Abstract
When I was a student more than twenty years ago, I went to a conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art. One of the hosts of “Memory: The Question of Archives” was Malcolm Pines. I remember him well because he had the thankless task of reading out the paper of a distinguished professor who didn’t show up. The conversation between Pines and Sue Einhorn that’s posted on the new-look GASI website includes some pondering on the current standing of group analysis. Is it taken seriously by psychoanalysts, for example? Pines the founding father isn’t downhearted, mentioning positive developments like growth in Europe. But I for one had never heard of group analysis until 2014. If, back in 1994, the conference-goers were told that Pines was a group analyst as well as a psychoanalyst, it made no impression on me. So let me explain how I discovered group analysis – and why I’m both glad and sorry I did.
In 2012, with more than a year left to run on my contract as a magazine editor, I gave notice of termination to the publishers, a company with newly installed top managers. It didn’t go well after that. I realised that stories about the pitfalls of prisoners “going straight” applied to my seemingly respectable world of work too. I stood up for myself against the corporate shenanigans. A few months later my contract was paid out.
With time to recharge I spring-cleaned, practised yoga and went on long walks to ponder the future. A new beginning seemed possible. My peace of mind was, however, short-lived. After a while self-doubt crept in. It was difficult to chase it away. I questioned decisions I had carefully made, which began to seem like errors. I blamed myself for circumstances beyond my control. The worst of it was that on some gloomy mornings I pined for institutions I had outgrown.
Two poignant songs I love kept coming to mind at this time. In Scott Walker’s “Farmer in the City” a dying artist looks back on his life: “I used to be a citizen / I never felt the pressure.” I had renounced my own professional citizenship and now I was under pressure. A young man escapes home and takes refuge in the city in Sunhouse’s “Hard Sun”. But the future frightens him: “In the throes of thought I wonder / Can I make it on my own.” My new beginning now seemed not only possible but necessary. If I was going to make it on my own, though, I needed help. So I found a therapist.
To support the therapy, I read psychoanalytic texts. Fairbairn’s idea of “moral defence”, for example, helped me reflect on self-blame (Fairbairn, 1952). Michael Balint’s reflections on new beginnings struck a chord (Balint, 1969). Still it was almost by chance that, during the summer therapy break in 2014, on the third floor of the British Library, I read Bion’s Experiences in Groups (Bion, 1961). This wry, misanthropic book is the work of a brilliant (though not likeable) writer. The ex-editor in me admired details like the way his repeated phrase “a group in which I am a member” keeps things open and allows for the possibility that Bion’s presence set the cat among the pigeons. Beyond the patrician style and the touches of mischief, I felt with a pang that this was a book that could have helped me survive institutions better. For it claims that people in groups often behave very badly, even madly. I know this to be true. Yet since I wish it not to be true, fuzzy thinking stops me from truly accepting it, and my denial brings trouble of its own. Experiences in Groups nails these problems down. It also rescues the idea of work from the disappointing reality of workplaces.
I wanted to know more. It didn’t take long to find out that the conveniently located Institute of Group Analysis’s London foundation course was starting the following month. (I knew nothing then about the differences between Bion and Foulkes.) I enrolled.
The course runs over thirty Thursday evenings, ten per term. There were forty participants this year, who were assigned to one of five small groups. Before the small groups there are lectures during the first two terms. During the third term, the lectures are replaced by a large group for all participants – or as many as wish to attend – including the small-group conductors. Lectures and groups are the main components but the whole experience is wider. There’s also what happens in-between: the break between lecture and small group, the journey home, the nights when something troubling that has emerged in the small group disrupts sleep, the two vacations, all the moments of rumination and perplexity along the way.
After each of the first few lectures I found a spot outside the IGA building (which is shared with both GASI and the Society for Analytic Psychology) where I ate homemade sandwiches. Others smoked sociably nearby. This gathering became a sort of casual small group on the fringe of the course. An ex-smoker, I gravitated to the huddle. It brought back to me the experience of being lonely at secondary school and discovering at about the age of fifteen that smoking granted access to a subculture – it was a way to belong. Obeying that same urge to connect, after a while I started walking to the overground station with three of the smokers. We were discreet about our small groups while we walked, but I succumbed on a couple of occasions to the temptation to speak about the immediate emotional fallout from the group, taking the edge off my feelings in the process. These walks continued until the start of the third term when, abruptly, I told the others that I wouldn’t be joining them any more because we were now all members of the same group. I set a new, strict boundary because I wanted to get the most from the large group, sharp edges and all. It didn’t occur to me that my decision might be seen as pedantic and rude.
