The WCP is a NGO and is a member of the UN. The purpose of the WCP is to unite all psychotherapists, psychotherapeutic institutes with their different school orientation, psychotherapeutic researchers and their institutes, and their national and international organisations.
I serve on the International Scientific Committee of WCP
WCP hold international conferences every three years. it's membership is wide and includes countries and therapists from all around the world.
I was elected to part of it Board of Directors and took part in the last two conferences. The first was in Durban, South Africa in 2014, Psychotherapy meet Africa, where I presented a paper about Love Transference in Supervision, and the second in Paris, France in 2017, Life and Love in the 21st Century, where I gave two lectures. The 2020 Moscow conference which was scheduled for June was cancelled due to Covid-19.
The first was about Love Transference. During the last two decades, I have been teaching undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate social work and expressive art students in various academic institutions in Israel. As my theoretical inclination leans toward the psychoanalytic ends of the spectrum, I have tended to place high emphasis on the pivotal importance of transference and countertransference in the therapeutic process. Increasingly, I have emphasized that whenever one refers to transference, he is in fact referring both to the patients ‘ inner world and to the therapists’. In short, transference is always accompanied by countertransference. Added to that, I have also been thinking more and more that the issue of love and its vicissitudes is always a prominent aspect of the therapeutic process. People seek help because something in the development and practice of their loving capacities has been inhibited, injured or barred. So, when putting the two together, I have found that in order to help my students deals with the challenges of therapy, I have to facilitate open-hearted and critical study and discussion of how love is exhibited, or not, in the therapy room.
In the second lecture, Lawrence Durrell and Exile, I discussed Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) who was English writer who came to fame in the early sixties when he wrote the tetralogy ‘The Alexandria Quartet’(1958-1960). Durrell was an avid reader of Freud, Rank, Groddeck and other psychoanalytic authors, and his fictional work is saturated with explicit and implicit reference to their ideas. In this tetralogy, Durrell used various psychoanalytic concepts to demonstrate his claim that the human psyche is governed by transcendental forces. Durrell uses various narrative techniques to echo his claim of the multi-layered voice of the author-protagonist, thus re-vibrating and introducing complex notions regarding the cohesiveness of the human self and its authority. Beyond the question of love, The Alexandria Quartet, and its abundance of references to the workings of the unconscious, be it through actual dreams or through dream-like rich metaphoric prose, deals with the protagonist’s quest for meaning in a world which seems to be traumatized both by political upheavals as well as individual sufferings. The dream-work which the tetralogy offers, points towards a remedy – language. It is the power of language both to injure but also to heal. It is the function of writing, so Durrell claims, to transform pain into art. The particular pain that Durrell sought to relieve through the transformative force of sublimitive writing can be described as relating to his severed sense of belonging. Not being a citizen of any particular nation, as Durrell was, his protagonist becomes a citizen of his own consciousness. Through his existential efforts to make sense of himself, and his world, he is an example of modern man. No longer able to put his trust in the Old World security, shattered by two World Wars, he turns inwards, seeking to define himself through the terms Freudian thought has provided.
