Appreciating ‘Le Non/Nom’

Experiential Session One

A hiccup broke an interval of silence, which was ignored, followed by meandering comments about how to begin. I said that we had begun, and had assumed the hiccup to be a commentary about what had, as well as what might transpire. ‘No, I’m sorry, my stomach, go on.’ The speaker was a visibly anxious figure, seated in a chair noticeably pulled back from the circle. After a few minutes, she bolted from the room.

‘Theresa does that often at our meetings, she comes in and out,’ a member informed me. ‘She keeps her seat back, answers her phone.’

‘Yes, but she’s a very good writer and thinker,’ the director interjected.

Theresa returned and the former discussion of how to proceed resumed.

I addressed Theresa: ‘Are you ok?’ She seemed surprised when I informed her that, in her absence, she had been the subject of concern. ‘I had another endo [endoscopy]—almost couldn’t make it, gerd acts up bad.’

Apparently Theresa’s news of the cause of her spasmodic gastric distress was a revelation to other members. ‘I’ve been uneasy about initiating a dialog with you.’ Now they inquired about her seating position and phone behaviour. ‘Well, my ex-husband threatens me—I have an order of protection. One of my kids still has a need to see him—but they’re all [her children] big successes. So it is not all bad. I’m going to shut up now.’

The director attempted to shore Theresa by encouraging her to talk further, about what was positive. I reassured the director that Theresa and I were doing fine and did not need her help. ‘I’m expressing my opinion,’ she protested. ‘No therapeutic opinions, just your feelings,’ I chastised. ‘Not if I don’t want to.’ I said: ‘That goes for all of us,’ which received a warm laugh from her and others.

Group members spoke of ‘digesting difficult material’ and the danger of ‘ruminating’. Carola said that in the group she was conducting, she had no choice. Out of frustration with her co-therapist, she withdrew into her own thoughts. She did not want to withdraw here. I commented ‘I don’t think the issue of co-therapy is settled in our group,’ which brought laughter. ‘You’re the boss,’ the Director exclaimed, and I nodded dubiously.

Several interesting issues were raised as the participants caught up with each other and related to me, and then, Lukas broke in: ‘I need to talk about feelings related to something sexual. Something happened during the [recent European] Conference. I felt invaded. I have a lot of important feelings relating to sexuality to talk about in this group.’

Michael and Carola encouraged him to go on. I said I was not comfortable with talking about sexual feelings so early in our workshop. Some members concurred, but Michael was disappointed: ‘I guess we will talk about something else if you want.’ I clarified that we could talk about sex, but that first I wanted to talk about talking about sex. I wanted to understand more about ‘why now?’ and if the topic felt sufficiently safe for other members. No one would benefit if Lukas became the target of voyeuristic curiosity.

Pierra, trembling, said ‘I was in your group. I had a terrible headache the next day, didn’t know why. Could not talk. I did not know what happened [in that group] until now.’ She began to cry, and as did Lukas and Rebecca. The director asked Theresa to get the tissues, which were near her, and then began to address Pierra. ‘No co-leading,’ I interjected. ‘Let’s give Pierra a chance to talk.’

Lukas declared that he felt clarified and supported by the members who had spoken up. When he persisted in revisiting the Conference group and began once more to describe how upset he was by ‘a man’s actions’, I redirected him to consider how he was connecting to ‘this group’ and to me particularly. This was the first time Lukas mentioned the gender of the individual, and it remained unclear whether the man was a group member or the leader. But, I speculated, ‘Sooner or later, I will become “that guy”.’

Afternoon’s Case Conference

Sarah, a social worker on the hospital’s staff, had been approached by the clergy from a nearby fundamentalist community to work with a youth group sent from their villages for education. There were strictures, however. She had to work with a co-therapist from the sect who alone was to talk to the teenagers directly, and further, a clerical representative had to be present. ‘Any hint of challenge to their authority or point of view and I will be dismissed.’

