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While outside the nordic summer staged a rapidly changing mixture of shower bursts, sunshine and crystalline skies, the First European Symposium on Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy took off the ground on the premises of the University of Copenhagen in a spirit of friendliness and impartial objectivity. One of the most memorable features of this symposium was the genuine mutual interest with which participants scrutinised each other's work. There was no cult of personalities, present or absent. Instead credit was given to all those who have contributed to the development of brief psychotherapy. The few opening words by the President, Jytte Vestergaard-Bogind, said it in a nutshell. With great simplicity she declared that the aim of the symposium was ‘to bring together different initiatives in short-term dynamic psychotherapy’.
The 120 participants represented a wide range of centres of excellence dedicated to clinical work, psychotherapy research and training. The bulk of the participants came from Norway, Sweden and, of course, Denmark. The host country contributed mainly with the imaginative multidisciplinary approach developed at Montebello, a model psychotherapy hospital in Helsingor. Their programme of shortterm inpatient treatment of neurotics, with ongoing psychotherapy training for all interested staff, unfolded through several free papers and video-presentations.
Individual participants came from Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, the United States and Yugoslavia. The transcultural nature of the gathering - or perhaps of psychotherapy as a whole profession - acquired a poignant dimension as one kept on meeting more and more participants who were born in a country other than the one their nametag purported to be the case. It was nevertheless strange that the only person from the UK should be someone born in Hungary, namely myself … The absence of more participants from outside Scandinavia, especially from