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Psychotherapy Section Review No. 54 Spring 2015

ISSN: 1747–1761

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Letter from the Editor Terry Birchmore ‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’ Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. ‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.’ Philip Pullman. ‘It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.’ Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind. ‘We’re all stories, in the end.’ Steven Moffat.

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UR LIVES ARE WOVEN AROUND STORIES. We tell ourselves and others the stories of our lives. Our identity springs from the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we construct about our past, present and future. The stuff of our psychotherapy sessions is storied: patients or clients tell us stories: about their pasts, their present difficulties and relationships, their traumas, joys and frustrations. We hear narratives of repeated patterns, personal lived themes that cannot be escaped despite changes in relationships, settings, and time. Through stories we learn about who is the victim, who is the persecutor, who is the wished for prince or rescuer, who identifies with whom and for what reason. An understanding of story and narrative structure seems essential in the business of listening to the stories that we are told and the stories we tell ourselves. Our own construction of a professional identity may depend on the stories we construct from our experiences. These are sufficient claims to support the view that our trainings need to incorporate teachings about literary criticism and narrative structure.

In this issue of the Psychotherapy Section Review two topics predominate: story and narrative; and group therapy. We reprint two articles that were originally published in the Psychotherapy Section Newsletter in 1990: an article written by David Smail and a companion article by Simon King-Spooner both discussing narrative and identity. David Smail’s article is reprinted as a further mark of his importance to our Section in the past and follows a second obituary written by colleagues who worked closely with David over the course of many years. We have reports from our Autumn workshop on the theme of sibling relationships, part of which touched on siblings in literature. Other articles highlight the ability of groups to illuminate and heal personal distress. Please note that we are hoping to publish at least one special issue on ethics this year. Please: if you can contribute anything on this important subject, contact me. Your knowledge, experience and willingness to contribute will only add to the strength and vigour of this Section. Terry Birchmore

Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

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Letter from the Chair Ho Law

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ELLO AGAIN! Welcome to the Spring 2015 edition of the Psychotherapy Section Review. You may be surprised to read this letter from me as in the last edition, I wrote that it would probably be my last letter, as the Chair of the Section before the AGM on 26 November 2014. Sadly, no one put themselves forward to be nominated to take on the role of the Chair. As a result, I was co-opted back onto the Committee as the Chair for another year, while Neringa Kisler continues to serve as the Honorary Treasurer, and Terry Birchmore the Editor. I would like to welcome our new Committee members: Zara Rahemtulla (the Honorary Secretary); Steven Heigham, Peter Kelly and Erica Brostoff (Ordinary Members) who were co-opted at the AGM; and Abbie Darlington (the newly-elected Student Representative for PsyPAG). It is clear that as part of the contingency plan for the Section, we do need more new volunteers to come forward onto the Committee so that we can serve our members and engage with the Society more effectively. This is particularly important as the British Psychological Society is undergoing changes as part of its renewal, for example, see its new Strategic Plan: http://www.bps.org.uk/ what-we-do/bps/governance/ strategic-plan/strategic-plan At the time of writing, we (the

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Committee) are conducting a membership survey to seek to better understand your needs and expectations from the Section – please respond to the survey if you have not done so already. Alternatively, if you wish, simply email me. Dr Ho Law Chair, Psychotherapy Section Email: [email protected] http://www.bps.org.uk/ networks-and-communities/ member-microsite/psychotherapy-section


Looking ahead at future plans for CPD Steve Heigham

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OLLOWING ON FROM THE AGM and a more recent Committee meeting, we have begun to plan the CPD events for the next six months, though these plans may be supplemented in response to the member’s survey that is being sent around at this time. In consideration of the number of changing perspectives in the field of psychotherapy over the last few years – registration with the HCPC, the accession of CBT to prominence through the introduction of IAPT in the NHS, the controversies surrounding the introduction of the DSM-5, the proliferation of new ‘brands’ of therapy, and so on, we would like to look at the commonalities that unite psychotherapy as a discipline. It is easy to get the impression that therapy is a very divided subject, yet there are certain key trans-theoretical concepts and practices that are fundamental to all of our activities, which we would like to develop in our future programme of continued professional development.


