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Opinion is divided as to whether or not some cultures and some societies manage conflict better than others. What is clear, though, is that some societies pass through periods of intractable conflict. Northern Ireland, South Africa, the Middle East, Europe during the conflict between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, the conflict of Muslims and Christians in Indonesia today: all of these are examples. They are situations in which negotiation, coercion, and avoidance have all been tried but without lasting success, at least for many years. Northern Ireland and South Africa seem now to be emerging from conflict although violence remains high. No-one now remembers the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, unless they read Dante. We as psychotherapists are familiar with enmeshed couples and families who cannot separate but cannot stop fighting. Many of us are also familiar with organizations in intractable conflict. Indeed, in the UK, psychotherapy organizations seem to have a particular susceptibility to this state. What makes for an intractable conflict can be deduced to some degree from this week. These are conflicts which should be solved by negotiation because each party has something that the other wants, and continues to want. But negotiation fails because there is no trust, or because there is a history of such negativity that neither party can concede. Withdrawal is not possible because Catholics and Protestants, Muslim and Christian, live side by side and anyway both think that the other has something that they want. Studies of intractable conflict show that the conflict itself becomes a part of the identity of the conflicting parties. Young Catholic men growing up in Belfast earned the respect of their peers by attacks on Protestants and, conversely, not to attack Protestants was to demonstrate a reprehensible lack of loyalty to one's community. Failure to prosecute the conflict becomes a reason for shame. In a later week we will consider intrapsychic conflict, one of whose properties is also intractability. Psychotherapists have tried to find reasons for this. Freud's postulation of a repetition compulsion is one. I have argued that shame may be also be a reason for intractable personal conflict, and we shall return to this in a later week.
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This project
is funded by the Leonardo da Vinci programme, project number UK/01/B/F/PP/129_387,
2000-2003 |