Small Groups in Sao Paulo: A Cultural Clash?

This paper describes our experience of organising small groups for all participants at the IAGP congress ‘Connecting People, Communities and Cultures’. Not much is said about the very necessary pre-congress organisation. Instead, our focus is on the logistics of actually managing this ‘forgotten element’ in the group therapy culture of Brazil and IAGP. To enable us to make more sense of our experience, we researched both the participants’ and coordinators’ experiences through an email questionnaire afterwards. Although it might have been possible to arrive at a list of recommendations for the future, we came to the conclusion that it was probably more important to try to describe the inevitable misunderstandings that occur when bridging across cultures so that others can learn from them. We hope that through this description, others willing to take on the task of organising small groups in a very large congress will feel supported by our experience.;

Teresa von Sommaruga Howard (UK), Luis Russo (Brazil), Small Groups in Sao Paulo: A Cultural Clash? in "FORUM" 2/2007, pp 65-77, DOI: