A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Conflicts and Reconciliation in Groups and Society by Gila Ofer (review)

Abstract

issn 0362-4021 © 2019 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring 2019 61 1 Correspondence should be addressed to Stephanie Lemor, PsyD, 113 University Place, Suite 1014, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: DrStephanieLemor@gmail.com. Book Review A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Conflicts and Reconciliation in Groups and Society. Edited by Gila Ofer. London: Karnac Books, 2017, 222 pp. Reviewed by Stephanie Lemor1 A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Conflicts and Reconciliation in Groups and Society, edited by Gila Ofer, PhD, brings together 12 essays, some of which were presented at the 2012 conference Conflict and Reconciliation in Groups, Couples, Family, and Society in Athens, Greece. The essays, divided into four parts, use cases from history, literature, culture, and psychology to deepen our understanding of conflict and reconciliation. Overall, the book is highly informative and succeeds in drawing a thorough and clear picture of conflict and reconciliation as they relate to the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and larger social worlds. In the first section, “Between the Social and the Psyche,” chapter 1 describes the way that conflict stays alive through a process author Vamik Volkan names transgenerational transmission. He provides several examples to explain the phenomenon by which adults, or “depositors,” pass memories and images on to their children, who then become the “reservoirs” of the adults’ externalized trauma. The author suggests that, as future generations struggle to contend with these previous traumas, this process sustains larger, group-based mental representations of conflict. As a reader, this chapter sets the tone to understand the potent, and long-lasting, impact of conflict on generations of people. It also suggests the way that conflict is maintained through both intrapersonal experience of trauma and collective, or shared, experience of these narratives. The second and third sections of the book, “Process of Building an Interpersonal Bridge in the Group” and “The Social and the Group,” respectively, focus on whether these concepts are intra- and/or interpersonal phenomena. In chapter 3, 62 lemor author Gila Ofer highlights forgiveness as an essential part of overcoming conflict. Using examples from group therapy, she points out that to achieve forgiveness, both an internal process (i.e., maturing ego capabilities) and an interpersonal process (dependent on interaction between two or more people) are critical. Similarly, in the third section of the book, in chapter 8, author Haim Weinberg explains that safety in groups can be disturbed by conflict, because each party may get stuck, or “submit” to his or her subjective experience of the conflict. According to Weinberg, the therapist’s role is to help group members move from “submission to surrender,” from feeling trapped in the injustice done to them to a place where mutual recognition can lead to reconciliation. Here, again, both interpersonal and intrapersonal processes are essential to reaching reconciliation and growth. In contrast to this idea of dual processes, authors Isaura Manso Neto and Mario David explore, in chapter 5, the way that group settings, over individual processes, are critical for exploring anger and aggression and can more successfully shift these feelings from destructive to helpful within the context of group conflict. Outside of the chapter on rage and aggression, most of the authors in the third section emphasize the idea that confronting conflict and moving toward reconciliation is a shared process, within oneself and between self and others. For me the chapters in the fourth section—“Processes of Reconciliation in InterGroups ”—stood out as the richest, by way of case illustration and applicability. In the first chapter of the section, author Uri Levin describes a well-known psychology experiment, Sherif’s Robber Cave, to highlight conflicts that occur when groups naturally form distinctions between “us” and “them.” The author makes use of this study, as well as citing literature from psychologists like Ogden, Klein, and Bion, to illustrate that the natural formation of these divisions is an impulsive process rooted in innate behavior but that may not be based in reality; Levin calls this magical thinking and suggests that this type of thinking sustains and leads to further conflict. Levin suggests that these forces may be mediated against by focusing on “real thinking” within the conflict to drive reconciliation rather than blindly trusting...