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I have just returned from Bulgaria, where there are now about a hundred people actively involved in psychoanalytic studies of one kind or another. They center on the New Bulgarian University, which had regular Psychoanalytic Week events in the early 1990s, inspired and directed by David Reason of the Kent Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies. For some unaccountable reason these have ceased, but the main person at the Sofia end, Toma Tomov, has recently been appointed head of the Department of Psychiatry in the Medical School of Sofia, and he is actively involved in introducing psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking into the Bulgarian psychiatric community. Several joint programs are in the planning stage with the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies at Sheffield University in England. These include training for psychotherapists and distance learning programs in Psychoanalytic Studies; Disability Studies; Psychiatry, Philosophy, and Society; and Psychosocial Interventions in Severe Mental Disorders.
The New Bulgarian University is also in the process of setting up an Institute of Human Relations, based on psychoanalytic approaches to all levels of human interaction. It recently held a five-day Group Relations Conference, which was very interesting indeed. Thirty-six members took part in small group, large group, institutional, and consultation events which were set up to enable the participants to reflect on their own group process. One of the main themes was how unaccustomed they were to trust groups and institutions at all, even when run by people they had reason to trust. The conference had consultants from London: David Armstrong of the Tavistock Centre Consultancy Service, Gordon Lawrence of Cranefield University, and me. The Bulgarian consultants were Zlaka Mihova, Kimon Ganev, and Toma Tomov. All of these people had been involved in an earlier two-day Group Relations held at the Centre for Culture in 1992. The one this year was held in a building which, under t