a grenade in Jaffa exiled in the Nakba. Individually and personally they also reflect on their participation in the group process. They express their complex feelings and evolving reactions through poems and essays, family memories, historical reminders and philosophical arguments. This courageous, far-reaching collection urges us all in the direction of sense and empathy, and away from polarisation, and easy assumptions.
Book Launch
12 November
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm (UK time)
