Bystanders No More: Psychotherapeutic Dialogues for the Politically Silenced

On May 13, 2011, an unprecedented conference began its three-day course at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City. United by their decision to respond to the call embodied in the title of the conference, “Bystanders No More: Psychotherapeutic Dialogues for the Politically Silenced,” the participants who gathered for the event were otherwise very diverse. They came from various parts of the United States, as well as many other countries, and represented a wide array of disciplines, including social work, psychology, psychiatry, education, law, religion, and the fine arts. The articles that appear in this issue of the IJPSP and the next, all versions of papers presented at the conference, reflect their shared belief that the voices of those who cannot speak out for reasons having to do with their race, religion, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, or political affiliation, must be spoken for.

As the chair of the conference, which was sponsored by the Training and Research in Self Psychology Foundation (TRISP), I was extremely moved and gratified by the openness of the dialogues that developed

between the presenters, whose talks all contained deeply-felt personal experiences, and members of the audience. But considering the emotion-packed way the conference came into being, I should not have expected anything less. The impetus for the conference sprang from the moment at the 2009 International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology conference in Chicago when Shake' Topalian, a child of survivors of the Armenian genocide, stood up before all who had assembled to hear Tessa Philips's presentation, “Race, Place and Self in the Experience of a Bystander” and spoke from her heart. Noting that she had been inspired by Philips' courage, she expressed her dismay that the next conference would be held in Turkey, a country