When I was first employed I made many workplace friends. Ten years later redundancy required me to learn, as I’m told divorcees do too, that such relationships depend on a shared environment, like fish swimming in a bowl. Losing professional citizenship involves losing these friendships. It was a shock to me the first time it happened, and it hurt. I was back to being the solitary adolescent on the margins of school … except that my younger self, while wanting to be less lonely, was also healthily sceptical about the merits of being an obedient insider, a good boy. There are some tough lines of the poet Cavafy that the teenager would have understood better than the newly unemployed thirtysomething: “Even if you cannot make your life the way you want, try this, at least, / as best you can: do not demean it / by too much contact with the crowd, / by too much movement and idle talk.” (I don’t think this statement contradicts group analysis, which shouldn’t foster idle talk.) Somewhere down the line I gave up too much for the sake of institutional identity and its perks. Or else I thought I could have the best of both worlds by being an outsider within a workplace, a maverick insider. It’s a hard act to pull off, and one which in may case ended with more than one fall. I couldn’t have the best of both worlds at the IGA either. For it became obvious as the third term continued that, to satisfy my own work ethic rather than any external rule, I had hurt the feelings of the three people I’d bantered happily with on the way to the station. What I learnt on the course was never exactly easy, but what happened about the journey home proved to be one of the most difficult lessons.
Boundaries are an issue that the foundation course opens up without scrutinising in detail. (I assume that the topic is explored at later stages of training.) In some ways the course is an unusual free-for-all. This year’s participants included a couple as well as people who are colleagues or flatmates. Applicants aren’t interviewed (unless my own case wasn’t typical). There isn’t dynamic administration in respect of intake, though it’s ensured that people who know each other don’t join the same small group. This means that participants are implicitly invited to see why dynamic administration and strong therapeutic boundaries become important beyond the foundation course. Of course, many of the participants belong to the caring professions – counsellors, clinical psychologists, doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists – and so were probably more familiar with therapeutic boundary issues than me, a nonprofessional who didn’t tread as carefully when it came to socialising as a professional might have done.
Yet here I must note something that surprised me. Many of the professionals never questioned the lecturers and were noticeably reluctant to let down their guard in the group settings. I found this lack of candour annoying. It had a chilling effect. For much of the course, a collective professional reserve clamped down on emotional frankness as well as theoretical argument. I wondered if my expectations were faulty until I read an article on the reading list. In it, Ian Craib recalls an experiential group that was part of another introductory training. Its members too were reluctant to discuss their own conflicts and emotional difficulties. Participation in the group was seen by the majority as “an activity directed towards something outside of oneself rather than investigating one’s own suffering” (Craib, 1997). Further light was shed when I heard one therapist explain that as a trainee he feared being perceived as unstable by his peers and tutors. It was a reminder that caution is needed to be a successful insider: in the workplace, you can’t say whatever comes to mind. I was grateful that this therapist let down his guard enough for me to glimpse understandable institutional worries that were being kept below the surface. Many participants were attending for reasons of professional development. Inevitably they brought their workplaces with them, much as I brought my past work troubles with me. My business affairs had ended whereas these professionals were part of ongoing enterprises. It’s no mystery why the insiders felt less free to speak than the ex-citizen.
As more than one group analyst has observed, lectures are the antithesis of an analytical group. My sense of relative freedom wasn’t worth toffee in the lecture sessions. Seventeen of the twenty followed the same pattern: an hour’s talking-plus-Powerpoint followed by a question or two that never quite went anywhere. Lecturers usually started with a version of the statement, “Please stop me if there’s anything anyone would like clarified.” (Sometimes this statement was qualified with “—but please keep wider issues until the end”.) I asked lots of questions of lecturers once they had finished but intervened during a lecture only once. I asked if the speaker would speed up in order to leave extra time for discussion. He seemed to consent … but didn’t relinquish even a second of his allotted time. I was quick to make my point after he had finally stopped. A brief response was given and that was that. I had to realise that this wasn’t a setting where topics could be debated. (I made further comments on the feedback form that was emailed out after each lecture, but I don’t know if these ever reached the lecturer.) We were really there to pay attention to someone selected by the institute for their eminence. Probably all sorts of professional politics play a part in the selection but I for one didn’t have enough knowledge of the group-analytic world to figure out that factor. If it was like being back in a classroom, it was also like the semi-academic workplaces I’m used to, with their echelons and prickly diplomacy. If I had to sum up my dissatisfied experience of these lectures, I would say that I felt left out of the picture. Possibly that’s what they’re there for.
