Vignettes from ICP 2012

The 30th ICP (International Congress of Psychology) held in Cape Town at the Convention Centre turned out to be a great place to meet former colleagues, to stretch one's psychological imagination - the programme went to 350 pages - and to marvel at the international scope of psychology. There were  five and a half thousand registrants from many different countries attending dozens of parallel streams - an amazing experience. There were disciplines I'd never heard of - like psychological physics and there were so many papers in neuropsychology, one could've probably ended up passing Neuropsych 301 by the end.

I chose to go to presentations connected with Human Rights issues and also some of the keynote debates and lectures:

• There was a so-called Controversial Debate between Mark Solms (who describes himself professionally as a neuro-psychoanalyst) and Barbara Wilson - a rehabilitative neuropsychologist. I have a huge respect for Mark Solms - he is a brilliant lecturer, has actually founded a new discipline which has brought him world recognition and has done amazing things on his Solms-Delta wine farm - and here comes the but - he started off the debate by telling Professor Wilson that he was frightened of her handbag! If one uses the Freudian theories to which he ascribes, one could translate this as him saying that he was scared she would castrate him with her womb (or her genitals) - not her brain, her womb! Actually, she did quite a good job of challenging him with her brain - she had actually taken excerpts from some of his published interpretative understandings of his patients. Out of context and maybe even in context, they really did sound ludicrous. Ultimately though they were really talking about different things - Wilson was talking about physical recovery from injury, Solms was talking about patients needing to derive meaning from the emotions, thoughts and fantasies they have when injured, in order to recover.
• There was a multidisciplinary team from Israel/Palestine who were looking at the psychosocial impact on families and victims of child detentions in the Occupied territories, as well as the effect of war on Israeli soldiers, who are also not yet adults. Some of this felt very familiar - the kind of work OASSSA did with detainee families and youth on the run in the 1980's. What was unique was that they had managed to come together to present their work. 
• Then there was Michael Rutter on the nature/nurture debate. This was a lovely lecture on the current state of research on genes and their expression. No silly superficialities here! all to do with the complex interplay between genes and the environments we create for them.
• And so we come to Elizabeth Loftus - scourge of therapists (me among them) whose clients start recovering occluded memories within the safety of a therapy relationship. Proponent of the so-called False Memory Syndrome, now redeemed in my view, by the Innocence Project in the US, which has had 300 prisoners released using DNA evidence which proves that they had been falsely identified by the victim. Nevertheless, she is a clever researcher and her findings about the malleability of memory seem incontrovertible. She is not however above using cheap tricks to make her point. Cheapest of all was to show US politicians embarrassed by false memory lapses. She claimed these were the most intelligent and educated among us. Maybe.... - but also the most well-schooled in being economical with the truth!
• Highlight for me and apparently quite a lot of other people was the symposium in which I presented - "The relevance of applied psychoanalysis in community settings in South Africa." This was because it was such a beautifully constructed symposium of moving papers with extremely dedicated and experienced presenters, such as Professor Lou-Marie Kruger and Dr Astrid Berg, convened and put together by the SAPC (South African Psychoanalytic Confederation). It was very well-attended - probably over 100 people and I felt very privileged to have been included.



l.to r.:Lindsay Fredman, Margaret Green, Astrid Berg, Lou-Marie Kruger, Lisa Padfield and Karen Gubb.

• And lastly, there was a movie: "Doctors on the Dark Side" which I think was brought by a US doctor and a psychologist, who belong to professional social responsibility organizations. This was a harrowing documentary film about US torture and rendition and the complicity of doctors and psychologists in torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo - something I wrote about in a previous blogpost. To see it visually enacted however was really powerful. There was a panel of speakers afterwards which included members of the APA ethics committee. I learned a lesson - these are Steven Reisner's 'bad guys' and there they were appearing as if they were the 'good guys'. Yes, they made mistakes, they should've acted earlier to stop their members being involved in interrogations but they were having such difficulty defining what constituted torture etc. etc. I doubt I was the only one in the room with heated feelings. Luckily, there was a very eloquent member of  UNHRC present, who pointed out that it is not difficult to decide at which prisons doctors and psychologists should not be present - if the Red Cross is refused entry and is not allowed to visit prisoners, those prisons should not have psychologists in advisory roles. Simple as that. The event ended without coming to blows, but the background story - the one in the wings so to speak - the enmeshment of psychology research funding with the military in the US, was not exposed.

There could be 100 blogposts about this conference and everyone of them would be different - so far, if you've got here, you've read mine.
Bravo to the South African organizing committee who did such a great job!