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Group, Vol. 24, Nos. 2/3, 2000
The Shadow of the Group in the Dawn of the 21st Century: The Journey from Varniai Morris Nitsun1,2
The future of group psychotherapy is seen in the context of social and historical links which demonstrate a pervasive ambivalence about groups, leading to idealisation, fear, and attack on the group. The author’s personal history, paralleled by literary references, forms a backdrop to the debate. The concept of the Anti-Group is presented as a binding principle that in its therapeutic application represents the hope of recognition and transformation. KEY WORDS: group ambivalence; social violence; the Anti-Group; future threats.
“For all of us the future is a land we can delineate only in terms of what is already known to us—which is not how it will ever be.” Dan Jacobson, 1998
This quote is taken from the autobiographical study “Heshel’s Kingdom” by the writer Dan Jacobson, also Professor Emeritus at the University College, London. Like myself, Jacobson is a South African Jew by birth, now living in England. The book is based on his explorations of his family roots in Lithuania, centering around his mysterious grandfather, Heshel Melamed. The quote appears in a section of the book where Jacobson describes the family fleeing from their home town of Varniai in 1914. The Germans had invaded Lithuania (as part of a greater invasion of Russia) and the Jews, who were regarded by the Russians as collaborators of the Germans, were evicted from their homes and towns. As Jacobson follows the family’s journey, he ponders on the future that awaits the same community just a generation later. This time, the Germans would return 1 Head
of Psychology, Psychotherapy and Counselling Services, Redbridge Health Care Trust and Member, Institute of Group Analysis (London). should be directed to Morris Nitsun, Psychology Department, Goodmayes Hospital, Barley Lane, Goodmayes Essex IG3 8XJ, UK.
2 Correspondence
115 C 2000 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society 0362-4021/00/0900-0115$18.00/1 °
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and bring with them the machinery of mass murder. Jacobson comments that it would not have occurred to Heshel, leading his family to safety, that this could one day be seen as a dress rehearsal for what was to take place 25 years later— only this time, those in flight would find their murderers waiting for them at every turn. I include the above passage and commentary for two main reasons. One, to highlight at the outset the problems of predicting the future and, hence, my sense of inadequacy at grappling with the question of group psychotherapy in the 21st century. How can I, or we, know? How can we delineate this unknowable land? Second, there is the fear, based on the violent history of the 20th Century (and to some extent summed up in the journey from Varniai), that history could repeat itself in even more destructive ways in the next century. More recently—and on the brink of the millennium—the atrocities in Kosovo were a further reminder of how a violent past can be repeated through the generations. This probably represents the single greatest threat to our collective futures: the threat of annihilation. Whatever other futures we look towards, we do so in the shadow of the destruction that many of our families (and countless families we have never known) experienced in the last century. SEARCHING FOR HOME This brings me briefly to my personal history and, then, back to the main topic of this essay, group psychotherapy in the 21st century. As a South African Jew, whose parents fled Lithuania to settle in South Africa, I later made my way back to Europe (like Jacobson) to live in England, partly because of the political tensions associated with apartheid. I believe I hold in this history some of the 20th century’s persistent themes—war, racial prejudice, migration, the break-up of the family and social groups, displacement, and the search for a new belonging. I have sometimes thought that this is what attracted me to group analysis: the search for a home, a group to belong to. I have also looked at others and thought the same. At meetings at the Institute of Group Analysis in London I have looked around and noticed how many members, sometimes almost all, were of an immigrant background. It is interesting that the pioneers of group psychotherapy in England and the USA, Foulkes and Slavson, were both originally immigrants and refugees from persecution. This may be a coincidence, since London, like New York and other major cities, is peopled with immigrants and their children. Nevertheless, I have wondered if group psychotherapy offers a particular kind of professional home to a particular kind of individual who is especially sensitive to group disruption and the need to belong, coupled with a striving to restore the group psyche, the splintered family group and the social fabric from which their group was torn.