The director helpfully turned our attention to the mores of the religious community, with which she had expertise, but which left Sarah out of the relational equation. After a while, I redirected, suggesting that for now, we focus on the psychology and therapeutic options of Sarah, the appointed leader.

Sarah reported feeling confused, worried, even frightened: how could she function effectively and have a voice without being dismissed? She had established quasi-therapeutic relationships with each of the potential group members and with the co-therapist, who seemed to share her dread of the students’ re-entry into their respective communities, known for female oppression and violence.

So, articulated bonds existed, I suggested. Sarah’s empathic presence modelled and conveyed an enduring—although unspoken—message of female empowerment. Sarah could function as a ‘double agent’, sheltering and nurturing her constituents and stimulating their intellectual development, all the while under the elders’ watchful eyes.

I thought to myself: a better allegory for our weekend group could not be scripted! Like Sarah, I was an outsider invited to educate and influence. To function with integrity, ³ I had to be willing to challenge an existing culture, in purview of its administrator. It was late in the day, there were other concepts to review, and I decided that ideas relating to parallel process could wait and be tested within an appropriate context.

Experiential Session Two

Theresa reported that she had stayed the night in town, at an expensive hotel, and slept like a baby. She reassured us: ‘That’s not all I’m getting from the weekend.’ She had been taking extensive notes the day before and gestured to them.

A swell of members attested to similar reactions, which I took as efforts to assuage Lea’s discomfort: ‘Back off, she doesn’t need protection.’

This was the first time Lea had spoken, and another new voice then cried out. ‘How do you know?’ Hilde led a foray of protests and reassurances, and when Lea began to cry, Hilde said I was ‘very nervy!’ I registered Hilde’s disapproval but maintained my inquiry.

At one point, Lukas turned to Michael: ‘You’ve been unusually quiet.’ ‘Have I? I’ve been watching and learning. [to me] I like the way you operate.’

‘I’m here, doing fine. I’m enjoying this a great deal. I speak when I want to,’ the director reassured her. Several members expanded on Lea’s theme of being ‘stuck’ in the middle in their families, past and present. Now was the time, I thought, to recall yesterday’s case conference, and Sarah’s predicament: how to cope with the elders while preserving her own mind and finding her own voice. Before closing, I reintroduced the dynamic between the director and myself, but while people seemed to understand the analogy, the idea—or my way of presenting it—did not have verbal traction. The putting-into-words process could ‘hurt’.

During the lunch break, the director reminded me to review the concept of combined individual–group psychotherapy, which I did during the lecture/discussion. A coffee break preceded the final process group, with an exchange that I found fortuitous, but not as I had anticipated.

Experiential Session Three

Almost all the members had spoken and I invited Max to join in. He haltingly complied: ‘Maybe the group is too big, and I like it if there is a smaller group. But I have been listening and getting a lot from this.’ ‘Yes, but you have more to say,’ I pursued.

‘Let the fellow be!’ Hilde cried out, playful but also serious. I complimented her for being comfortable enough to take me on. I explained—as if to her alone—that during the coffee break, Max and I had spoken. I had asked him if I could reference us to model how integrating dyadic communication into the group situation might work.

This seemed to satisfy the members and Max, and the subject of combined psychotherapy was dropped. Lukas took the opportunity to return to the topic of his Conference group and the lingering effects of the sexually aggressive man. Other voices joined in. Hilde: ‘I was there too. I didn’t speak up yesterday, which made me feel like I was [again] being a co-conspirator.’ The director volunteered that she was puzzled, since the Conference has a fine reputation and she did not hear from her colleagues about anything unusual or traumatic transpiring.

I too remained confused about the European Conference group, but which, despite being stimulated and curious, I did not want to make our focus. What was happening in our group was of greater concern. I persisted, but my inquiry met with silence that became uncomfortably long, and when I asked about it, longer still. The group seemed frozen and I seemed to have no options but to wait it out.

