About FEPTO

History

History FEPTO. In the seventies and eighties a variety of organisations evolved offering international seminars for psychodrama, from the Louvain (Leuven) Seminar 1972 (106 participants out of 8 European countries) to the Cattolica meeting 1987 and Moreno Memorials in 1989 at Baden Austria with an opening for Eastern European countries.

The more concrete project to gather European trainers in one association emerged in Montreal at the IAGP Congress of 1992. The first meeting was convened by Grete Leutz and Pierre Fontaine with the local organiser Göran Högberg in 1993 in Stockholm (29 participants from 17 countries). There were yearly meetings under the name ESCOPE (European Study and Co-ordination of Psychodrama Education). More > Annual Meeting History

1996, in Louvain, the association was founded, as FEPTO, a constitution was voted on, and the first council was elected. It was agreed as an international non-profit organisation in accordance with Belgian law. The statutory address is (c/o Pierre Fontaine) Herestraat 21 in 3000 Louvain, Belgium. The working language is English but sometimes at the annual meeting there is a working subgroup speaking French, Italian or German.

FEPTO Newsletter 4.3, January 2003

Introductory note

A year ago (2002), when Renée still was our president, she asked me to write the history of the beginning of FEPTO, the roots, for our members who joined later. I can only tell my story and I know stories of origins become always mythical stories. So I am cautious. I think in a way we construct reality, but we have to do this together (social constructivism) in talking together. So this is only a draft. Please can we make in Sofia the real story together Gretel, Göran, Gábor… you were there all and stay in my mind.Even if it was more based on my memories and impressions than on archives, I started to write this history seriously but at the end I felt it was a love story and I put in brackets and headings making this clear and I felt it was good so.

Prehistory

In practice the history of FEPTO starts in 1992 in Montreal, at the IAGP Congress. Surely other earlier European meetings prepared this. So I remember personally Zagreb (IAGP) 1986, Cattolica 1987, Barcelona 1988, Baden/Bad Vöslau 1989, Amsterdam (IAGP) 1989. They brought psychodramatists from Eastern and Western Europe, from North and South together.1992 Montreal (a decisive meeting)

In Montreal we had different large meetings of psychodramatists inside the Congress building and also outside. So I remember specially a large lunch meeting in a Chinese restaurant, where projects were made.After Montreal, Gretel Leutz wrote to remind me of these projects and, together with Göran Högberg, we started to knit together a group and to organise a meeting. Gretel and I wrote to people about our project and invited them and Göran organised the meeting in Stockholm, on the local level.Before the meeting, a questionnaire was sent to each participant, asking the identity of their organisation, historical background, training scheme, role of the psychodramatist in their country and their view on the future. The answers were published in a booklet sent to the participants as “Preliminary documents” one month before.

1993 Stockholm (first group dating on a lake side)

On October 16-18, 1993 was this first meeting. The location was very fine. It was in a little complex of red painted wooden houses, near a lake, on the country side in Huddinge (South of Stockholm). We were 28 participants from 17 countries in Europe and near-East. The travel costs were shared between all participants. We had meetings in large groups and also in little groups every time changing composition. There was a presentation of the psychodrama training in the different countries and we learned from our diversity but there was also pair supervision and real psychodrama. We had a nice party at Monica’s house with music and singing.Charge was given to Pintèr Gábor, Pirkko Hurme and myself at the end of the Stockholm meeting, to organise the next meeting in Oxford, just before the International Conference organised by the British Psychodrama Association. Marcia Karp and Paul Holmes were our hosts.

A name At the start we called ourselves ISCoPE for IAGP Study and Coordination of Psychodrama Education. We were, at the start very faithful to IAGP, our womb. We asked the members of our group to also be members of IAGP. But not everybody in Stockholm agreed with this. Later some people, outside our group, protested against the use of IAGP in our name. Even if it was in some way discussed at the Montreal Congress, it was never put on the agenda and approved by the board. So later, in 1994, it becomes ESCoPE (E for European) but simply called European Psychodrama Trainers Group.

The Oxford meeting was prepared in Budapest by Gábor and I. It was fine working together, planning the content and the process. Pirkko could not come to Budapest but was in charge of the financial aspects. We invite Zerka Moreno at the end of our meeting, and she accepted. We wished also to make the link with the IAGP Buenos Aires Congress and invited Monica Zuretti, who sent Dr Stola.

