IGA Glasgow Conference
- Maddy
- Nov 8, 2022
- 9 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
50 Years On: What is the future of Group Analysis and what does it contribute in the 21st century?
Friday 26th September and Saturday 27th September 2025
The Studio, 67 Hope Street, Glasgow, G2 6AE
Programme:
Friday 26th September
18.00 - 18.30 : Registration
18.30 - 18.45 : Welcome by Chair Sharon Hannah
18.45 - 20:00 : Keynote: Group Analysis in the Vale of Soul-Making: Rethinking the therapeutic relationship - Dr Farhad Dalal
This talk will try to flesh out an intuition: that psychotherapy (group or individual) is better thought of as a kind of soul-seeking and soul-making (Keats), rather than the more usual description of ‘treatment’. It is the mortal, perishable soul that is being spoken of.
I will call on Foulkes and Winnicott, as well as Raimond Gaita and Martin Buber, to argue that the values of ‘analysis’ – neutrality & detachment – can subvert the therapeutic project. I will argue that the therapeutic encounter takes place in the realm of I-Thou, and this necessitates the therapist to be engaged (rather than detached), transparent (rather than opaque) and responsive (rather than impassive). But because such moments are rare and cannot be bidden, the ethos of I-Thou signals a direction of travel rather than a place of arrival. In sum, I will be arguing for a reconfiguration of the relationship between one-who-tries-to-help and the ones-who-come-for-help.
 Farhad Dalal PhD is a psychotherapist and Group Analyst in private practice in Devon, UK. He is trying (and failing) to retire. With colleagues, he is delivering a group psychotherapy training in India. He has published four books to date: Taking the Group Seriously, Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization, Thought Paralysis: The Virtues of Discrimination, and CBT – The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami: Managerialism, Politics and the Corruptions of Science. He is currently writing on ethics. www.dalal.org.uk |
20.00 - 21.00 : Networking with Drinks and Canapes
Saturday 27th September
09.30 - 10.00 : Arrival
10.00 - 11.15 : Workshops*
11.15 - 11.45 : Break
11.45 - 13.00 : Median Groups
13.00 - 14.00 : Lunch and Networking
14.00 - 15.15 : Workshops*
15.15 - 15.30 : Break
15.30 - 17.00 : Reflective Large Group
*Please see below the eight workshops on offer during the conference. There are two timeslots, participants should choose one workshop per timeslot.
10:00am - 11:15am Workshops
Developing a patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) specific to Group Analytic Psychotherapy
o Generating awareness of the pros and cons of developing and using a group-analysis-specific PROM (questionnaire) o Discussing with delegates the development of the ASK PROM and generating interest in participating in this continuing process o Developing a network of those interested in taking part in this project o Sharing information as to how to go about conducting Research in the NHS  Tony Ashton is qualified as a group analyst in 2002 and has, ever since, worked in this role in the NHS in two NHS MH Trusts - between 2000-2010 in West Yorkshire (Wakefield) and between 2000 – Now in Teesside (Middlesbrough/Durham). |
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QMMAC Fishbowl
An experience of working in a median group in a fishbowl exercise of QMMAC , in which the group offers their shared insight.
1. An experience of working in a median group in a fishbowl exercise of QMMAC , in which the group offers their shared insight. 2. Participants will gain knowledge of the ‘Regional’ IGA community; QMMAC. 3. As the wider community of Group Analysts, participants will be able to share in some of the dilemmas facing QMMAC as we consider the future at a time of change. Sheena McLachlan is in Adult Education and Group Analyst Sheelagh McCartney is a retired Clinical Psychologist and Group Analyst. Artemis Andreou is an Integrative Counsellor/ Psychotherapist with an interest in Groups Asia Kozyrka, Janet Wilson is a Team and Leadership Coach and Consultant Bridget Grant is an art psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and lecturer on the MSc art psychotherapy programme at Queen Margaret University. Sally Mitchison is a Group Analyst and Large Group Convenor |
Decolonising Group Analysis: Ubuntu, Whiteness, and Epistemic Justice in the Group Analytic Frame
This participatory workshop invites group analysts, trainees, and educators into an embodied and dialogical exploration of how colonial legacies continue to shape the habitus of group analysis. Drawing on African Knowledge Systems, particularly the ethics of ubuntu, the session explores how alternative epistemologies can be integrated to support a more pluriversal, relational, and ethically grounded practice. Through conceptual framing, reflective dialogue, and multi-modal forms of engagement—including somatic, narrative, and aesthetic dimensions—participants will explore whiteness, epistemic injustice, and institutional resistance, decentering the Western canon and reimagining what group analysis might become in a decolonial frame.