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GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY IN A CHANGING WORLD This leads more directly onto the practice of group psychotherapy, its value as a socially orientated form of therapy, and what this may imply for its future in the 21st century. I suggest, as we enter the new era, with all the pressures and fears and hopes that mark the transition, that the relevance of group psychotherapy may be all the greater. The tendency to entropy and fragmentation that could continue in society, the loss of human connectedness, the atomisation of the self, may all give group psychotherapy added momentum as a medium of social healing. The frame of our therapeutic endeavour—in small, median, and large groups—is very close to the social frame with its group networks, giving us an important opportunity to influence the pattern of connectedness, not only in the therapy group itself, but in the world of groups outside the consulting room. In this sense, social healing takes place within the therapy group through empathic interchange and encounter between individuals while, on a wider scale, group therapy as a discipline offers society a guide to interconnectedness, compassion, and the reclaiming of intimacy. Of course, the wider needs of the new world we enter are hardly going to be met by any one psychotherapeutic form. We must not delude ourselves that our specific enterprise in itself can of necessity make a deep or lasting impact on the world around us. However, there are currents within currents in society, and insofar as we are part of a movement that seeks to foster understanding and constructive change, we can hope to exert some influence for the good: that is, we can help to restore belief in the value of group and community. ATTACKS ON THE SOCIAL ORDER It could be useful to speculate further on some of the immediate threats to social disintegration that we face. There is the ever-present threat of war, with the difference that in the future the capacity for mass destruction will be greater than anything we have previously known. Then, there is a phenomenon which may be friend or foe: technology. For all the dizzying promises of technology, it also poses the threat of a different form of dehumanisation: the loss of personal contact through the substitute strata of a virtual community. Technology offers a seductive alternative to the direct human encounter. Not only does it spare us the ordinary tensions and embarrassments of interpersonal communication, it offers a world away, an escape, from the darkness we fear in social groups: aggression and counter-aggression, destruction and self-destruction. Ironically, though, it may be technology itself that in the end offers the most potent and widespread means of destruction. The capacity for mass destruction will increasingly be reinforced by technology, and the effects will be told in either devastating “little” wars or the “big” war to end all wars. Not only in its direct power, could technology turn out to
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be a dangerous ally but in the blurring it creates between the virtual and the real. In this ambiguous world of the semi-real, unleashing Armageddon might seem more like a video game than the real thing. Finally, in this brief glance at the social conditions that mark the start of the 21st century, there is fundamentalism. In the late 20th century, we saw the dramatic rise of fundamentalist ideologies, often promulgated as a defence against the perceived degeneracy of the new world order. It is likely that fundamentalism will continue to rise in parallel with the rapid materialistic advances of the near future. This brings the danger not only of a restriction of human liberty, but an attack on the other, on difference. Fundamentalism carries with it the seeds of its own destruction, as we have seen in the Jamestown’s and Waco’s of the last few decades, but its overall threat as a world force goes beyond the conflagration of its own communities. Like technology, it is seductive, but seductive in a different way. It offers the hope of transcendence through attachment to a totalist ideology, fostering the notion that there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong, denying the need for healthy doubt and ambivalence, and generating splits and divisions that lead to violence and revenge. Fundamentalism is predicated on a primitive group narcissism that promotes the illusion of total unity with an idealised authority, complete merger of identity, and independence from all other groups, as opposed to the complex task of interrelationship and interdependence between social groups, as well as the integration of diversity within groups. As the push to create the new through technological and materialistic advancement intensifies in the next century, reinforcing the individualistic ethic and leaving behind the belief systems of the old, we can expect the attractions of fundamentalist ideologies to remain a potent threat. THE PLACE OF GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY So, where does group psychotherapy fit in? If the magnitude of the problems outlined seem to shrink the significance of group psychotherapy, it could nevertheless be argued—as above—that group therapy may be the most socially relevant and useful of all therapies in the new century. Many of our social problems reflect a twin process of fear of the group and attack on the group, and we can expect this to continue in the future. Yet, people will still need and want to relate to each other in effective and satisfying ways. We could see group therapy as a crucial medium for therapy and education in the sense of interpersonal communication and relatedness. What is already glaring is the gap between technological communication, increasingly precise and potent, and ordinary face-to-face, person-to-person, group-to-group communication, often hopelessly confused and inexact. At the start of a new millennium, human beings seem to have learned relatively little about communicating with each other. The consequences of this may be dire. Group psychotherapy has the potential to address some of the deeper
