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The fourth meeting of the Association took place at an extremely well-appointed residential conference centre just outside Paris and the sixty participants reaped the benefits of living and working together for nearly a week. The general atmosphere was stimulating and charged with enthusiasm reminiscent of the early days of the Association, when professional development was seen as a by-product, rather than an aim, of its activities.
For on this occasion, while there were several short papers of the conventional type, by far the greater amount of time was spent on non-verbal ‘workshops’ aimed at increasing the members’ awareness of themselves via methods not traditionally associated with analytical psychology—bioenergetics, physical expression, voice workshops and painting in groups. Happily, the more logos-minded members of the organising committee had insisted on the inclusion in the timetable of adequate space for verbalisation and conceptualisation of the happenings in the workshops: talk complemented action.
Two other events deserve singling out. The first was a plan from the Italian group to create a pantomime using clown masks (the serious White Clown and his opposite Auguste, the red-faced sensual buffoon). The pantomime took the form of a trial of the committee for changing the theme of the conference from ‘Masculine and Feminine’ to ‘Aggression’. The trial ended in the criminals taking over the court and the bribery of court officials with sexual and monetary offerings. Somehow, the entire country of Switzerland was then arraigned for non-attendance at the conference. The themes of difficulties in trusting those in authority and the search for scapegoats were quite thoroughly discussed at a later session—as was the enormous increase in ‘casual’ aggression possible when one is behind a thick greasepaint mask.
The second event was the visit of a teacher of Akido, an Eastern martial art and Taoist path. In demonstrating his extraordinary techniques this man talk