with Nimer Said. Task and Design The title of the three Nazareth-Conferences – “Germans and Israelis: The Past in the Present” –, was its program. It spoke of two national groups and suggested to recognize the past of the relationship between the two target groups in the present. Thus, the conferences were able to become a place where individual and group identities could meet and where was given the opportunity to explore the chances and risks of such an encounter. The task was to find out how the current relationship to the other group was influenced by belonging to the own and how the presence of this ratio was influenced by the past. Although it was intended, thereby also to detect the underlying, unconscious fantasies, the target was not therapeutic, but learning at the moment of encounter. To address this difficult task undisturbed by the everyday life of the participants, the design of conferences presented a secure framework. Members and staff lived together in a house and worked for six days in the topic. Conference language was English. The use of one's own national language was permissible, but only if all those present dominated this language. Through all this, it gradually should be possible to perceive one's own role, which was taken at the conference in the presence of others, and explore how this role was affected by past and current psychological and social processes. Participants As the conferences were assessed from the outset as a bold and risky venture and planned by psychoanalysts, the invitation first was directed to a kind of closed society: over various psychoanalytic associations and societies to their members. This changed later. Participants were members of the “groups in conflict” and members of staff. The staff's purpose was the management of the conference, he took over the responsibility for the frame, thus securing the boundaries of space, time and task; he presented consultants systematic or if necessary and was called for, and offered working hypotheses about what just happened. In the same time the staff was not an external observer, but as participating individuals and as a group involved in the entire process. The participants came, as it turned out, not only from Germany and Israel, so that the division of the world in the title appeared as a “fantasy on the part of the planners”. The largest age group was built by the so-called