SPLITTING IMAGE: Seeing the Other in the Self
SPLITTING IMAGE: Seeing the Other in the Self
PCCA – Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities | 27–30 August 2026 | Platres, Cyprus
Posted
2 June 2026
The Tavistock Institute is very pleased to support this event
- Concerned about the growing trends of hatred, racism, and the violence toward difference and diversity?
- Wondering how you — and your communities and institutions — may, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to dynamics of othering and exclusion?
- Curious to explore the psychological and systemic forces that underpin splitting, projection, and the making of the Other?
We invite you to join us in Cyprus for this in-person conference, the culmination of the PCCA Series: “Othering and the hatred of Diversity”.
SPLITTING IMAGE:
Seeing the Other in the Self
Freud invited us to consider the impact of human social structures on the behaviour of individuals. 112 years ago, in 1914, he wrote “Thoughts for the times on war and death” and he wrote letters on the anatomy of destructiveness in which he said “there are many more cultural hypocrites than truly civilised men [and women]”.
As the world continues to play out these cultural hypocriticalities, it takes courage to face the way that we are all mobilised by our cultures to commit atrocities in action or thought. French philosopher, Voltaire wrote in 1765, “Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde, est en droit de vous rendre injuste” often translated as “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In such circumstances, the Other — who represents a different identity and divergent values — readily becomes the signifier of threat. The tendency, at both the individual and group level, is to project fears and hatred outwards, and to identify the Other as the enemy that exists beyond the boundaries of self and group. Unchecked splitting will deteriorate into violence and persecution.
The violence is not just manifest in bombs and guns (kinetic war) but in policies, systems of economic, welfare and education practices and least obvious but most virulent, narratives of superiority and inferiority/impure and pure. However, it is illusory to think that such splitting processes provide safety, homogeneity and preserved cultural or racial purity.
PCCA launched this series of conferences, 3 online and this in person conference, to explore and address the forces that drive othering and the hatred of diversity — forces that are not abstract, but present and active in the world around us and within us.
SPLITTING IMAGE: Seeing the Other in the Self is an invitation to those willing to arrest the processes of the automaton, blindly projecting onto the “other” that which cannot be owned from within the self – to find the courage to see the other in the self. Imagine if this could be done in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Iran and on the streets of cities in every country on every continent?
These conferences aim to enable participants to encounter and explore their internal stance and lived experience of othering, exclusion and inclusion — as these relate to their identities and experiences of self and others within the conference setting. This is so as to foster deeper understanding of these societal dynamics and reduce the unconscious influence of such internal stances in everyday life.