Lea, who yesterday had expressed a belief in her learning disability, finally came forth. ‘People are frightened by how you approached Max during the coffee break and pressured him.’

While I did not comprehend Lea and Michael’s perception of my ‘way’ of conducting, Max did: ‘No, he didn’t! I approached him.’

Apparently, many people had shared their misapprehension of my ‘doing’ Max, that is, of accosting him in the vestibule and pressuring him to verbally expose himself.

Max then divulged more than I would have ever relayed regarding his ‘social anxiety and insomnia’. ‘That’s why I always yawn in these sessions . . . I apologized and explained to Richard, and he just asked if he could invite me to say something—anything. I needed him to bring me in and I have done it! I won’t leave without having spoken up!’

Another silence had descended on the group—now one of relief and relaxation. A fantasy of verbal sexual abuse had been covertly transmitted among the members—felt, believed, responded to with fearful silence, and now, dissipated. And I could say confidently and with satisfaction: ‘So, I have become “that guy”’.

I took her remarks as a compliment to us both, told her so, and she agreed. Several others thanked Lea and Hilde for speaking up, and Lukas refocused on Max. ‘I’ve noticed your yawning—not only during this workshop, and wondered if we threatened you.’ Lea: ‘I wondered if you were like me, feeling that you weren’t able to understand.’

The experiential group was ending the way it began: attending to a member whose paraverbal behaviour—yawning—begged for naming and group reference.

Establishing ‘Le Non/Nom’ in the Group Context

Lacan (1977 [1958]) held that the psychoanalyst

knows better than anyone else . . . [to take] an everyday event for a fable addressed to whoever hath ears to hear . . . even the sigh of a momentary silence [may stand] for the whole lyrical development it replaces. (1977 [1958]: 43–4)

If this is so, the group leader must use such knowledge—relying on training, empathic intuition, and reverie—to structure the group to listen for and unpack into discursive language (the ‘Symbolic’ register) the ‘lyric’ of silent glances, hiccups, yawns, and the copious indications of covert and submerged relationships, such as existed in this workshop.

I was not imported for or interested in presenting a model of co-therapy, yet next to me—in physical and emotional proximity—was the esteemed director of the hospital and its group programme, to boot, a gracious host. In assessing the situation, I concluded that an immediate and ongoing leadership task was to loosen without severing the powerful and perhaps essential nonverbal bonds (Billow, 2003) between the director and each of us.

Having an affectionate and respectful rapport with the director gave me verbal and also enactive leverage to put the predicament front and centre. And too, I have worked on diplomatic (Billow, 2010a) skills—expressing power and preference—with a certain class of problematic participants, people like us: practitioners and students of group psychotherapy.

Our relationship could be used to advantage: providing understanding and enhancing meaning. To free members sufficiently to ‘nom,’ that is, to put words to an authentic experience, a diplomatic ‘non’ would be required, along with an implicit invitation for challenge and dissent. When I playfully chastised the director for ‘helping’ me with Theresa: ‘No therapeutic opinions, just your feelings,’ she spiritedly retorted: ‘Not if I don’t want to.’ ‘She would surrender gamely, but not forcibly submit’ (Ghent, 1990).

In directing and at times silencing our feisty director, I believe that we were both aware that there would be consequences, anticipated as well as unforeseen. Her influence on the group’s history and culture could not be detached from whatever would eventuate. It had been the custom for her to attend and participate in previous workshops; voluntary absence and exile would only amplify her presence in fantasy (Lacan’s ‘Imaginary’ register). I thought that the best option was to call attention to and verbally inspect the elephant in the room: the director’s relationship to the group, and specifically, to its invited presenter and designated, if temporary, leader.

