Abstract
More than 40 years ago, the first training group of the Institute of Group Analysis Heidelberg started their training with Ilse Seglow in London. However, the beginning of the training was overshadowed by a conflict, since the group did not know that the training should take place entirely in London. This paper tries to explore this conflict in the light of unconscious dynamics underlying the foundation of the institute. Ilse Seglow, a German exiled Jew and ex-communist, was the ‘spiritus rector’ of the institute and the facilitator of the first training group. Group processes are described, showing how the group as well as Ilse dealt with this situation, commemorating one of the charismatic, controversial and politically inspired, but mostly forgotten personalities of the group analytic community.
Keywords
The beginning in 1980
The 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute for Group Analysis, Heidelberg motivated the editors of the Institute’s journal to collect memories and to ask for papers, remembering and reflecting the social and psychological circumstances of the foundation. As members of the first training group, we were asked to submit a paper, telling our group’s story, which was special in many ways. We gladly picked up this opportunity in the hope of sorting out realities and phantasies of our group’s conflictive history.
The first training group of the Heidelberg Group Analytic Institute started with a rather unexpected surprise in September 1980. Shortly before our first meeting as a group, the Organizing Committee (OC) of the Institute informed us that the first, five-day block would not take place in Heidelberg, but in London. We were rather surprised, since nobody had ever mentioned anything about a training in London. However, at that time, we had no idea that this adventure would last four long years.
We were a group of ten candidates, four women and six men. A rather heterogeneous group of people: one psychologist, a non-medical practitioner, a teacher, several social workers, a nurse and two sociologists. This professional heterogeneity of the group was due to one of the progressive political goals of the Group Analytic Institute in Heidelberg. Up to this time, it was not possible to enter as a non-medical or non-psychological professional into any type of psychotherapeutic training. The institute in Heidelberg wanted to break through these politically established barriers and open up the field of psychotherapy for non-medical and non-psychological professionals. Therefore, the training was designed to attract professionals from social, educational, religious, political, medical and psychological fields of work. To accept professionals from these various professional backgrounds meant also, to waive the necessity of previous therapeutic experience. As a result, the majority of group members had no individual psychotherapeutic experience prior to entering the group analytic training.
This group of 10 participants stayed together throughout the four years of the training, despite all the difficulties that surfaced during the training. No one left the group and no new member was ever admitted. At the time, we did not think that this was a very unusual experience, even though we realized that this produced strong bonding dynamics and, simultaneously, equally strong dependencies and internal fight–flight moves (Bion, 1961). However, at the end, only half of the group’s members completed the training with a certificate and later worked as group analysts. Maybe this was a late symptom of this unusual ‘closed-shop-syndrome’, showing that even though all of us stayed, not all of us succeeded. Today, more than 40 years later, already three members 1 have died, among them Christiane Schlossarek. She was a group teaching analyst and for many years an active member on the board of the institute and died suddenly in 2017 under dramatic circumstances.
Starting the training in the London Centre for Psychotherapy
Before being admitted to the training, we had to pass through extensive individual interviews. Two members of the OC conducted these interviews. In September 1980, we finally flew to London to meet llse Seglow, our training analyst 2 . We had not met before as a group, nor did we know Ilse Seglow 3 .
Our first meeting took place at the London Centre for Psychotherapy (LCP), the renowned psychotherapy centre founded by Ilse Seglow in 1973 4 and led by her as clinical director until 1983, which was located in a majestic looking British brick building on 19 Fitzjohn’s Avenue, a street lined with old horse chestnut trees, near Swiss Cottage 5 . The centre was located just around the corner of the house where Freud had lived and close to the Anna Freud Institute, the Tavistock Clinic and the Institute of Group Analysis 6 .
The therapy rooms of the LCP could be reached either through the foyer of the building, or by a tiny elevator, which was added to the side of the building at Ilse’s instigation, since she had walking difficulties 7 . Many patients preferred the tiny lift as well, allowing them to reach the therapy rooms directly from the street, without having to walk through the foyer of the building.
