Centre for Group Analytic Studies

This talk and discussion will begin with a sharing of my experience of initiating a Group Analytic training in India. I will particularly look at violence from the histories we embody. The challenge has been to name violence, acknowledge responsibility, avoid blame, and process loss and pain. The training context can and does inevitably become a repeat of historical violence, but can it also be a context in which we can think about such matters and hope for social change?

Anando Chatterji is a group and therapeutic community psychotherapist. He has been working for the last 25 years with vulnerable people in severe distress, both in residential as well as out patient and community settings. He is a co-founder of an organisation, Hank Nunn Institute, 2014, which provides several therapy services, outreach programmes, supervision, and training. He initiated the Group Analytic course in India in 2018; the first cohort will qualify in 2026. He is an honorary member of the IGA, London. He is interested in how therapeutic groups experience the trauma of the context they are set in while simultaneously working on the healing of members whose traumas are in their own personal histories.