Leadership Activates, Monitors, and Motivates ‘Le Nom’

Theresa’s hiccup expressed but could not discharge, disgorge, or expel the discomfort with which we began. Nor could the hiccup be ignored, or treated as if localized solely in the body of the member. Certainly, the paraverbalization marked my quandary, and which, given their involvement in the discussion regarding the placement of the director, had saliency for all group members. I was an unfamiliar leader, coupled with the symbiotic figure of maternal and basic assumptive dependency—the director. (She had informed me that certain capable students could stay with her ‘forever’ without progressing into being group therapists.) The situation was unsettling and with risk, yet intriguing and challenging, adding an unusual dimensionality to the work as invited presenter. And too, the anticipated and ongoing process of any experiential group has hiccups: upsetting intervals of confusion, ambivalence, and pain.

While hiccups cannot be eliminated, they can be relieved by empathic actions, thoughts, and words. Naming Theresa’s hiccup as a commentary, applicable to what had, as well as what might, transpire normalized the speaker and ‘localized’ her speech act as a group event. ‘Are you ok?’ provided further opportunity for Theresa to demystify her spasmodic group behaviour.

Seemingly for the first time, she became a dialogic figure of compassion and identification. Others associated to the problem of ‘digesting difficult material’. For all of us, ruminating or withdrawing, such as in the presence of a difficult peer or co-therapist (Carola’s predicament), remained defensive options. While the director labelled me as ‘boss’, the matter of co-therapy could not be easily or fully assimilated.

Indeed, it was the unconscious that reigned as the ‘boss’, speaking to us through our bodily reactions, paraverbalizations, symbols and enactments, and stimulating unexpected associations and ideas. ⁴ However far we seemed to stray from the topic, I remained aware that likely, all of us remained ‘unsettled’ by the reality of two ostensible leaders. I remained alert for symbolic derivatives of what I assumed to be an organizing, nuclear idea (Billow, 2013), and which would need to be put into language and explored.

I surmised that Lukas was unconsciously talking about us—the leadership pair—when he interjected: ‘I need to talk about feelings related to something sexual. Something happened during the [European] Conference. I felt invaded.’ This session being paramount, I was concerned that he—and others—had been invaded by my presence, and that also, he might be sacrificially offering up himself for another abusive exposure—an iatrogenic enactment that would not aid him, or others, in finding the authentic ‘voice’ of unconscious. ⁵

Earlier in the session and prior to it, we had talked about talking. We agreed to limit the director’s options: ‘No therapeutic opinions, just your feelings,’ I had reiterated. Her good-naturedly rebellious response: ‘Not if I don’t want to,’ and my rejoinder, ‘That goes for all of us,’ demonstrated as well as provided a message of safety to the whole group.

‘Le nom’ puts language to trauma—removing it from the dreadful, unnamable realm of the ‘Real’. But premature or imposed talk could reinforce rather than resolve trauma, being an enactment and not effective naming. When the paternal figure, that is, the group leader, is ‘undeserving’, as in being an inadequate, or fraudulent ‘pillar of the faith’, the signifying function may falter, opening the way for trauma (and even psychosis: Lacan, 1977 [1953]: 219).

In our quasi-therapeutic two-day workshop, opportunity existed to modify traumatic experience by placing it in the Symbolic realm via translation (Foulkes), that is, through examination of the group’s unconscious communications. To locate and localize sexuality (Nitzgen, 2009), that is, to discover its relevance to the members in the here-and-now group context but also to reinforce a message of safety, I insisted that first, we needed ‘to talk about talking about sex.’

Lukas reported having felt, in the antecedent Conference group, ‘abused, almost like a rape . . . unprotected and could not find my voice.’ For Pierra, symbolic expression had remained silent otherwise than in the symptom of her trembling body: ‘I had a terrible headache the next day, didn’t know why.’ The web of communication tentatively expanded from the unarticulated and bodily, referring both to our as well as the Conference group, to the verbally symbolized-familial, projective and transferential levels of discourse (Foulkes, 1971: 212). Pierra: ‘We did not have time to talk, too afraid too, of my father.’ Pierra and Lea each expressed gratitude for ‘giving me a place to talk.’

