Abstract
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. (Walt Whitman, 1881–2)
The maestro, Toscanini, declared: ‘Every time I conduct the same piece I think how stupid I was the last time I did it’ (in Gottlieb, 2017: 20). The music of the group is inspired and limited by our ‘stupidity’, the ambiguous emergence of our fluctuating emotions, how we integrate them according to theory, craft, personality, and—let’s face it—inherent talent. We have opportunity in stupid. Attending to confusion and ignorance—our own, especially—arouses curiosity and offers direction as to how to think about what is happening and what could happen.
Raised in the Dark Ages of classical psychoanalysis and ego psychology, I was taught: ‘when in doubt, don’t say anything’. Never the most obedient of students, I tended to follow the reverse, and still do. Doubt makes me anxious, but I treasure doubt, offer doubt, and make efforts to instil doubt in others.
Each leader is ‘stupid’, and deals with doubt and confusion in one’s own way. No way to circumvent stupidity. No way to avoid being blindsided by assigned roles and configurations, those we bring to our work, and those thrust upon us within the group. To some degree, our minds remain subordinated by an in-eliminable relational–cultural matrix that regulates it (Mitchell, 1988: 292).
The unconscious is the leader of any group, we may agree, but whose unconscious? It is your unconscious, in mental contact with Freud’s, Foulkes’, and perhaps Bion’s and Winnicott’s too, in interaction with the collective and interactive unconsciousness of the particular members, and the force of ‘G’ (group organization) itself. With apologies to Walt Whitman, it is impossible ‘to filter them from yourself’.
If Foulkes (1975: 293) is correct that the tendency to make the therapist the leader is the greatest resistance, we greatly resist too. We also are attached to leaders, and we love and fight them, and remain curious about who they are and what they offer, and we challenge those who challenge our attachments.
We struggle to escape a confined mindset: speaking a voice not wholly our own, enacting a scenario directed by our own fantasy leader—idealized versions of Foulkes, Bion, Freud, even of our pre-constructed professional self. We cannot stand outside a shifting, but bounded ‘field’ of interacting group transference-countertransferences (see Stolorow, 2013), which includes our transferences to our own leaders. If we minimize our interactions and let others do the work, how do we participate in our own working through? How do we ourselves learn and develop our own creative capacities?
We make efforts to ‘alpha-beta-ize’ (Grotstein, 2007; 2009), to apply our mental apparatus to think, to sort out and put in our own words what we feel and witness. We need to speak, to right (‘write’) ourselves out of our adapted theories and theorists, trusting ourselves to develop our own versions of psychic ‘truth’. As such, our authority is perspectival, subjective, uncertain, and revisable. When I say ‘it is all about me’, it is to emphasize ironically how little we know about ourselves, and about what others know or believe they know about us.
Our interventions, derived from subjective experience and participation in social relations allow us not only to discover, but to co-create meaning (Hoffman, 1988). In opting out of expressing our subjectivity, we obstruct or derail the rewards of mutual exploration, revision, and ultimately, recognition (Benjamin, 1988).
The old joke goes like this. The tourist asks: ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall’? The New Yorker answers: ‘Practise, practise, practise’. We need to practise what we preach, and commit ourselves to making an authentic presence known, as much as to ourselves as others.
In conducting a group, we practise by turning inward, attending as best we can to the discordant and concordant notes of one’s own ‘irrational emotional involvement’ (Renik, 1993). At the same time, turning outward, we try to absorb, understand, and respond to the presence of the other players, the varying rhythms of the whole group, and the effects of our presence.
I try to do nothing without forethought, yet preserve a freedom to be spontaneous, appreciating that what I observe, say and omit saying have elements of the ‘not known’. I alter the mode of my communications and their nature to address shifting interests, not the least my own. In attending to individual and group processes of resistance, rebellion, and refusal—which arise continually in the life of the group no matter its cohesiveness, duration, and sophistication—I vary what, and if I say, and when (Billow, 2010).