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problems of communication, but we have some way to go. Our theory and technique are at an early stage, there is much confusion (Dies, 1992), and there is perhaps a tendency towards superficiality and over-simplification in current trends in the field. THE ANTI-GROUP I, therefore, have to stem the tide of my growing optimism about the future of group psychotherapy, at least temporarily, to consider that its potential will be challenged, paradoxically, by the very forces that I have outlined as indicating the need for a group approach. The atomisation of the self, the loss of human connectedness, the breakdown of communities, the failure to deal with aggression in non-violent ways, the obsession with quick and easy solutions, and the seduction of fundamentalist ideologies, may be so profound that the therapeutic endeavour will fizzle into insignificance. I believe as group therapists we need a greater understanding of these phenomena, and this is what led me to formulate the concept of the Anti-Group (Nitsun, 1991, 1996). Originating in the clinical setting, the concept sought to make sense of the negative and disruptive processes in therapy groups that could obstruct or undermine the therapeutic development of groups. The Anti-Group is a critical principle that challenges the conventional optimism of group psychotherapy by suggesting that there are destructive or potentially destructive attitudes towards groups that have been insufficiently recognised in the literature. These attitudes may be manifest before the group starts. In the selection process, lists of people needing psychological help often disappear at the point of invitation to join a group. People express considerable doubts and fears of group therapy. Then, during the group, anti-group attitudes may find further expression in responses such as excessive drop-outs, erratic attendance, and continuing attacks on the value of the group. They may also be found outside of the group in the organisation in which the group is run. Therapy groups in organisations often arouse suspicion, denigration, and attempts to sabotage the group. There appears to be a mixture of envy and a sense of exclusion aroused in those outside the group. Coupled with fears that the group may be too revealing, not only of the participants, but of the organisation as a whole, the attack on the group from the outside may become a palpable force. Winnicott, who wrote very little about groups in the sense that we know them, nevertheless conveyed in vivid terms the power of the group to provoke attack. He sees the group’s drawing a boundary around itself, establishing an identity, as an immediate provocation. A group is an I AM achievement, and it is a dangerous achievement, [because] the repudiated external world comes back at the new phenomenon in every conceivable way and attacks from all quarters (Winnicott, 1965, p. 149).
The group therapist often also harbours Anti-Group attitudes, usually linked to his or her internal representation of groups as awakened in the counter-transference
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response to current hostilities in a particular psychotherapy group. There are therefore several sources of the Anti-Group: the group membership, the host organisation, and the therapist him or herself. These all need identification, and in addition an understanding of the mirroring processes whereby the different levels of influence are inter-connected (Nitsun, 1998). The Anti-Group, however, is not meant to imply a static, irreversible state in the group. It is linked dialectically to constructive group development. It provides anti-thesis to thesis, a means of testing the survival of the group, and—in favourable conditions—helps strengthen the containing function of the group. Taken a step further, the recognition and containment of Anti-Group processes is the key to the creative development of the group. It enables potentially destructive aggression to be transformed into constructive process, it awakens a sense of responsibility for destructive impulses and it evokes a wish to repair, to make good—a key ingredient in all therapy. In parallel with Winnicott’s theory of the “use of an object,” (Winnicott, 1968) the survival of the group in the face of attack is itself growth promoting. It reinforces belief in the strength and durability of the group and it enhances trust in the group. Manifestations of the Anti-Group in the clinical setting have been described in detail by myself and several other writers (Craib, 1997; Mishan & Bateman, 1994; Nitsun, 1996; Zelaskowski, 1998), and the reader is referred to these for a fuller exposition. ANTI-GROUP FORCES IN SOCIETY Here, I wish to return to the Anti-Group in the wider social setting, since the concept can be extended to the organisational and social domains. Threats to society in the new century become understandable in the light of a unifying principle that I call “the culture of the Anti-Group.” Somewhere in the vast jigsaw of civilisation and its “discontents” there is a very deep ambivalence about groups, a longing to belong alongside a desire to drift away from social cohesion. Alternatively, a love of one’s own group is professed at the expense of the other’s group, which is feared and hated. The threat of destruction that pervades history seems both to generate and reflect a form of Anti-Group at the core of our civilisation and our basic humanity. Viewed in these terms, it is not surprising that society frequently seems in a state of entropy, like Yeats’s “centre that cannot hold.” The destruction of valued institutions and groups seems to occur in isomorphic fashion from one level of society to another: witness the disintegration of communities, of family life, of social groupings, and of intimate relationships. True, much of this may reflect the inevitability of social change in the face of gathering economic and technological pressures. But how much is this also a retreat from the group, from the challenge of group belonging? How much is it antigroup?