The therapy room looked somehow worn out. There were old looking armchairs and the ambience seemed more like a storage room than a therapy room. Nevertheless, Ilse seemed at ease and at home here 8 . Soon after the first meeting, we moved into her private house on Goldhurst Terrace, a less feudal area, with small one-story brick houses, not far from Swiss Cottage tube station.
Already during this first block, the conflict about the location of our training escalated, because Ilse left no doubt that she never thought of ever coming to Heidelberg to run the group. We would therefore have to travel to London for four years, four times a year, each time for a whole week. We were completely in shock! We felt terribly deceived and betrayed by the OC in Heidelberg. There was rage and fury and the question, ‘who had lied?’ Throughout all this terrible turmoil of trying to come to terms with this new reality, Ilse stayed completely calm and finally proved to be a real magician. She waited patiently, listened to all our projections and phantasies about betrayal, lies, and finally asked very softly; ‘Well, what do you want: a VW or a Mercedes-Benz?’ Our raging fury ended abruptly, as if someone had jabbed a hole in a balloon and the conflict somehow miraculously dissolved into laughter. She was, as Hopper (2014) and many others pointed out, a charismatic personality. She herself said: ‘As a hysterical personality, I get an idea in my head, and then it happens out there. People tell me that I’m on the phone all the time, writing to people, twisting people’s arms. But that’s not how I experience it. I think of it and it just happens’ (Vernon, 2014: 100). This is exactly what we experienced. Even though discussions and complaints would come up occasionally, there was no doubt left—we would travel to London, even if this meant to leave small children at home for a week, pay much more for the training, but in the end, we accepted the new reality. However, there was a lot of underlying, grudging resentment beneath the surface for a long time.
For the time being Ilse had convinced us, with her extraordinary warm-heartedness and her undisguised affection, or should we say, ‘seduced’ us? The conflict was driven underground, but of course did not disappear. Without being able to formulate it at the time, we developed a specific defence and started to feel like the chosen ones, lucky to be with an extraordinary therapist who, at the age of 80, offered us all her professional wisdom. We benefited enormously from her. In the course of the group-analytic sessions, which initially took place daily from nine am to five pm, for five days, we sometimes had the impression that she had fallen asleep. The conversation in the group continued and then bang, she would open her eyes, say something and hit the ground with somnambulistic certainty and we sat there in complete amazement and admiration thinking, this is pure magic! Without doubt, we all were caught in a highly idealized transference relationship that did not allow us to think that she also might be responsible for this difficult situation and the ensuing conflict.
In retrospect, we are grateful and feel it is an immeasurable privilege and truly a luxury to have experienced and witnessed her comprehensive therapeutic skills and her ability to empathize. Ilse was quite self-aware of her unusual talents: ‘I think that my success as a therapist is my ability to feel, to identify with other people . . . I can fully identify with my patients . . . I can cry when they cry and, nevertheless, to hold them at a distance’ (Seglow, 2014: 15) 9 .
Most of her patients would agree with the first part of this statement, but rather disagree with the second part. She often established an intense closeness to patients and crossed therapeutic boundaries. This was one of her great weaknesses and within the psychoanalytic community considered an absolute transgression. These transgressions nourished doubts about her professional training and her ethical standards and were used to denounce and exclude her. In contrast, even Hopper (2014), who was once one of her patients, writes that she was inspirational in her therapeutic work and that she possessed extraordinary abilities to reach people through the power of her intuition and through the depth of her feelings. However, she could also be resentful, irritating and even aggressive 10 . We experienced the range of these transgressive motions in our group as well. However, this first magic experience with Ilse in our first training course shifted our conflict entirely to the OC. We wrote nasty letters to the OC, we felt cheated and betrayed. How was it possible that nobody had told us the truth about having to go to London to do the training?