The lecture format was varied three times. At the end of the first term there was a Social Dreaming Matrix. The free-floating format allowed a number of our group to contribute for the first time. A virtual montage was assembled that was striking for its scary imagery (car crashes, torture, dead parents) and at the same time enjoyable, warm. This mismatch of content and mood disturbed me but it was splendid to be actually interacting. The next exception was the session on therapeutic communities. The psychiatrist lecturer brought with her a colleague who’d once been a community resident. They opened the session up almost immediately, not to clarification but to genuine discussion. It was tentative at first but then the nettle was grasped. The mood was sombre and even mournful, as if we were at a meeting where something was being closed down. I think we were aware in the session that the radical ideal of trends like antipsychiatry and democratic psychotherapy has been eclipsed, and that even though the NHS is still central to national life the concept of welfare which used to underpin it has been corrupted, turned upside-down. The final exception occurred at the end of the second term, when we all participated in a large group – or perhaps I should say a large-group reception, for there were pictures scattered on the floor in the middle of the circle of chairs. Picking an image and commenting on it helped reduce the anxiety that would trouble the large group throughout the following term.
The conductor of our small group came in, sat down and said flatly: “This group will meet here for the next thirty weeks.” Probably she then looked down. That was all. Presumably it’s how most experiential groups start: unnervingly. The main reaction to the lack of instruction was silence. The group was struck dumb. And week after week the silence returned for long stretches. Often I was the one who broke it, until I began to feel guilty about breaking it … and so helped to renew the paralysis. I wonder if experienced conductors learn to distinguish between various kinds of silence, like an Eskimo tells the difference between types of snow. To me it was all the same: a shared failure to think, to work.
By the time the group relaxed, something emerged that separated me from it. I could remember almost everything that everyone had said in previous weeks. It may sound odd, but this was as much a surprise to me as it became an irritant to others. My late father, a scientist, sometimes said he had a photographic memory. I never thought of myself as having any similar capacity for remembering, yet I quoted verbatim statements made in the group months before. My recaps weren’t welcome. One group member said it was like having a surveillance camera in the room; another compared me to a court stenographer. I felt abashed by the remarks and I feel abashed again now as I write this, fearing readers will imagine me to be robotic, machine-like. Nevertheless it’s true that I wanted always to proceed analytically. This was never to the exclusion of discussing painful incidents and difficult emotions as far as I was capable of doing so, but it was always my hope that distressing subjects could then be mastered rationally (perhaps with the help of a quote from a previous session!). The trouble was that no-one else was taking the same approach.
The unconscious was clearly at work in the group, despite my best intellectual efforts. We bristled, jumped at shadows, took offence when none was intended, saw in others what was denied in oneself, competed in an unannounced butter-wouldn’t-melt tournament of compassion, or went the other way and committed minor delinquencies. There was much walking on eggshells. Disturbingly, uncannily, the group became preoccupied in the third term by suicide. I won’t say more about this except that it was is if a certain tragic (and sometimes black-comic) story that belonged to no-one possessed the group. A sort of poltergeist invaded the room. This development bewildered me but I won’t deny evidence of something having emerged in the group that couldn’t be reduced to common-sense psychology.
I’m not sure if our group got the measure of projection and projective identification, which is supposed to be one of the outcomes of the course. Certainly no explicit discussion of these concepts occurred. This was probably a good thing since they can be made to mean what anyone wants them to mean. Still, I was disappointed that the group didn’t mull over the problem of envy much. It may be that the thing about envy is that it’s elusive, being sullen and slinking, so it only ever comes into view for a moment. Perhaps envy must be glanced at in passing not pinned down and discussed. Yet I felt like the group was missing something important. Unless it was just me. For I’m a twin. Twins have to share time, space, food, love from the very start in a way that single children usually don’t. Maybe that means envy can’t settle down in a twin – or perhaps it means envy has to lurk in especially dark corners of a twin’s mind. I had difficulty, anyway, when sibling rivalry was an element in the small group.