I took Lukas’s reinsertion of the theme of the sexually abusive man as an inducement to relocate the discourse to our group’s ‘frame of reference’ (Foulkes, 1983 [1975]: 107), specifically to its designated leader. ‘Sooner or later,’ I suggested playfully, ‘I will become “that guy”.’ My assumption: on the intersubjective register, I already had.

The afternoon’s supervisory session illustrated how the naming process requires delicacy and integrity—awareness of the historical and current group context, delimited by cultural and social constraints. The despotic elders—the fundamentalist clergyman—served allegorically as ‘that guy’, abusing their Signifying influence and reintroducing trauma by imposing severe verbal restraints on speaking and speakers.

I was encouraged when the associative web closed in around me during the second morning’s group, in which I and the director became the necessary foils for the members’ experience of ‘being in the middle’ with powerful but misintuned parents, for those ‘very nervy’ fathers who came on too strong, or not strong enough, and for wished-for fathers who could ‘handle a powerful woman’.

As Oedipal partner to the director, and a multidimensional displacement figure in the members’ transferences (and in my countertransference), I served as an idealized/demonized part object. But despite my invitation to be considered otherwise than as the Imaginary father, I continued to remain, in public discourse, mostly ideal or avoided. The third experiential session—punctuated by Max’s report on our coffee-break interlude—providentially stimulated and exposed the reverse.

The group’s lengthy silence, despite multiple invitations for discourse, insinuated that I had broken the social pact and was being exiled from the verbal community of others. The members could no longer hide behind a ‘pillar of the faith’ (Lacan, 1977 [1953]: 219) in my leadership. ‘We do things differently,’ Michael declaimed. As ‘that guy’, I no longer represented the Name of the Father, legislating and enforcing those laws and restrictions that control both desire and the rules of communication.

For a fearful and exciting, speechless interlude, a primitive and perverse version of ‘infantile sexuality in interaction’ (Foulkes, 1990 [1972]: 243) preoccupied the members’ mental space.

The Group Leader Exists in the Three Registers

The individual and group are continually and repetitively drawn to trauma (Freud’s ‘repetition compulsion’), that is, to that which stimulates fear and a pre-linguistic hunger for symbiotic union/dissolution. ⁶ The therapist must bear the tension of serving as the vehicle for these expressions emanating from the registers of the Imaginary and Real—for that which is at ‘the same time within language and outside of it’ (Lacan,1975: 174)—yet uphold the signifying function.

As the Signifier, ‘the Other can be very impertinent’, ‘luring’ the child by separating him or her from the pre-verbal, erotic and symbiotic relationship with the mother (Lacan, 1977 [1953]: 213). Max’s clarification could not absolve me from being the ‘doer’ and all the participants, the ‘done to’. The director had advised that the candidates did not ‘want to separate from their role as students. They could talk theory with me forever!’ In the leadership role of ‘impertinent’ Signifier, I disrupted the workshop participants’ relationship with the director, which had condemned them to joyfully reside ‘forever’ in the Imaginary register of the symbiotic. As the seductive ‘that guy’, but now tolerated and appreciated as existing in all three conterminous registers, the group submitted to the paternal (and psychoanalytic) law: ‘put it into words’.

The ‘hiccup’ and presumably, much that proceeded in prior workshops as well as followed in ours had been and remained symptomatic, to the extent that discourse represented ‘theory’, ‘ruminations’ rather than transformative ‘digestions’. Lacan (1977[1953]): 86) insisted and demonstrated that ‘the function of language is not to inform but to evoke’. To expedite change— the candidates’ passage into the role of group therapist, they had to engage in experience that disturbed the Imaginary and that brought us perilously close to the Real.

By locating trauma in the group—exposing my role as the problematic but obligatory ‘that guy’—Theresa, Carola, Lukas, Sarah, Lea, Hilde, and Max were the prominent spokespersons—we could move away from ‘theory’ and from re-enacting and reinforcing trauma, and toward appreciating naming as a ‘nervy’ and anxiety-producing but ultimately humanizing dimension of intersubjective living.