Fed with Tears - Poisoned with Milk: The ‘Nazareth’ Group-Relations Conferences. Germans and Israelis - the Past in the Present. H. Shmuel Erlich, Mira Erlich-Ginor, and Hermann Beland. Giessen:  Psychosozial-Verlag, 2009.

Entering a Tavistock Group Relations Conference is an invitation to regress among a group of strangers held together by a common task. Within the spare framework of the conference task - with the staff's continued focus on the group - each member inevitably begins, over time, to see aspects of the self that are reflected in others. We unconsciously spread ourselves around in the membership and staff of these conferences in the service of learning about social and organisational life. And, if we take the risk to engage those members whom we find ourselves hating, we inevitably discover aspects of ourselves that we have wished to avoid. This is an unparalleled learning opportunity.

But what if the task framework of the conference becomes the study of hatred itself, and the historical roles of Germans and Jews in the Holocaust are at the forefront of that study? And what if members, selected for their sophistication about the study of unconscious dynamics, are the children from both sides of that trauma - a generation removed?

This is the challenge the organisers of the Nazareth Conferences took up when they brought Israeli and German psychoanalysts to examine how feelings and fantasies about ‘German-ness, Israeli- ness and Jewish-ness’ affected relations between these two groups. The organisers assumed the exploration would illuminate how these aspects of historically influenced and trauma-based identity related to the roles of citizens and analysts. They were right, and this extraordinary book brings the reader directly into the awesome confrontation of the trans-generational transmission of trauma, in the presence of the Other.

The authors, one German and two Israeli analysts, took care to invite the participants to speak for themselves. The resultant book