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LEAPS AND LINKS I am aware of leaping from the clinical to the social and back again. In one sense, these are leaps since they touch on different domains. But perhaps, instead of a leap we could see a link. The link invites the important question of whether our therapy group “can make society’s groups more therapeutic.” This is the title of a presidential address to the American Group Psychotherapy Association given by Rutan (1989), which reflects a strong tradition in the USA to relate group psychotherapy to the improvement of wider society. A similar tradition exists in the UK, where both Foulkesian group analysis and the Tavistock approach are applied to the elucidation of organisational processes, as well as political and historical events and trends. The recognition of psychoanalytic and group analytic principles as a basis for organisational consultancy is developing, and alongside this, some interest in their relevance to broader social and political issues. However, this is a slow, tentative development. As Armstrong (1995) pointed out, psychoanalysis has not made much impact on organisational culture and this could equally be said about group analysis. There is a discontinuity between our theories, their social implications, and their application outside the consulting room. This does not mean, however, that there is no further potential. Rather, there is a requirement for us to re-examine the link between theory and practice with the aim of strengthening their relevance. If this is achieved, there is a better chance that, from a basis in group psychotherapy, we would contribute something more substantial to the betterment of the world. JOURNEY’S END When Heshel led his family from Varniai in 1914, he had a sense of destination. He was going to the town of Kelme, where his wife’s family could offer temporary refuge. Twenty five years later, when the Germans invaded again, the Jewish townsfolk had no similar choice. They lost all control and dignity in the face of the onslaught on their community. The tragic march of the Kosovan refugees several decades later mirrored the same theme. Our vision of the future is tinged with similar anxieties about choice and control. We do not know what awaits us in the 21st century. In an age of global networks and technological mastery we remain unable to predict or control some of the most basic— and dangerous—aspects of human behaviour. Similarly, the future of group psychotherapy in the 21st century remains an enigma. I suggest, however, that to some extent the uncertain future hinges on the nature of Anti-Group manifestations, at both clinical and social levels, and the extent to which, as practitioners and theoreticians, we are able to confront and deal creatively with these phenomena.
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REFERENCES Armstrong, D. (1995). The psychoanalytic approach to institutional life: Why so little impact. Group Analysis, 28, 33–45. Dies, R. R. (1992). Models of group psychotherapy: Sifting through confusion. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 42, 1–17. Craib, I. (1997). Trying to make sense of the Anti-Group. Group Analysis, 30, 107–118. Jacobson, D. (1998). Heshel’s kingdom. London: Penguin. Mishan, J., & Bateman, A. (1994). Group-analytic therapy of borderline patients in a day hospital setting. Group Analysis, 27, 483–495. Nitsun, M. (1991). The Anti-Group: Destructive forces in the group and their therapeutic potential. Group Analysis, 24(1), 7–20. Nitsun, M. (1996). The Anti-Group: Destructive forces in the group and their creative potential. London: Routledge. Nitsun, M. (1998). The organisational mirror: Part II. Group Analysis, 31, 505–518. Rutan, J. S., & Groves, J. E. (1989). Making society’s groups more therapeutic. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 39, 3–16. Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The family and individual development. London: Tavistock. Winnicott, D. W. (1968). Playing and reality. London: Pelican, 1974. Zelaskowski, P. (1998). The suboptimal group. Group Analysis, 31, 491–504.
