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The walls within: working with defenses against otherness

Online Conference 5-11 July 2021

AM24-PP15-QC

Parallel Papers Session 3
Saturday 6 July 11.00pm-12.15 pm, EEST
Paper Code: PP15

CE Credits Available

Systems-Psychodynamic Guerilla Style within Development of the Belgrade Koinonia-Art Training in the Traumatized Psycho-Social Fields with Paradigm Clashes.

Presenter: Marina Mojović
Moderator: Rob Ryan

Abstract
The Belgrade Koinonia-Art Training is conceived during the “Horrible Nineties” of the Destruction of ex-Yugoslavia with initial Reflective Citizens (RC) groups in grassroots style at the margins of Peace Protests and Anti-communistic Revolution. Initiation of the Belgrade Systems-Psychodynamic Organizational Consultancy Training (SPOC) happened in 2003 with the Introductory Workshop co-convened with ISPSO members, Larry Gould (USA), Rina Bar Levi (Israel) and Branka Pecotić, (UK/Serbia), organized by Marina Mojović and Zaven Đorđević. The chosen venue was the Sailing Boat Club on the Belgrade River Sava. It seems now, that from the very beginning there were some “un-thought known” related to the necessity of learning/co-creating sorts of joint crew skills like in sailing for balancing huge complexities in the traumatized psycho-social fields with unpredictable “waves and storms”. Thus, continuous adaptation, acquiring knowledge and skills through group and social creativity, were knit & weaved into layers of the emerging new training organization. Consultancy at the beginning with David Armstrong and Malcolm Pines were of invaluable significance, as were later collaborations with colleagues from ISPSO (Angela Eden, James Krantz, Martin Ringer, and many others), OPUS, GASi, IAGP, EFPP and local affiliations.

In the European region of the Balkans with its long and continuous cultural-historical clashes between the East and West Civilizations, Empires’ power-wars for domination never giving up, the social-political and organizational processes had inevitably to manifest extreme turbulence throughout centuries. Could such fine area as is systems-psychodynamic ever survive so extreme disruptions in the fields? What vehicles to take or build for the journey?

Leader, trusting her psycho-analytic and group-analytic trainings, her therapeutic community, group relations and operative groups’ (Pichon Riviere) work, as well as, eighteen years of directing “London Link” NGO with Belgrade Klein/Bion Study group led by Pecotić, kept searching for refinement of co-work between sibling fields for Koinonia-Art. Even the appeal for “Revisiting Northfield”, appearing at one Belgrade conference, materialized as real workshop in the old war hospital in Birmingham, helped. RC Method & Community, as a sort of scout infantries, continued discovering skills, bringing them “home” to the major SPOC

Training. Being well anchored at Group Analytic Society Belgrade enabled certain stability. Cooperation with other associations, local and international, was essential in continuous learning. So far over two hundred trainees participated in the major SPOC training. Other Training branches developed: social dreaming hosting, RC hosting, conveners of systems-psychodynamic groups, conductors of large and groups, applied therapeutic & learning community.

Can aspects of guerilla style be allowed and helpful for organizational development, when facing pervasive psycho-social and war turmoil? Is it possible to reach good-enough communicative vertex, optimizing the rhythms for integration of variety of theory and practice in such circumstances, protecting values and virtues of our professional fields, thus, without dirtying colors or any bad boundary violations? Researching Northfield has always been a source of encouragement. Pioneering work of Pichon Riviere, Post-Bionian Field Theory Developments (as Morgan Jones and Mojović presented at ISPSO Moscow) and Bridger’s work have special meaning in these sensitive transitional processes for Koinonia-Art Training.

Biographical Summary

Marina Mojović MA, MD, psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, group analyst, and organizational consultant in Serbia, founder of the Reflective Citizens Koinonia Method (RC) of working with citizens groups and International Reflective Citizens since 2020) with branches spreading in several countries. She is a full member of the of the IAGP , ISPSO, GASi. In Group Analytic Society-Belgrade she is training group analyst, supervisor, the founder of its Section and Training in ‘Psychoanalytic and Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Institutions, Organizations and Society’ – Koinonia-Art Training, and a co-founder of the Section for ‘Large and Median Groups’. She also founded the RC Training, Social Dreaming Training, develops the Applied and Traveling RC, and other projects of exploring the Social Unconscious in Serbia and abroad. Presents, and publishes internationally, conceptualized ‘social-psychic-retreats’, ‘conception trauma’ of organizations and societies, involved in the post-Bionian Field Theory Development projects.


References

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