The OC finally realized that appeasement was no longer enough and organized a large group meeting with a group therapist. The meeting was tense. Accusations, complaints and attacks filled the room and the OC tried to convince us that they knew nothing about Ilse’s decision. However, the aggressive dynamics of this confrontation and the conscious and unconscious implications for us as members of a group analytic training remained completely misunderstood. Immediately after the meeting, a vitreous opacity appeared in the eye of one group member and never disappeared again. No doubt, there was a blind spot within the group analytic training, tightly connected with Ilse and the OC. Something essential could not be seen, felt, perceived or acknowledged, much less explored. The majority of the members of the OC had been in therapy groups with Ilse. This was obviously the main reason why it was not possible to recognize our reality, because it would have meant to uncover entanglements and even enactments that were involved with our therapy move to London. Therefore, conflicts’ realities and histories remained a mystery 11 .
Perhaps this conflict was an expression of the seemingly ‘revolutionary’ goals connected with the ambitions of the institute, allowing non-medical and non-psychological professionals into a psychotherapeutic training, which was a slap in the face of the established medical and psychological elite of the country. There were two other group analytic institutes in Germany existing at the time, but both open exclusively for medical and psychological professionals.
Today we think that the ‘labour pains’ of this institute pointed symptomatically at the murderous German history, the Second World War and the Shoah and their aftermath.
The fact that an ex-German, ex-communist, exiled Jewish psychotherapist would now take up a major role in establishing a German group analytic training that stood up for progressive and anti-elite rules in the field of psychotherapy stood for more than just an exclamation mark in the professional field of German psychotherapy. Given these circumstances, how would it have been possible to establish a group analytic training without producing highly disturbing conflicts?
At the time, however, it was not possible to explore this political and historical context and for all people involved this turned out to be an extremely painful experience. Members of the OC suggest today that the foundation was possibly and unconsciously a symbolic form of reparation to compensate for the immeasurable damage that had been inflicted upon Ilse (and on millions of other German Jewish citizens) and included a somewhat helpless attempt of mourning (Jorkowski and Keval, 2020: 157). In this sense, maybe our group was meant to be an unconscious institutional token, a bride price to Ilse, trying to make up for her suffering, alleviating her distress as well as our feelings of unspeakable guilt, underlying all of our professional exchanges with her. Our phantasy to be the chosen ones would confirm this hypothetical interpretation. However, at the time of the conflict, we, nor anybody else was able to explore the social, political and historical dimensions of the conflict and therefore it stayed in our memory like a nagging wound, leaving deep scars. But these scars served to tighten the bond with Ilse and separated us even more from the OC. The conflict simply stayed, even beyond Ilse’s death. Nevertheless, this experience taught us an important lesson: A conflict’s reality and history have to be acknowledged and explored, before they can be interpreted and understood, because as Foulkes (1964: 52) wrote, the individual is primarily and to the core a social being.
The group in Ilse’s living room
In any case, the result was that for almost four years, starting in September 1980, we flew to London and met in Ilse’s living room. Soon we felt very much at home there. Ilse always sat on a sprawling, comfortable armchair in front of the window. The walls were decorated with paintings and graphic art and bookshelves were filled with the collected works of Heinrich Heine and other German literature. She loved and revered Heinrich Heine, as she told us.
During the afternoon break, we had ‘tea’ and German cookies from Ilse’s favourite German pastry shop at Swiss Cottage. We moved from the therapy room into the dining room next door. Ilse joined us at the table and we drank English tea, ate cookies, and had phantasies about a zebra skin covering the entire wall 12 . Was this maybe a gift from Norbert Elias, with whom she had been close friends and who had lived and taught in Africa for some time? She knew Norbert Elias from Frankfurt, where she continued to study sociology (after having studied sociology, psychology and pedagogy in Berlin), attending classes of Karl Mannheim and his assistant at the time, Norbert Elias. She also attended psychology classes of Kurt Goldstein and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer (Seglow, 1977: 16, Seglow, 1981: 220). Later, after her return from Paris (1934), she asked Mannheim to be her advisor, supervising her doctoral dissertation about actors and society, which she did not finish because she moved to Berlin in 1935/36 13 . She had worked as an actress for many years, so she knew the profession, and wanted to write an interview-based, empirical doctoral dissertation. Both Mannheim and Elias supported her in this endeavour and they even accompanied her to theatre performances in Darmstadt (a town close to Frankfurt) for field research (unpublished manuscript by Ilse Seglow) 14 .