 Matthew Rich-Tolsma is a South African artist-educator, consultant, and group facilitator based in the Netherlands, whose work bridges decolonial theory, critical pedagogy, and institutional transformation. He serves as Pedagogue-in-Residence at the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ArtEZ University of the Arts), and lectures in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Tilburg University. With a background in education and organisational consulting, he co-founded Workspace Social Sculpture, a practice-based research institute exploring dialogical, aesthetic, and embodied methodologies for collective inquiry and change. He is also President of the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) and a core member of the Nonviolence Response Group, an international collective working on trauma-informed peacebuilding and systems-level conflict transformation. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Educational and Social Equity. Matthew is nearing the end of his training as a Group Analyst at Group Analysis North, teaches on the IGA’s Diploma in Reflective Practice in Organisations, and previously served on the IGA Board. His dissertation, Decolonising Group Analysis through an Encounter with Afrikan Knowledge Systems, was awarded the 2025 Dennis Brown Prize. His facilitation work draws on African Knowledge Systems, complexity theory, and critical pedagogy to support pluriversal approaches to healing, dialogue, and institutional change. |
Where is group analysis now, and why is it the way it is? o How might Group Analysis be a force to be reckoned with? o Reflect on the group analytic culture we embody. o Recognise how it might constrain or enable us.
 Cynthia Rogers worked alongside Foulkes’ colleagues at the Group Analytic Practice and has spent 40 years actively participating in the teaching and development of group analysis. She cultivated an interest in the challenges psychotherapists experience in their working lives, publishing “Psychotherapy and Counselling a Professional Business.’ Wiley (Rogers. 2004). Her research, grounded in Elias’ figurative approach, reflected the lived experience of group analysts in the UK, and the network of relationships they navigate. It threw light on the prevailing culture in which we operate. Cynthia is a training group analyst, teacher and supervisor in private practice in Dulwich, London.
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14:00pm - 15:15pm Workshops
Pioneers, Fallen Idols, and the Sins of the Fathers: Creative adventure and anxious conformism in Group Analysis 1974 - 2025 Foulkes arrived in England after Hitler came to power in 1933, influenced both by the dialectical imagination of the Frankfurt Institute where he had been to seminars with the Marxist philosophers, and the demands of the English psychoanalytic establishment where he needed to be accepted. The consequent tension between the creative innovation required and displayed at Northfield Military hospital and in subsequently promoting and developing Group Analysis and the Group Analytic Society on the one hand and the need to fit in and belong somewhere in the psychoanalytic and psychiatric profession, has staid with us from those earliest days until now. My question is, how far has the need to manage anxiety by conforming and homogenising come to stifle the creativity and sense of adventure that drove the founding and early development of our institute. While the ‘founding fathers' were predominantly white, Western male professionals in a white Western patriarchal cultural context, they were also brave and innovative, many of them leaders of new approaches like therapeutic communities and family therapy, who inspired students with a spirit of adventure and enterprise. I recent years I am repeatedly listening to IGA London students talking about the need to fit in and keep their heads down in order to get through the training and qualify! Surely not a good sign. In the middle of this fifty-year period there occurred a specific disclosure, regarded by some as a scandal, that showed how some of our founders might be somewhat more human and more fragile than we might have wished or hoped for. Earlier crises had occurred around the breakaway of the Family Therapy Course in the late 1970s and, shortly before that, the death of Foulkes himself. Significant theoretical challenges to Foulkes have also emerged, notably from Nitsun and Dalal. It is unclear how well these events have been processed, or the losses mourned, or how much has been repressed into our social unconscious, and how far our collective confidence and courage may have been dented if not seriously undermined. This workshop will aim for a twenty-minute outline of our history since 1974 when I joined the ‘Introductory Course’ (now called the FC) with some speculations about the relationship between our evolving institution and its evolving social, political and cultural context. That will leave approximately forty minutes for discussion in whatever sized group we have.  Dick Blackwell, Affiliation IGA. (Member of IGA (uk) and London QC staff member. |
The practice of group therapy: Restoring Call and Response.
