Teresa von Sommaruga Howard

Teresa's career was prefigured by many cultural influences. She was born in England of a German Jewish father and British mother who was not Jewish. They immigrated to New Zealand when she was a child. She trained as an architect and systemic family therapist with specific expertise conducting median and large groups. She regularly conducts social dreaming matrices, median and large groups in different places around the world.  

She was the 47th Annual Foulkes Lecturer for the Group Analytic Society International in 2025, The Architecture of the Large Group: Politics, Community and Culture [The long thread from Frankfurt].

She has written extensively about the application of large group ideas and transgenerational transmission of trauma. She co-edited The Journey Home: Emerging out of the shadow of the past with David Clark (Peter Lang, 2023) She also co-authored Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects (Wiley, 2010) with Karen A. Franck. This book uses mini case studies to illustrate the importance of designers developing ‘good-enough’ relationships with those who commission and use buildings and places. How these relationships can be made ‘sustainable-enough’ through all the inevitable complications of the design process are also described.  Reviewed in Group Analysis.

Teresa is an Honorary Member of the IGA and Fellow of the IAGP.

Farideh Dizadji

Farideh Dizadji is a group analyst, a psychotherapist, psychodynamic counsellor and organisational consultant. She has worked as the clinical director of Nafsiyat and a clinical supervisor at the Women’s Therapy Centre, and the clinical director of Kids Company’s principal London centre. She is a supervisor of Individual clinical work on the IGA qualifying course and Self-Reflective Practice Group conductor at Tavistock Relationships. She is a clinical supervisor at Maya Counselling Centre and Freedom from Torture (FFT).  She also has a private practice. She holds a MSc in Group Psychotherapy and MSc in Psychodynamic Counselling both from Birkbeck, University of London, and is a member of the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA). She has worked at the University of Hertfordshire, the Lorrimore Centre, and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. She was an associate of the Centre for Psychotherapy and Human Rights.

Before joining the psychotherapy community, she obtained  a BA in Political Science at Tehran University, and an MBA at the University of California Los Angeles, (UCLA). After returning to Iran she worked as a systems analyst while training as a lawyer. During the late ’60s and mid 70s, as a student in the USA and in Iran, she was involved in many international socio-political movements. In Iran, she was a member of National Unity of Women which was a major feminist force throughout that period. After the 1979 Revolution she was forced to leave Iran as a political refugee and lived in West Berlin before settling in London

Mike Tait

Mike has worked in therapeutic communities and psychiatric units since 1981 in a variety of roles including: member of the residential staff, drama-therapist, group analyst, consultant and organizational group analyst. In that time he has participated in median and large groups, including: community meetings, psychodrama and drama therapy groups, staff dynamics groups and ward rounds in which both staff and patients gave feedback to each other. Most of those have been with young people or the staff that work with them.

Mike is a Member IGA and British Association of Dramatherapy.

Mike has run seminars and workshops for the IGA, the British Association of Dramatherapy, the Squiggle Trust, Limbus and EPI - usually in relation to his experience in therapeutic communities and often in relation to the thinking of Winnicott and Foulkes. Mike has been involved in international trainings in group analysis, in shadow workshops, is a Squiggle Trustee [an organization promoting the work of Winnicott] and has been writing and facilitating facilitating online readings of 'The Visitors’ - an evolving novel exploring group processes. Part 1 has recently been self-published and includes paintings by Marcus Price.

Dick Blackwell

Dick was born into the post WW2 British Labour movement, the son of a trade unionist father and grew up in a climate of Christian Socialism. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence on sports fields. He went to university in 1967 to study Business Management where, following Les Evenements of May 68, he became part of the New Left; campaigning for 'student power' and supporting anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist Third World Liberation movements. This background has informed and provided the ideological basis of all his subsequent work. 

During my time at university Dick joined the Samaritans working as a volunteer befriending the 'suicidal and despairing’ over the telephone and face-to-face. He graduated as a full member of the IGA in 1983. He also trained in family therapy and was later appointed to the staff of the Institute of Family Therapy. He first encountered Pat de Maré on the IGA Introductory Course in 1974, and joined his first experiential Large Group the following year, continuing for five years.

Onel Brooks

Onel Brooks is particularly interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is a member of the core teaching team of SAFPAC (www.safpac.co.u k), a senior lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology, Psychology Department, Roehampton University, BACP-accredited and UKCP-registered as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as an existential analytic psychotherapist. He worked for many years with adolescents and adults, in therapeutic communities, the NHS and in voluntary organisations, as well as in universities. He also contributes to the teaching at The Philadelphia Association.