The location of our group analytic sessions—Ilse’s living room—perhaps most clearly demonstrated a special feature of our training: The classical rules contradicting setting. This made us feel very special and beyond all hardships, and we eventually experienced the frequent flights to London and the setting in Ilse’s living room as an exciting adventure. We felt like cosmopolitans. We ate in Chinese and Turkish restaurants and accompanied a group member to buy a Burberry coat downtown. However, it was not only this special setting that caused the group to frequently violate the setting rules. Both the lunch breaks and especially the evenings were spent mostly together. We behaved like typical exiles who stray into foreign lands, banding together to support each other. Even though this group dynamic ‘outside’ was repeatedly the subject of discussions in our group sessions, these dynamics remained a difficult part of our group experience.
Nonetheless, the group analytic process unfolded a very idiosyncratic, emotional intensity with Ilse. Our different backgrounds, professional situations and life plans did not always make it easy to reach an understanding. What made it even more difficult was that Ilse was very gentle and protective with some of us, affectionately allowing closeness, but less so with others.
The discussion of the Nazi past in the group
Right at the beginning of our group analytic experience, it became clear to all of us that one could not sit in Ilse’s living room, in front of the collected works of Heinrich Heine, without knowing exactly what our parents had done or not done during the time of the Nazi dictatorship. Ilse left no doubt that she could work with us as younger Germans, but never with our parents 15 .
The group understood this statement as a direct invitation to deal intensively with our own family histories. Some knew very well how their parents had lived under Hitler’s terror regime, while others did not know too much, but then felt urged to investigate about their family histories. For those in the group whose parents were perpetrators or ‘mitläufer’ (bystanders), the group discussions became a very painful, however crucial and formative experience. One member’s family had experienced prison and an annihilation camp. Another member’s family was originally from (ex-) Yugoslavia and had to flee to South America for political reasons. Speaking about his family’s bitter escape, he then had to realize that Ilse, as a former member of the Communist Party and later member of the Labour Party in Britain (Griffin, 2014: 51), defended Tito’s politics in (ex-) Yugoslavia and had little understanding of his painful memories. In this context, we recall a remark of Ilse: ‘I did not flee Nazi Germany as a Jew, but as a communist’.
Throughout the entire course of our training, we repeatedly dealt with our parents’ entanglement in Nazi Germany and what had been transferred on to us. Almost unbearable sadistic fantasies emerged in the group, describing in detail horrifying, torture-like fantasies. Bloody rabbits without skin were hanging from trees and this was just one of many associative images in the group. In this context it turned out that one member of the group had Jewish family ties. The whole group considered this statement as an insubordinate and narcissistic ingratiation to Ilse, and fiercely attacked and rejected this statement as pure fantasy. Even though this group participant tried repeatedly to talk about these issues, all efforts were smothered in incredulous remarks of the rest of the group. When one participant threatened to throw a large ashtray at the head of this member, the issue was never raised again. It seems as if it was not possible in the early 1980s to bring up this issue of Jewish family ties in a German group setting and explore the difficult past with all its unknown impacts and entanglements.
Ilse did not intervene during these disputes and kept a low profile, as if she wanted to tell us: ‘This is your story and you have to work it out and you have to do it alone. But I’m here’. However, if she would have intervened allowing an exploratory analysis, her own Jewishness, her painful past as a political exile would have been an issue and maybe neither we, nor she herself dared to get into an analysis of these transference and countertransference feelings and reactions (Seglow, 1975: 189).
