The Second Summer School in Kazakhstan
«Theory and Technique of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy»
ВТОРАЯ ЛЕТНЯЯ ШКОЛА ПСИХОАНАЛИЗА В КАЗАХСТАНЕ
«ТЕОРИЯ И ТЕХНИКА ПСИХОАНАЛИТИЧЕСКОЙ ПСИХОТЕРАПИИ»
Report by Athena Chatjoulis, Anne-Marie Schlösser, and Gila Ofer
Finishing our Kazakhstan summer school experience, all of us agreed that it was an interesting, fruitful but also peculiar experience, both in terms of the group of the participants and of the place. Anne-Marie Schlösser was the coordinator of the project for the EFPP with Gila Ofer, Athena Chatjoulis, and Gabriela Mann as fellow teachers.
We will start from the place, since the place and the people who had invited us has constituted the frame of our work. The summer school was conducted in a resort place around 70 kilometers away from Almaty, the main city of Kazakhstan at the east end of Kazakhstan near the borders of China (until recently Almaty was the capital of Kazakhstan, now it is Astana north of Almaty). The resort place was on the artificial Katchegay lake which many times seemed like a sea surrounded by steppe and dessert. The feeling of being there was one of being in the middle of nowhere at least at the beginning of our arrival. We had the chance, approximately half day after our arrival and a whole day before our departure to visit Almaty and the surrounding area and gather a lot of information which completed our view concerning the cultural background of the participants in the summer school. This cultural knowledge gave meaning to the participants’ narratives and their stories concerning their psychological profile, as well as the primary and the secondary groups of belonging of the Kazakh people.
The summer school was well organized by Anna Kudiyarova and the Kazakh Institute of Psychoanalysis of which she is the president. There were 40 individuals who were taking part in the summer school. Most of them were in some kind of a psychotherapeutic profession or they were in their training to become analysts. Five of them, including Anna, were more senior concerning their training. They were the "teachers" and had already started work with the groups half day before our arrival and continued half day after our departure. Most of the participants were from Almaty or other towns in Kazakhstan, although there were some participants from Russia and from other neighbor countries. Among the participants there were also some individuals who were not in the profession of psychotherapy, but who were sensitive to the psychoanalytic psychotherapy and they were currently in analysis.
The need for "food for thought" concerning psychoanalysis and the need for learning psychoanalytic theory and practice was very profound. This created a very intense climate of insight during the whole summer school which was enhanced by the rather intense program. The everyday program was as follow:
10.00-11.00am: Paper presentation on plenary
11.30-13.00pm: Discussion groups
14.30-16.00pm: Paper presentation in study groups in rotation
16.30-18.00pm: Supervision groups
In the evening for three nights from 20.00pm until approximately 22:30pm there was a movie followed by discussion.
The plenary paper presentations presented by the four of us and Anna Kudiyarova were on "Defence mechanisms" (Anne-Marie Schlösser), on "Setting in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy" (Gila Ofer), on "Transference and Countertransference" (Athena Chatjoulis), "On Submission and Aggression" (Gabriela Mann), "On the First Interview" (Anna Kudiyarova). There were additional papers elaborated by the four of us in the rotation study groups.
Concerning our entertainment there was a welcome reception followed by dancing at the first day and a dinner the last day. The dinner was followed by a ceremony during which the participants received a certificate for their participation in the summer school. This in turn was followed by an interesting "role playing" from some of the participants, during which they were mocking in a very smart and lively way the psychoanalytic thinking.
We believe that the program was rich and gave the trainees a lot of material for metabolizing, helping them either to clarify known psychoanalytic concepts, or to meet new ones. We believe that for the majority of them there is a lot of work to be done and this was agreed by Anna Kudiyarova. Some of the most experienced ones are already asking further possibilities of training, even if they have to travel out of their country for that.