1994 Oxford (in the large world-question of identity)

The College in Oxford was a nice place. We were 33 participants. We had some good meetings, in little groups, on our practice. If in Stockholm, we were in a little cozy place with friends together, in Oxford we were in a big and interesting old city, just before a large congress. I felt brought in the large world, sailing in the open sea, confronted with new participants who asked questions about our identity, our goals, our staff and responsibilities. Our organisation had to be adult and we were growing up but not adults. We were at that moment in search of ourselves. So the visit of Zerka, at the end of our meeting, was that of a supporting mother for us and gave us also more credit and identity.

At the end of the Oxford meeting, the group asked me to be for one year the coordinator of the group and to organise the next meeting. I asked Renée Oudijk and Ella Mae Shearon, the most nearby trainers to help me – they accepted – and we proposed to organise the next meeting in Louvain.

1995 Louvain 1 (we wish to stay together)

Our third meeting was June 2-4 1995 near Louvain in a Franciscan monastery in the woods: large rooms but somewhat monastic. It was a pleasure for me to invite the group to my house and garden in the evening. Meanwhile a new service, manned by Renée, with a secretary and a psychodramatist-journalist produced an ESCoPE-paper (news, reports of subgroups, messages…). It was distributed each morning at breakfast. After a good warming up, we worked successively on two subjects: theory and supervision, the five subgroups bringing, in a playful way, to the general meetings their ideas through action.

The second part of the meeting was devoted to a quest for the objectives of ESCoPE. What do we need? How do we see ESCoPE in 1996-2000? So we discussed really the questions of our identity. There were different tendencies: club of trainers or federation of organisations. We had large meeting rooms and for decisions people expressed their choices by moving, taking distance, explaining and grouping together. There was a democratic tendency to vote for decisions and there was no unanimity but a desire to stay together and set up an association and a proposition to call our group Us=we. So we decided to continue our Louvain meeting in February without new participants, closed doors, and create a constitution.

So there was a troika of committees: a constitutional committee chaired by Giovanni Boria, an organising committee with Renée Oudijk for Louvain 2. And I was in charge of a committee for collation of training programs.

1996 Louvain 2 (closed doors: working in intimacy on a contract)

The constitutional committee had done a very good job between the two Louvain meetings by preparing together the text of the statutes sending it to people, receiving and discussing the proposed modifications. So the voting of all articles progressed rapidly. We had the first board elections. Many people wished to participate actively and we nominated 15 board members.

Giovanni was elected president, Ella Mae vice president – secretary and Renée treasurer. Many committees were composed.

The committee collated and published a new “directory of institutes” with 2 pages of information about 31 training institutes. There was a wish to come to mutual agreement on the base of minimal training standards. There was a list of the training hours of the different institutes but establishing minimal standards was not possible.

1997 Sulzano (a place for a honeymoon)

Here Pierre story stops and he invites a next writer to take the pen and to continue our story about FEPTO. We warmly thank him for starting to help us remember…

FEPTO Newsletter 3.1 June 2000

FEPTO started for me as ESCOPE. It was about psychodrama education in Europe and Scandinavian countries. We have expanded to Mediterranean and European Training Organisations as our focus. I liked the first meeting we had in Stockholm organised by Göran Högberg and others as we tended to psychodramatise everything we could. We divided up into small groups looking at varying aspects of the trainer/trainee scenarios and compared and contrasted how we do certain things from country to country.

There was also room for personal histories to be enacted and particular dilemmas of the trainer role to be dealt with in discussion or in action. I think the thing I learned from that time and the ensuing meetings is how important it is for the host country to be the planner/designer for the event. It then has a theme, continuity and a particular presentation style.

I wonder if it is possible to keep that in mind for future meetings.

FEPTO Newsletter 10.1 March 2010

I have come back to FEPTO after a few years of being absent due to some disagreement in the management of the organization I found after being away due to a post of much responsibility at another international organization.

FEPTO was first born as a common interest of Psychodrama practitioners, mainly clinicians, from many of the European countries. As many of our members know, this interest was mainly a need of encounter and a need for sharing common experiences as well as certain curiosity to learn from the transcultural aspects influencing the practice of Psychodrama in the different countries.
It took several meetings and long hours of discussion and exchange before the group found a way to put those interests in an organized manner, so that the emotions involved in the foundation of the organization could be expressed in a comprehensive way, at least for the majority of the participants in the foundation meetings.

