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The catalyst for this paper was an invitation to contribute to a conference, ‘Homage to Gunnar Hjelholt: Working on Boundaries’, organised to commemorate the life and work of Gunnar Hjelholt.
Gunnar Hjelholt had mentored a generation of social scientists with specialisation in the field of social psychology and psychoanalysis in Scandinavia. He was a teacher and a consultant who devoted much of his time to human welfare, rather than to making money. His publications have been translated in several languages, including English. Gunnar had joined the resistance movement under German occupation and survived his imprisonment in the concentration camp to emerge at the end of the war with damaged lungs. This did not stop him from working till lung cancer claimed him towards the close of 2002.
This paper responds to the challenge of the theme of the conference, by offering some reflections on boundary phenomena. The first part of the paper develops an idea, or rather a prediction, offered by Gunnar in a letter to me not long after the dismantling of the Berlin wall. The second part is based on a recent experience of mine as Joint Director of a Group Relations Conference that involved representatives of the so-called ‘untouchable’ community in India.
The veteran Indian journalist, K. P. Nayar , wrote an article in The Telegraph, one of the Indian national dailies, with a rather startling title, which read, ‘It's worth thinking about whether the US is a communist