History of the Section
Our history has many similarities with the stories of other schools of modern Ukrainian psychotherapy, which began to appear at the turn of the 90s of the twentieth century, when, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence, the citizens of our country recieved unprecedented opportunities for contact with culture, values and the traditions of Western Europe, including psychotherapeutic.
This story can be described as a series of ups on waves of enthusiasm, followed by periods of recession and disappointment – it took a lot of time, patience and persistence for this movement to acquire the character of an evenly progressive one, the one that is fueled not so much by the hopes of a quick achievement of distant goals, which have not become much closer than initially, but by many tangible fruits of collective activity, strong confidence in its importance and necessity, by growing competence in its implementation.
For Ukrainian psychotherapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, the acquaintance with the group analysis – wherever it took place, be it in retreat study shuttles to European countries, or in local educational projects, which Western experts willingly visited to share their skills – was a real revelation. The diagnostic cliché was replaced by knowledge filled with content and meaning. To replace nosological clichés, arose a deep understanding of the structure of the human soul, its complex manifestations in the network of social interaction.
It seemed to us that the inertia and formalism which the Ukrainian mental health system inherited from the Soviet Union would forever remain in the past, that the irretrievably muddy stream of pseudoscientific and esoteric practices that filled the ideological vacuum of modern times would subside. At the time, to our eyes teachers from Europe seemed to be the celestials of the psychotherapeutic Olympus, bearers of both ancient traditions and new knowledge, messengers of a different world, arranged more reasonably, justly and better than the one we knew.
Ukrainian adepts of group analysis, inspired by the experience of open communication, mutual acceptance, trust and support, which they acquired in analytical groups under the leadership of European colleagues, began to strive for consolidation and continuation of this experience, expansion of the method’s circle of supporters, introduction of the method into everyday therapeutic practice, broadcasting of their knowledge to new generations of specialists.
Thus, from the graduates of the Austrian school Altaussee, the Kiev project of the International Society of Group Analysis, the Truskavets School of Psychotherapy, a circle of like-minded people was formed, who organized within the framework of the Association of Psychotherapists and Psychoanalysts of Ukraine – one of the first professional associations in our country – the Section of Group Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
At the beginning of its activity, the group of initiators of the Section was much inspired by the creation of faculties of clinical psychology in a number of medical universities in the country. At one time, this innovation inspired hope for serious changes in personnel training and an increase in the proportion of psychotherapeutic assistance in the Ukrainian health care system. The faculty abounded with bright, talented students, passionate about their specialty and actively looking for those knowledge and skills which could serve as a reliable support in their future professional activities. It is gratifying to know that many of them have found this reliable support in the group analysis and educational activities of the Section.
A whole generation of specialists grew up and professionally formed at these events. The coaching staff of the Section has grown together with them, and has long expanded it’s activity beyond the framework of individual student projects. It was a long and difficult path of development: we had to overcome a lot of things, and with a lot of things we had to come to terms with.
We had to overcome our own ignorance, inertia, intolerance of disagreements and the desire to satisfy personal ambitions only. We had to overcome self-doubt and the habit of looking back to the West or East in the endless hope of the prophets from any other side than ours. We had to come to terms with the fact that the space of European psychotherapy, into which we were accepted as equals, turned out, although more civilized, orderly and reasonable, is still far from the Garden of Eden, as we saw it through the pink glasses of transfer reactions. We had to come to terms with the fact that real changes in the Ukrainian mental health and education systems remain difficult to achieve, that the critical mass of professionals of a fundamentally new kind, apparently, must be much larger in order for these changes to take place.
Our conviction is that the group analysis is an indispensable tool for the formation of such professionals. The analytic group not only has a powerful therapeutic and cognitive potential, it allows you to firmly learn an important thing: both personal well-being and mental health of an individual are impossible without his successful integration into the social environment, and is unattainable at the expense of unhappiness and distress of others; on the other hand, a group is only viable if it allows to experience belonging to it without compromising individual differences and the personal well-being of the people who comprise it.