Psychodrama first appeared as the least prominent sibling of psychoanalysis and as such had to struggle hard to survive. In the same manner that Psychoanalysis was debated as a more or less valid tool to soothe the suffering of human beings, Psychodrama was openly disqualified and excluded by the more “scientific” world and, at times, taken as a gimmick of the illuminated few that would follow such trend. This battle is fought to this day, a fact hardly admitted by psychodramatists.

The hardship confronting Psychodrama forced its founder and close followers to open the new technique to people far from the prestigious universities and hospitals where Psychoanalysis was presented and debated upon. So, at the same time in which some physicians came close to Psychodrama, so did people from other professions and public in general. Some of them trained as equals.

They all became psychodramatists in time and the more daring would add the term psychotherapist or would simply replace one term by the other. This fact was to be costly for the technique at times in history.

The term “psychodramatist” comprises many different professions and also several attitudes. So, while for some it is a skill to be added to a profession or a more specialized way of doing psychotherapy, for others is a way of doing and a profession itself.
“We are all equal, but not the same” goes the saying and this is most applicable to the psychodramatic world. It is impossible to conceive that a psychodramatist psychiatrist or a psychodramatist psychologist could be the same, do the same things or have the same clientele that may have a person not acquainted with psychopathology at all.
When I see that there is a special interest in identifying all psychodramatists as “psychotherapists”, something starts smelling funny to me.
Some training organizations appear to have different classifications for the way their trainees may operate, but I do not think that all take the pain to make those differences, even when the differences may be in paper and in all formal ways possible.
Due to those facts, Psychodrama is not always accepted by insurance companies as a psychotherapeutic method they would support.

A colleague friend tried to explain to me the difference between the “Old FEPTO” and the “new FEPTO”. He explained to me that it was a matter of growth. Well, it could be so! Nevertheless, FEPTO had in its core a messianic attitude since its conception. There were always members in FEPTO with strong political attitudes as well as religious believes that always tinted the professional aspects of the association.

I will not go into details that would illustrate this perception of mine.
Nevertheless, it is not too difficult to identify these and other aspects in the organization if one is prone to analyse groups.
These aspects, in my eyes, remain as part of the organization and, I believe, pervade it; in spite of its growth and the burocratic aspects resulting from that growth.

During the meeting in Ghent I had a most perplexing experience.
In the course of one of the coffee breaks a gentleman approached me when he noticed I was by myself at a given moment. In a low voice – or so it appeared to me – he spoke about my institute as not fulfilling the requirements needed to be a member of FEPTO. I looked at him in disbelief and all I could say to him was what indeed the facts were: “I do not have an institute”. He clarified that he was referring to The International Institute of Human Relations “Dean and Doreen Elefthery” for which I work but, I am not the director nor have anything to do with the administrative responsibilities of that entity. I suggested to the gentleman that he would write to the Institute and notify its president or director about the news he was giving me.
He gently refused to do that and made me understand that the decision to step out of FEPTO should be taken by the Institute based on the information he was giving me!
I was taken aback, not so much by the information, but by the ways used.
The feeling was that a person to whom I had never been introduced and that had overlooked the formality of introducing himself was asking someone else to kindly commit suicide because he did not want to be accused of murder.
The man took away understanding that his job had been done and I could hardly believe my ears.

I made a casual remark about the incident to a dear colleague, also a founding member of FEPTO. She, in a most naïve way said to me:
“Oh, Roberto, just ask them what requirement they want from the Institute and say that you have them. That is what I did. I hardly have any students, but I have written that I have in my school what they say I must have”.

I have presented these two vignettes only to illustrate the conclusions to which I have come. While it is easily understood that these characteristics are necessarily implied in the growth of the organization and that the organization has grown as a result of the prestige given to be a member of it, it is hard to understand that FEPTO may have to join another European organization that promises to give accreditation to FEPTO members as psychotherapists. As far as I know FEPTO members should not have a need from another organization. If this is so, then I have to ask myself if FEPTO may be joined for what it is or if it is joined by certain members and organizations as a way of getting a little they could not get any other way.

Furthermore, do all accredited training organizations deserve that name? Do these organizations practice what is written in the programs they present in their application to belong to FEPTO? How many students graduate each year at any given organization?

All organizations need to reflect about the dynamics established in them as a human group. I ask myself if the time for FEPTO to revise its dynamics and reflect about itself has come.