Consequently, polarizations, divisions, tensions and pairings developed in the group, which had long lasting effects and could never be resolved completely. These dynamics were also stimulated by Ilse’s emotional enhancement towards different members of the group. Hopper (2014) describes, as does Herman (2014), that Ilse continually created polarizations in her environment. She was, as Herman writes, a paradox: ‘She was passionate and idealistic in her vision that psychotherapy had to be brought to those who were starving for it, who had nothing, who could barely pay for it, and who were not willing or able to come to therapy four to five times a week. She carried this conviction, which was shaped by her political–humanist ideals before her like a torch and promised those who entrusted themselves to her ‘a promised land’
16
. Herman continues: Her boundless creative drive, fuelled by omnipotence, refused to leave a stone unturned when in her view it needed turning. While her intolerance to frustration, of being cut down to size of reality’s demands, her difficulty with boundary and refusal to let go of any of her progeny, be they human or ideas, her lip-service to democracy, so totally against her grain, would in their massive contradictions impel the LCP to life as clinic and as training centre. (Herman, 2014: 110)
With the founding of the LCP, Ilse had finally found a home after all her forced migrations. ‘The LCP would, in that sense, become Ilse’s Israel: a heaven for the dispossessed’ (Herman, 2014: 119). She treated patients for £1.50 when all other analysts were taking £5.00 at the time. She worked tirelessly and without fee as the director for the LCP and ended up in poverty at the end of her life.
Besides her enormous strength, her weaknesses showed clearly in our group. Even though our initial resistance in having to travel to London had long ago turned into something like a pilgrimage and an adventure, we realized that we somehow had to deal with her chaotic management of organizational matters of the training. She simply was unable to do any logistic planning. Appointments, dates, numbers—an endless chaos. This drove Christiane Schlossarek, in particular, who was a real organizational talent, to sheer despair. Hopper et al. also described that on the one hand she obsessively pursued her goals and on the other hand regularly caused veritable administrative chaos in the process and worse; ‘In her therapeutic work, she sometimes did all the things we strictly forbid our training candidates to do: She could be tactless, inappropriate, uncontrollable, direct, insensitive, intrusive . . . (Hopper, 2014: 179)’.
Group dynamics
However, despite our rather unorthodox group conductor, our group flourished and reciprocal multiple transferences among the group’s members and, of course, with Ilse became evident. Growing cohesion in the group was noticeable. This dynamic showed specifically at dinner times, when we went to eat at a nearby Chinese restaurant. In the beginning we insisted—a weird German habit—on receiving 10 individual bills. Realizing that this caused considerable irritation, we decided to calculate the respective individual share from the total bill and put it on the table. Even though we tried very hard, at the end something was always missing. Everyone recalculated, nervously, adding something to the required amount, and still something was missing. Tensions in the group were palpable. It was obvious that there were economic differences between us, something we never talked about, but now it became obvious. Some were able to spend money freely and others had to calculate their expenses cautiously. This also showed in the nerve-racking bickering about the bill in the restaurant. Finally, one member would throw five pounds on the table and this usually resolved the situation, and we left the scene relieved, but also slightly ashamed, like a bunch of startled chicken. It was only towards the end of the training that this problem was resolved and we were able to put down the correct amount needed to pay the bill.
Throughout the training, there were always different subgroups emerging, which roughly reflected the dynamics that had developed during the sessions. Heated conflicts in the group allowed many of us to work through early childhood experiences, grievances, and experiences that still caused pain. Here Ilse was an alert and revealing help.
Dynamics inside the group were additionally enhanced by the fact that some of the group members stayed in the same hotel, others shared a bed-and-breakfast, and one of the authors, Elisabeth, stayed with Gerhard Wilke and his wife. This was an extraordinarily friendly and generous offer; it helped to get away from the group in the evenings. I am still very grateful to have been able to stay with them. It was definitely the healthiest of all solutions, but for Gerhard and his wife Elise also a burdensome situation, allowing a stranger into their house for four long years, four times a year and each time a whole week.
In the course of our training, especially from 1983 onwards, it became obvious that Ilse was becoming noticeably weaker and when we arrived in the morning, she was already sitting in her chair, wrapped in blankets and with her legs up. During breaks, we were then asked to leave the room so that a caregiver could take care of her.