o Experiential exercise; call and response in groups o A social & evolutionary theory of trauma: our instinctive need to tell our tribe o Tears in the Matrix: Locating hidden trauma via disruptions to call and response: Perturbations, Glitches and Glimpses o How we restore the call and response in a group: discussion & clinical examples  Howard Edmunds qualified in Group Analysis in 2001. His recent roles include Clinical Director and Co-Founder of Brighton Therapy Centre, NHS Principal Adult Psychotherapist and organisational consultant. He is based in Brighton and teaches on the IGA Foundation and Diploma course Brighton, Qualifying Course London and Diploma in Clinical Supervision London. He is a Training Group Analyst and full member of the Institute of Group Analysis. |
Deathly Silencing in the ‘Time of Monsters’: Political Dissent, Speaking Palestine and Group Analytic Practice. Gramsci’s “Time of Monsters” is laid bare by the genocide in Palestine and its accompanying silencing. As group analysts, attuned to mechanisms of oppression and repression, we are called to sit up and take urgent notice. Silencing undermines therapeutic and liberatory processes by breeding mistrust, diminishing emotional engagement, and potentially deepening psychological distress. Silencing in group analytic practice must never be condoned. Nonetheless, it can be understood as a communicative act indicating that something remains unspeakable but demands eventual articulation. We begin with a short presentation outlining the mechanisms of silencing, with particular reference to Palestine. We will give political, institutional and clinical examples of this process. We will locate group analysis as a potentially revolutionary praxis in that it follows psychoanalysis’ principle of free association contra the deathly pressures and structures of silencing, allowing for a multi-layered understanding for what that means in terms of both clinical and activist spaces. We will then explore, through an extended free flowing discussion the costs and effects of silencing as well as the ways to counter it. Aims & Outcomes
Reem Shelhi is a neurodiverse Anglo-Arab Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, and Clinical Supervisor whose distinctive intersectional background deeply informs her work. She serves on the Management Committee of the Group Analytic Society International and the Steering Committee for Group Analysts for Palestine. Her work explores ‘Locations of Disturbance’ in the context of physical, psychological, and psychosocial oppression, addressing both internal landscapes shaped by childhood, intergenerational trauma and family dynamics as well as external forces such as occupation, normalisation and structural violence. Central to her practice is the pursuit of both collective and individual liberation, reclaiming agency, voice, and meaning in the face of personal and political histories of suffering. Julia Borossa, Phd. is a psychotherapist and group analyst. In addition to her clinical practice, she has an interdisciplinary academic background with an MA in Comparative Literature and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science. She was for many years the director of the Centre for Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University, London, where her teaching and research interests centered on the histories, cultures and politics of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, with a particular emphasis on de-colonial and cross-cultural approaches. Sally Skaife, PhD, is an art psychotherapist and group analyst. Having started therapy work in adult psychiatry in the NHS, the bulk of her working life has been on an art psychotherapy training at Goldsmiths, University of London. In parallel, she has run art psychotherapy groups privately, in the third sector with victims of torture. Currently, she supervises therapists working in a variety of institutions and maintains a therapy practice. Her theoretical interest is in developing art psychotherapy group practice as a form of resistance to a world where people are made sick from inequality and injustice. Her recent co-edited book is entitled Art Psychotherapy Groups in the hostile environment of Neoliberalism, 2022: Routledge. |
'No royal roads': what is a post-psychoanalytic group analysis?
o Critically re-examine the relationship: Group analysis and psychoanalysis o Deconstruct the idea of ‘grand theory’ and ‘meta-narratives’ o Using philosophy (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari) and more, problematise the normative assumptions and ‘ethnocentrism’ of psychoanalysis o Allow delegates to explore ideas from other disciplines and therapy approaches they find intuitively helpful in their practice as group analysis  Martin Weegmann is a psychologist and group analyst with four decades of NHS experience. An author, he has published six books, including three on group analysis, and is completing a new one- Novel Connections: Between Literature and Psychotherapy |
Upon registration, please email your choices to Sam Evans, Training Manager: trainingmanager@groupanalysis-uk.co.uk
Fees:
IGA Trainee - £80
IGA Member (Early bird) - £100
IGA Member (Standard) - £120
Non-Member (Early bird) - £140
Non-Member (Standard) - £160
(Early bird closing date is now 30/06/25)
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