Main description:

This important book gathers a set of influential international contributors with psychoanalytic and group analytic knowledge to provide a wide-ranging critical analysis of the present state of Europe.

Europe is facing huge challenges: waves of immigrants are reshaping its identity and testing its tolerance; Brexit is a destabilizing factor and its outcomes are not yet clear; economic crises continue to threaten; the resurgence of nationalism is threatening an open-borders one-continent ideology. This book tackles some of these challenges. Divided into two parts, the first analyses the current social, political, cultural and economic trends in Europe using psychoanalytic and group analytic concepts, while the second concentrates on existing applications of psychoanalytic and group analytic concepts to help manage national and international change in individual countries as well as on the continent as a whole, including groups for German, Ukrainian and Russian participants; groups organised in Serbia in order to overcome the recent, traumatic past; and the "Sandwich model", developed to enhance communication in situations of conflict, trauma and blocked communication. When we feel threatened, we cling to our in-group and its members. We want to think the same and be the same as our neighbors, but this group illusion of homogeneity conceals the fact that we are different. While homogeneity offers stability, it is diversity that offers freedom.

This book will be of great interest to researchers on the present state of Europe from across a range of different disciplines, from psychoanalysis to politics, sociology, economics and international relations.

Contents:

Foreword by Morris Nitsun

Acknowledgements

Europe on the couch: the breaking of a homogeneous group illusion, Anna Zajenkowska and Uri Levin

Part One: General reflections

Aleida Assmann - Learning from history? The crisis and future of the European Project

Maria Eugenia Cid Rodriguez - A way of seeing some effects of globalisation and new technologies in Europe

Marianna Fotaki - Relationality in the age of neoliberal dispossession: protecting the "other"

Anna Zajenkowska and Uri Levin - My Europe: a continent between rejection and re-inclusion: a discussion with Dr. Robi Friedman
Part Two: Particular understanding

Haim Weinberg - The image of Europe in the social unconscious of Israeli Jews

Ziad Abou Saleh and Bogdan de Barbaro - Poland and the other - the other and Poland: a dialogue between a newcomer and a native

Regine Scholz - The German "Welcoming Culture" - some thoughts about its psychodynamics

Thor Kristian Island - Norway: between grandiosity and inferiority

Halina Brunning and Olya Khaleelee - Far from the madding crowd: pre to post Brexit Britain

Shmuel Bernstein - Will Brexit brake the EU?
Part Three: Practical interventions

M. Gerard Fromm - National nightmare: thoughts on the genesis and legacy of perpetrator trauma

Katarzyna Prot-Klinger and Krzysztof Szwajca - Social memory of the Holocaust in Poland

Marie-Luise Alder and Stephan Alder - Negotiation between three ambivalently connected nations: finding common ground through metaphors in multinational large group sessions

Marina Mojovic - The Balkans on the Reflective-Citizens couch unraveling social-psychic-retreats

Gila Ofer - Europe on the couch in Social Dreaming Matrices