To move the group, and to move with and in the group, we must be moved by what we hear (Wachtel, 2011). The music has to sound fresh and vital. It should play different every time. It is up to the conductor—and not the group—to make sure that happens. When being active or inactive, we cannot opt out from doing our part.
We are all ‘little nodal points’ in social networks (Foulkes, 1983: 14). Not all of one size and shape, however. Individuals differ in their power and influence, the therapist most of all. Members enter, trust, and adapt to norms at different times, and each entry affects member–therapist, member–member, subgroup, and whole-group relationships. The group moves forward and back, prey to a too comfortable basic assumptive groupishness that all members, including the therapist, are liable to fall into (Caper, 1999).
Members stay, prosper, and leave; the group continues, with its own accumulated history and culture, preserved most of all in the mind of the lone figure of the aging therapist. So, then, the existential–developmental arcs of each member, group, and the therapist differ. Hopefully, experience and professional and personal development brings the leader wisdom and savoir-faire—good luck with that.
The most consistent finding in all psychotherapy studies is that acquiescence to, retention, and satisfaction in treatment depends on the quality of the individual’s relationship with the therapist. I remind us of this without diminishing the importance of group membership itself, and the contributions of each member. Still, no less than with an orchestra or jazz combo, and whether is called ‘your group’, ‘the group’, ‘our group’, ‘an analytic group’—it carries in spirit of the leader’s name and influence.
Experienced therapists, like seasoned practitioners of any discipline, are more alike than different, no matter their professed theoretical orientation and training. Within the boundaries of talk therapy and what we assess are the needs of others, we vary in the degree and type of verbal activity: ambiguity and play (testing reality), clarifications (reality testing), empathic communications (holding, mirroring), translation (containing), whole group, interpersonal, and intrapsychic focus, accommodation, confrontation, reconstruction, interpretation, and so forth.
But we tend to have a larger, not smaller, presence, being more relaxed and available. We express more, not less of ourselves over time. Like all activity and inactivity by the leader, we impinge on and free up each member’s involvement and the group’s independence. No matter where we are in our own or the group’s development, we both contribute to and interfere with the collaborative enterprise. Isn’t this true in all interpersonal relationships?
To our metaphors of group facilitator, guide, dynamic administrator, leader, conductor, let’s add ski instructor—please substitute your favourite sport. We are describing an embodied thinker in motion, performing with unique rhythm and talent. Speaking personally, on and off the slopes I want to be with somebody who is damned good. Not merely to aid me in solving my problems, but to demonstrate, encourage, nudge—to push me into growth, to grapple with problems that I did not even know existed.
This turns me with gratitude to my responders—all damned good—and to D. Nitzgen (2017), who astutely assigned them to this three-part project. I have concentrated on the responses to Part III (Doron, 2017; Friedman, 2017; Gotz, 2017; Ofer, 2017; Tubert Oklander, 2017; Slonim, 2017; Weinberg, 2017). The responders of Parts I and II, not privy to its organic unity (and some seemed unfamiliar with my other writings), were at an assessment disadvantage.
In presenting to the Foulkes-centric Group Analysis community, I have served as a ‘very impertinent’ Other (Lacan, 1977: 213). I offered my ideas to a pre-existing group that has its own culture, methods, and myths. I have necessarily confronted intellectual and cultural loyalties, as well as vestigial preverbal and symbiotic relationships to that other Other, the looming Foulkes. To varying degrees, responders were challenged to think and experience in new ways. Some authors attempted to reach me through the lens of their explicit Foulkesian perspective. Others attempted to explain me to this culture.
A writer—not unlike a therapist—has to take responsibility to make a presence known. Impinging on an established group, I have asserted my own leadership, more or less compatible, tolerable, and welcomed. Every clinical hour, satisfying or not, should be a growth experience for all participants, including the therapist. I trust that our series of exchanges has addressed a basic need—to learn, discover, create—for the responders and for readers too. It continues to serve that need in me.