The arrival of Herta Reik as co-facilitator and the death of Ilse
In the winter of 1983, Ilse introduced Herta Reik into our group as co-facilitator 17 . Ilse explained that she was feeling ill and wanted to be sure that we were well taken care of if anything should happen to her. Herta Reik then attended all meetings regularly and brought a breath of fresh air to the dynamics of our group. So, instead of having to deal with leaving or new members in the group, we had to deal with a new co-conductor. Some who had not felt so well taken care of by Ilse, now felt recognized and acknowledged. Others moved from ‘first to second row’ and this was for the group a healthy development. Herta did not always agree with what Ilse said and told her so. However, there was an admirable solidarity between the two of them and it was extremely instructive for all of us to observe that dissent was not only allowed, but also accepted by both of them.
Then in January 1984, without suspecting it, we had our last group session with Ilse, again with Herta Reik as co-facilitator. We were very distressed to see Ilse so weakened. Nevertheless, she was still present in the group, even though Herta Reik became more and more involved. Shortly after the end of this course, Ilse had a severe breakdown. She died in July 1984 18 .
Our training moved to Heidelberg, because Herta Reik now took over and came to Heidelberg for the remaining three courses. This experience was strongly overshadowed by our farewell to Ilse. Painful feelings of loss and grief dominated the group. Herta Reik helped us enormously in this process. Negative memories of Ilse that had not been worked through, surfaced now and found adequate space and time to be explored. We noticed that Herta Reik turned out to be a more classical group conductor as Ilse had been. She was much more restrained in her statements and interpretations, but no less clear and precise than Ilse. Thus, in this one year in which we were able to work with Herta Reik, especially those group members who felt neglected by Ilse, were able to establish a strong positive transference towards Herta. And additionally Herta took us to Heidelberg, thus helping us to reconnect with the OC and the institute.
The theory and our Foulkes ‘memorial’
To leave no doubt, of course our training consisted not only of therapy, but also of theory. However, we were so busy with our self-experiential group analytic process that there was not much space left for theory. Occasionally group analysts from Heidelberg came to teach theory, but it also happened that they simply forgot about us. Then frantically a replacement had to be found and one day Adele Mittwoch turned up, who was available, but completely unprepared. The topic of the theory session was the composition of our own group analytic group, but Adele simply would not understand that we as non-clinicians (with one exception) could not simply ask our general practitioner to send us patients for our group analytic group. This was restricted within the German health system to medical and psychological professionals. We tried to make her understand, however, she simply could not understand that sociologists, social workers and educators in Germany had no access to patients. We struggled for hours, but this problem could not be resolved. Adele, being a refugee from Germany, might have had strong inhibitions, not allowing her to understand our anxieties and difficulties when it came to find an own group analytic group. Still, there might have been another reason that caused this endless non-understanding. That Adele had been willing to take over the theory sessions almost seemed a miracle. At that time, almost all group analysts of the London Institute of Group Analysis had broken with Ilse (or she with them) and the Institute did not recognize her as a group analyst, even though she had participated in a group with Foulkes and had also been supervised by him (Seglow, 1981: 222) 19 . She was not a team player, even though she was a convinced group analyst and group experience was part of the individual analytic training at the LCP. However, her strong political stance, her humanistic ideals, and her conviction that not just one school and theory of psychotherapy could be the right one, was apparently incompatible with a group analytic approach that sought recognition in the British health care system. In addition, there were certainly personal animosities, especially amongst the female refugees, who had lost so much and who had such a difficult time in a foreign country, building a new life and developing professional perspectives 20 . Decades later, one of the authors of this article, Elisabeth, met Liesel Hearst (a well-known group analyst from the London Institute) at Oslo airport, on the way to the group analytic symposium in Molde. They started to talk and when Liesel heard that she, this group member, had been in Ilse’s training group, she spontaneously exclaimed, ‘Then you are not a group analyst at all’.
