Serbian reflective citizens and the art of psychosocial listening and dialogue at the caesura

Abstract

‘Serbian reflective citizens’ is a psychosocial community practice and a new discipline conceived in Belgrade amidst Yugoslavia’s ‘Horrible Nineties’ by Dr Marina Mojović (the author) and Dr Jelica Satarić, both psychiatrists and psychotherapists in various Yugoslav public health psychiatric institutions. The therapeutic communities seemed to open a way for new paradigms to shed light and hope on overwhelming social despair, however, besides the Belgrade therapeutic community, ‘Serbian reflective citizens’ has a multitude of roots and ancestors in professional and wider social communities.The author explains the development of ‘Serbian reflective citizens’ using a metaphor of caesura at birth, discussing the history and methodology, its grassroots style, numerous ancestors, ways (and spaces) of being, its building blocks, names and other identity aspects of this new community practice and discipline, with particular mention of a recent example of a newly-formed reflective citizens branch in Italy. The mentioned caesura of birth is also considered by the author as a transitional space, a place where, as Marina Abramović would say, ‘The artist is present’. The Northfield experiments are seen as transcending the caesura and, as such, particularly mentioned at the 2nd International Belgrade Conference on Reflective Citizens in 2014, ‘Learning through Experience about Inclusion/Exclusion Phenomena in and between Traditions of Bion, Foulkes and Main’.