ABSTRACT
The whole conference seemed to be so overly relaxed, detached, and disengaged that group relations practitioners had images of a "retirement village", a holiday settlement like Club Med or pensionados on a cruise ship. Perhaps the underlying assumption was "Make love, not war", banning "war" by banning competition and envy. Envy is a difficult subject, and in large parts of psychoanalytic theory and literature it simply does not exist. For example, an article about envy in the Netherlands Journal for Psychoanalysis in the late 1990s stated that for nearly fifty years that word had not appeared in Dutch psychoanalytic literature. Envy is one of the greatest taboos, even from Biblical times. After all, the second story in the Old Testament is about Cain murdering his brother Abel—rivalry and envy. Clearly in each group group relations practitioners had been lectured to, silenced, criticised, and attacked by people over seventy years of age, almost treated like stupid children.