Ilse was either loved or hated. ‘She loved and hated with equal passion and was loved and hated with equal passion’ (Griffin, 2014: 53). She was a woman ‘who aroused highly ambivalent feelings in everyone. She was a force—a matriarch who could be a bulldozer and a bully. She was also incredibly intuitive, kind, sensitive, and creative, with vision and determination . . . ’ (Marks, 2014: 65). Group experiences with her were also a very inspiring experience, ‘but they could also be terrifying and negative, depending on how much she did or didn’t like you. One example is of a very shy and defended man in my group whom she continually nagged to speak. When he finally did share something important, she made mincemeat of him’ (Marks, 2014: 65).
Our theoretical experiences in the context of our training, which in many respects were neither particularly well organized nor well prepared in terms of content (there was no curriculum yet and theory was relatively eclectically thrown together), were compensated for by extraordinary experiences that none of us would want to miss today.
In one course, Elizabeth Foulkes was our theory teacher. We hardly remember anything about a theoretical issue that was raised during these sessions. However, we remember even more vividly the session at her home, which seemed like a ‘Foulkes memorial’. We sat under the bust of Foulkes carved in stone and she read us the correspondence between Foulkes and Freud, or had us listen to his recollections on tape. While listening attentively we ate all the chips she put in front of us and when they were all eaten, she encouraged us to help ourselves from her refrigerator, which we did extensively, euphoric and completely regressed. Maybe there were even some bottles of wine, which we emptied ruthlessly. We do not remember anymore. This experience compensated for all the theory sessions we had experienced as inadequate and created a high level of identification with group analysis. However, it must be admitted, honestly that next to Ilse, no theory, no matter how brilliantly presented, would have ever found a legitimate space.
Conclusions
Ilse was, no doubt, a lifelong non-conformist 21 , dominant, eccentric, brilliant, approachable, vulnerable, human, politically clearly left wing and despite the weaknesses that undoubtedly distinguished her, she nevertheless succeeded in forming from us a number of convinced and even successful group analysts. Not all of us graduated as group analysts after the end of the training. It is certainly interesting to note that of the four women in the group, three became very successful group analysts, while the men in the group practised group analysis either part-time or not at all after graduation. We think that especially we as women benefited in particular from Ilse. We could identify with her and also with Herta, and despite all the weaknesses and difficulties we had to bear, we never doubted that group analysis was simply the best thing we had ever experienced. The four-year experience in London, despite all different professional developments of the individual group members, created a strong sense of togetherness that led to continued yearly meetings after the ending of the group, not just to chat, but to work on personal issues as a leaderless group. No doubt, this was also the result of a deeply felt necessity to work through and to deal with the death of Ilse. There was nothing else we could do, but to take care of ourselves, alone. This definitely helped some of us, but certainly not all of us.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that both of us authors, as well as some others in the group, work or have worked predominantly, if not exclusively, in the field of applied group analysis. This was a natural consequence of our different professions, but probably was also influenced by Ilse and her understanding of group analysis. It allowed us to use group analytic knowledge to illuminate and to explore social, institutional, and psychological contexts in a variety of fields of work. For example, Renate Cogoy initiated an almost 20 years long continuing educational programme for secretaries in counselling centres, which allowed for professional and context related processes of self-reflection in groups. Christiane Schlossarek and Elisabeth Rohr were also involved in this group reflective training for many years. Eventually Renate Cogoy took group analysis with her to Italy and worked with groups of relatives of drug addicts and offered group supervision in a women’s centre, and often brought her intercultural experience to European group meetings.
After her graduation Elisabeth Rohr was a member of the board of directors of the IGA Heidelberg from 1987 to 1993. Since then she has been involved in the institute as a group teaching analyst, supervisor and lecturer. She has also taken group analysis to many countries in Latin America, to Palestine, to Kenya, working with groups in Ireland, Denmark and with a team working with genocide survivors in Rwanda. She has spoken widely about these experiences at international conferences and published on the subject.
In conclusion, we can say with Nini Herman: ‘Ilse’s limitations belonged to her own odyssey. Her achievements outstripped them. We remain in her debt’ (Herman, 2014: 124).