I think part of me would have liked to join a solemn, arcane group of what Winnicott called “observing egos” (Winnicott, 1975a) or even the more dangerously cut-off “mind-psyches” (Winnicott, 1975b). As the year went on I could see the flaws of my attitude, but it didn’t entirely stop me wanting thought to trump emotion. There’s a passage in The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa that captures well this detached outlook – or resistance – of mine: “And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.” In the actual and not-so-solemn experiential group of which I was a member, I was often a decadent in Pessoa’s sense … but of course the life of the group carried on regardless of my attitude.
During the last small-group session of the second term I got lost, as I had been lost in the past in my family. Believing, perhaps wrongly, that a tricky topic I had raised was being brushed under the carpet, I withdrew into claustrophobic silence. Bridges were rebuilt later, but I never again looked forward with pleasure to these sessions. This adjustment must have had something to do with the lectures ending and the large group starting: for I found that I felt perfectly at ease in the large group, which fascinated me from start to finish. Others hated it, but for me the large group was the best part of the course.
In preparation I read Pierre Turquet’s classic paper, which claims that large groups are “constantly suffused with the struggle to dominate” (Turquet, 1975). Perhaps his observations only apply to large groups composed of people accustomed to large groups. They certainly didn’t seem to apply to ours, which in fact was often not-so-large because of multiple absences. I never checked this but I heard it said in the corridor that attendance at the large group wasn’t required to pass the course. More than once someone expressed worry in a session about the group’s missing persons, as though an unfortunate incident must have befallen them, but it seems more likely that they just had better things to do. (One group member who had been the cause of concern returned after an absence of three weeks to describe her holiday in Cuba.)
The group was afflicted by nervous silence and a wary, often unspoken deference to the small-group conductors who now sat among us. Something appeared to be being played out about what it’s like to survive in today’s draining workplaces, with the conductors taking the role of bosses. No doubt, too, the anxieties of childhood bubbled away in all of us. They were kept firmly in check, however, in the stiff silences that once more prevailed. The group was in lockdown. For the first eight weeks it seemed as if we were always waiting for something to change. Perhaps one of the absentees would return and bring fresh energy; perhaps the conductors would take matters in hand; perhaps an angry outburst would galvanise the group. All of these incidents did occur – but half-heartedly, with insufficient force to lastingly relieve the nervous tension. So life in the large group repeated life outside. We’re unsure where power lies and how malicious it might be so we watch what we say, we feel the tremor of out-of-date childhood panic that we hold inside for fear of being shamed or punished, and so it all goes on and on…
Change came in the penultimate week, when grief burst in. A member’s father was dying in hospital, unable to communicate with his family. She cried openly and repeatedly, her emotion so raw it made it hard for her to say what she wanted to say. She apologised for what she did say, and for the intensity of her emotion. Even more than usual, the group was frozen by this contribution. It couldn’t, like our group member’s father, like she herself, like myself after I left my job, find an answer. The fear that nothing can be said to make an agonising situation better was paramount. We all shared the grief but we also couldn’t bear it. Caretaking failed. For me, this proved the power of the large group to go to the painful heart of the matter – to frame without fixing the experience, which can’t be escaped, of not-being-able-to-bear-it.
It’s tempting to say that I feel less alone as a result of what I learnt at the IGA. But that isn’t right. In 2013 I feared, not for the first time, that I couldn’t make it on my own. I felt cast drift, exiled. Perversely I longed for the citizenship I’d chosen to renounce. I’m sorry I couldn’t resolve by myself the conflict I felt (and still sometimes feel) between outsider freedom and insider security. I’m glad I found help after I realised I needed it. It has enabled me to go back with gratitude to the margins. I don’t feel less alone, I feel better able to be alone. For now, I need to live without both the privileges and the pressures of being the citizen I became, the citizen I used to be.
A couple of weeks before our large group met for the first time, I went as a student member to the April session of the GASI Members’ Group in South London. I spoke there, as I’ve written here, about the loss of institutional identity. When I had finished, someone commented that I was contributing rather more than a newcomer might usually be expected to contribute. (This remark was accompanied by an obscure reference to the plant species Fallopia japonica.) After a pause she resumed, taking a slightly different tack. She said that she sometimes dreamt of a workplace she had left but missed more than she wanted to admit. I think I knew exactly what she meant. If we’re there together at the next session, I’d like to tell her about a notion I have. It’s this: only simple beginnings don’t have histories. New beginnings can’t ever be free of the past. New beginnings always involve fear and grief. New beginnings are haunted. I don’t know what anyone would make of this idea, but I’ve found that I’d like to say it out loud in a group.
Footnotes