Grup d´Analisi Barcelona

1987-1989 IAGP: Pioneers’ Re-encounter

1980-1998 From Groupanalysis to Group of Analysis (Grup d’Anàlisi) 2

Introduction. The relationship of Juan Campos with the IAGP goes back to the eighties of last century when Juan wrote to the then president Jay W. Fidler, commenting that to him it seemed very important that the Association admitted not only individual members but also member organizations, and asking if the Spanish group association SEPTG could become a member of the IAGP. Jay Fidler sent him a 1980 Membership Directory and forms for individual as well as organizational membership inscription. He also informed Juan that the membership committee was in the process of elaborating clearer criteria for membership and that he would pass on to them the correspondence they just had had. In 1983, the Board of Directors invites Juan to join the board and it is then that he becomes an individual member of the Association. The “umbrella function” of the IAGP, its capacity of serving as a container of inter-group work and relations, has always been of great importance for Juan and he never stopped encouraging the societies and groups he was in contact with to join this platform. As to the CAOA (Consultative Assembly of Organizational Affiliates), it is not until 1995 that a Bilingual Report[1]  is presented which analyzes the answers of the then twenty-four member organizations to a twenty-five item questionnaire.

Being an active Board member for more than 15 years, in the IAGP Juan Campos opens spaces for two types of developments: one for the dialogue about the shared history between all members of the Association and another for the dialogue between different group approaches which are present right from the beginning.

1987-1989 IAGP: Pioneers’ Re-encounter

Pioneers’ Re-encounter: The Fathers of our Constitution in a fishbowl” , is a panel discussion celebrated  during the X IAGP Congress in Amsterdam in 1989 which had emerged in a conversation in the previous Zagreb Congress in 1986 with Max Rosenbaum and Raymond Battegay, both pioneer members of the Association. Between these congresses Juan asked for the contribution of other pioneers and the following joined Max Rosenbaum and Raymond Battegay: Zerka Moreno, Anne Schützenberger, Elizabeth Foulkes, Ana Quiroga, and Raul Usandivaras.  Part of the archives we publish is a long and interesting interview Juan made to Zerka Moreno while she attended a Psychodrama Congress in Barcelona in 1988. The rest are testimonies of this intense and continuous investigation and communication of Juan Campos with the pioneers in search of this common history he thought which could give us the key to the present and the future of our Association. Many years later, in 1995, on occasion of another IAGP Congress in Buenos Aires, Juan Campos closes this historical inter-group line of thought with a bilingual Spanish/English edition of “A history of the IAGP: Facts and Findings”.


[1] 1995. CAOA (Consultative assembly of organizational affiliates). Organizational affiliates of IAGP: their origins, objectives, projects and expectations. First Bilingual Report.