From the programme description:

From Negative Mirroring to Tradition, Creativity, and Innovation: Group as Pharmakós

In ancient Greek mythology, Pharmakós suggests both remedy and poison. Pharmakós is both the instrument of change, the remedy, and at the same time the entity destroyed or poisoned by that change. Pharmakós has the power to transform. Negative mirroring is a characteristic of Pharmakós and could be seen as one of the sources of difficulties the world is embroiled in. In this sense, Pharmakós reflects the current social crisis. How can the symbolic meaning of Pharmakós be elevated into a creative spark, from a negative mirror into a messenger of positive change?

Pharmakós stands at the boundary between margin and centre, between exclusion and integration. Group participation can be both harmful and beneficial. Relationships can nourish and/or injure. Words can constrain and/or enhance understanding. Binary distinctions between, among other polarities, good and evil, positive and negative, constructive and destructive, collapse under the paradox-embracing grasp of Pharmakós.

Delegates are invited to explore the idea that the group can shift from being a passive observer to becoming an active site of tradition, creativity, and innovation. The same forces that isolate or stigmatize the group can become the very ground for transformation and renewal, personally, socially, and culturally.

The Symposium offers us an opportunity to consider the contradictions, paradoxes and inherent duality in many aspects of our lives in general, and of our Group Analytic endeavors in particular. How can these dualities be negotiated? In this symposium, we are invited to transcend linear thinking and explore the idea that the group is often simultaneously the site of psychic injury and the space of potential healing.