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Prague is a beautiful city with unforgettable sights, like the Karlbridge or Charles Bridge, the old Town Hall and the Jewish cemetery. When we arrived for the EPF Conference in 2002, it seemed as though the good soldier Sˇvejk and his relaxed friends were waiting for us in the restaurants with Knödl and Staropramen beer. The conference took place in the local Hilton, which was situated in a peripheral part of the city’s kernel, and which resembled a modern, displaced American monument in the midst of a central European historical capital.
We, the moderators in the conference’s clinical groups, were recruited by the organizers of this first Working Party on Clinical Issues because they knew us personally and because we all spoke English (as well as several other languages). I had myself been in supervision groups with Haydée Faimberg, who set up the groups (see the Appendix). I was interested in the problem of different psychoanalytic schools, in the differences in views about technique, and, above all, in the absolute conviction of many analysts who thought that they were right in what they were doing. But I knew very little about what we were supposed to do in these new working groups when I arrived in Prague, although we had received some correspondence about the aims of organizing them. We had been told that there should be no supervision in the groups and we should assume that all presenting analysts were analysts, which meant that we should
not evaluate different methods into better or worse, or into more or less analytic categories. We had also received a suggestion from the organizers to raise six basic questions with the groups about the presenting analyst’s way of working - but these questions were to be more like a fallback in case the work didn’t develop spontaneously. Sure enough, it seems that in most groups the questions were not used.
And so, we knew in advance only a little about the explicit aims of the project, but, as the conference went