The long haired young woman standing waiting under the gas light outside the forge could have belonged to any time in the last two and a half centuries; a woman waiting for her lover, a daughter for her father, a wife for her husband, a member of the oldest profession for a client. In fact she was a psychotherapist, a relatively new profession, transplanted from Hampstead to the surreal surroundings of old industrial Sheffield, to this once vibrantly functioning forge now preserved in Victorian aspic. Inside the forge building, now an industrial museum, the "clean machine",the largest rolling mill in Europe performed its sterile in/out motion to the spectators; the master craftsmen beat their steel strips into surgical instruments, surrounded by nice archive pictures of buffers, stampers, grinders and other practitioners of the curious art of producing the internationally known Sheffield cutlery.
A stone's throw across the sluggish, quietly flowing and no longer poisonous River Don, the hospitality of the Stakis Hotel eased the discomfort of those travelling from the metropolis and other far-flung places to the home of "The Full Monty".
Psychotherapy and the Public Sphere was an excellent conference, with a good distribution of speakers integrating a wide range of topics from the intense microcosms of internal worlds and perspectives to the wider political, international and media dimensions, with an awesome and enriching mingling of agencies and disciplines and approaches.
Congratulations and thanks to Christopher and the Conference team.
But did we the professionals, in our cocoon of theory and practice, meet with the ordinary public sphere of Sheffield? Only a few years ago, the Don valley was in full flow, stark, black, filthy, noisy. Driving through, you would see crucibles as big as houses pouring molten steel, and the "clean machine" in its awesome and dangerous power working as the lynch pin of the steel mill. Conference delegates would only see the City in its post-Tory dereliction and surgical cleanliness. The Thatcher-McGregor combination had smashed the mining and steel industries of South Yorkshire more effectively than any tilt hammer, and left it lost, unbalanced, skewed, deformed.
As a young doctor I treated the specific illnesses of the trade of these good working men, concrete of action and expression, but securely attached to their families and their trades, (although I doubt this would show on the AAI). As a grown up psychiatrist, I tried to help the individuals and families with the violence of this dislocation from their culture and found my training sometimes lacking. Human reality and pain often go beyond theory and, as Derek Summerfield demonstrated in his work with victims of torture, needs to be heard individually.
The 1999 meeting continued the IAFP tradition of being a crucible where people, theories and patients suffering met to forge new ideas, alliances and amalgams.
But did we meet Sheffield?