Thus this will be the theme for our annual conference event in the autumn, with contributors being invited to give lectures and workshops on themes such as: self-esteem; self-concept; family relationships; and time line work. Suggestions for other trans-theoretical themes would also be welcome from members. In the summer it is also hoped to have a workshop on empathy and self awareness as aspects of human personality that are fundamental to the therapeutic relationship and process, and that are a useful focus in every school of psychotherapy. We look forward to meeting you all at some of these future gatherings. Steve Heigham On behalf of the Psychotherapy Section Committee.

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Be a Psychotherapy Section Review Writer! ‘Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.’ Mark Twain Would you like to share your ideas or professional concerns with a wide range of colleagues? Writing for the Psychotherapy Section Review is an ideal opportunity to begin your professional writing career with something that is informal, even witty or funny, a short piece that is a report of an event, a report about practice, a research report, a review of the literature, a review of a book or film, a reply to an earlier article published here, or stray thoughts that you have managed to capture on paper. Accounts of innovations, research findings concerning existing practice, policy issues affecting psychotherapy, and discussions of conceptual developments are all relevant. Psychotherapy with clients, users, professional teams, or community groups fall within our range as do articles about psychotherapy education and training. I welcome contributions from Psychotherapy Section members and non-members on any topics related to psychotherapy. Length: Full-length articles of up to 10,000 words, should show the context of practice or research and relate this to existing knowledge. We also accept brief contributions which need focus only on the issue at hand: brief descriptions, reviews, personal reports of workshops or events attended, humorous asides, letters and correspondence. Presentation: Articles, letters, etc., should ideally be in Word format and forwarded as an email attachment to the Editor. Editor’s email address: Terry Birchmore: [email protected]

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Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

Obituary

David Smail: Exponent of a socialmaterialist psychology and clinical psychology’s Voltaire The Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle

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AVID SMAIL, who has died at the age of 76, was a leading clinical psychologist and a man of great warmth, compassion and humour – deeply committed to his family and much valued by his colleagues and friends. A distinguished and influential writer (he was described by his fellow author Dorothy Rowe as ‘psychology’s Voltaire’) David was a cleareyed and sometimes hard-hitting critic. He drew upon his vast clinical experience and his wide learning to highlight the limitations of psychological treatment in the context of the damaging effects on people of the (often) toxic social world that we have created. He argued that the theory and practice of psychotherapy has largely ignored or downplayed the way in which personal distress is ultimately rooted in the environments in which many people have to live; and in doing so, psychological practitioners have too often become the unwitting agents of social control. David was born in Putney, London, on the 23rd of April 1938 – St George’s Day. Perhaps it was a sign of things to come thathe first reached public attention, while still at school, for the courageous rescue of a tortoise from a household fire. His early interest in the works of Carl Jung led him to take his first degree in psychology and philosophy at UCL, where he moonlighted as a semi-professional jazz drummer. As a postgraduate, David cut his first professional teeth in psychology in market research, Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

though he quickly found that making up results did not lead to intellectual fulfillment; and so, turning his back on the chance to make his pile, he signed up for clinical psychology training at the Horton Hospital in Epston. After completing his training, David joined Tom Caine’s psychology department at the Claybury Hospital in Essex, where he was among the pioneers of the therapeutic community approach to the treatment of distress. Influenced by the ideas of R.D. Laing and of other critics of biomedical psychiatry, this approach entailed the introduction of a more democratic, thoughtful and humane regime to the hospital ward, where patients were encouraged to become active participants in their own and each other’s rehabilitation. David’s work at Claybury included the completion of a PhD thesis encapsulated in his first book, co-written with Tom Caine, on The Treatment of Mental Illness, published in 1969. They concluded that the personal styles and preferences of those giving and receiving psychological therapies were far more important to the final outcome than theories or techniques, and that psychiatric diagnoses said little about the patients’ confusion and despair, which could be traced – not to their aberrant brain chemistry – but to the unkindness and neglect that had marred their lives. These insights, since upheld by a consistent body of research summarised by academic friends and colleagues including 5

The Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle

Mary Boyle, Lucy Johnstone, Mark Rapley and Richard Wilkinson – were to be elaborated in David’s subsequent career in the NHS as a clinical psychologist, which was to span nearly 30 years. From the beginning, he was a key force in the shaping of clinical practice and service delivery, as head of the Nottingham Clinical Psychology Service: the youngest person in the UK to hold such a senior post at that time. In the 1960s, the main role of the clinical psychologist was to administer psychometric tests, under the tutelage of the far more powerful profession of psychiatry. But clinical psychology grew rapidly in scope during this decade. Under David’s leadership, the Nottingham service swiftly expanded to take in the north of the county of Nottinghamshire. In the late 1980s, David successfully negotiated the move of the Nottingham District Service out of what was then known as the ‘Mental Illness Unit’ and into the new premises which became known as ‘The Community Unit’ – in the belief that he could build a community-based service, focused upon prevention as well as treatment, and free from the domination of psychiatry. But David never abandoned his academic interests. He established a clinical option in the psychology department at Nottingham University; where he was later awarded the honorary chair of Special Professor in Clinical Psychology – which he held from 1979 to 2000. For him, the practice of clinical psychology was never about trying to fit in, pragmatically, with the latest government or managerial ideology, nor with whatever happened to be most fashionable within the university. Rather, therapeutic psychology was both a craft and an intellectual endeavour, based, above all, upon clinical experience. As a founder of the Psychology and Psychotherapy Association and with two stints as chair of the Psychotherapy Section of the British Psychological Society (BPS), he was an influential support for those who hoped that clinical psychology might develop in more thoughtful and humanistic directions. Those who worked with David 6

were encouraged to become creative but meticulous applied scientists. Indeed, David was highly critical of his profession’s early enthusiasm for behavioural therapies, followed by the current favourite, CBT. He was among the first to highlight the simplistic nature of these treatments, their tendency to lay the blame for distress upon the supposed failings of the individual sufferer, and their limited effectiveness in day-to-day clinical practice – especially for people struggling with entrenched social and economic adversity – flaws that have since been well documented by many other critics and researchers, such as Professor William Epstein, in the US (Epstein, 2006, 2013; and see, for example, Dineen, 1998; Moloney, 2013; Newnes, 2014). Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that many who worked with David still recall his advice that current orthodoxies should always be questioned, and that we should strive to be mindful of how institutional and workplace demands can blunt our capacity for honest reflection and careful thought. Because of his openness to what his therapeutic practice seemed to be showing him, David was always willing to revise his ideas, and he became increasingly doubtful about the covert social and political functions of psychological treatment. In his landmark text, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety published in 1984, he focused mainly upon the subjective experience of the afflicted individual. David showed how daily life in an increasingly competitive and unequal society can spawn chronic insecurity – especially amongst those with the least power and control over their circumstances – and how these emotional states are all too quickly labelled (by mental health professionals and sufferers alike) as ‘clinical’ problems, to be fixed via individual treatment. He argued that these deep seated insecurities and fears can come to permeate our bodily and mental experience, indeed our whole being – and far beyond the reach of mere therapeutic talk – an observation that has since been amply confirmed by neuroPsychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

David Smail: Exponent of a social-materialist psychology and clinical psychology’s Voltaire

psychological research (Dillon, Johnstone & Longden, 2012). In his next book, Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy (1987), he focused upon the experts and the hollowness of their curative claims on the one hand, and on the other, upon how their mythology of cure reflects the workings of a society obsessed with facile imputations of personal ‘blame’ and ‘responsibility’. He showed that it was those with the most power and privilege who really benefit from these arrangements, which serve, in the end, to disguise the widespread harm that is wrought when interests of commerce and the pursuit of profit are put before the welfare of the ordinary citizen. Psychotherapy might offer comfort, clarification and encouragement – but for many, and probably most, it cannot cure. The only reliable way to ease widespread distress, he argued, was through changes in our social arrangements – an essentially political task. Indeed, David once said that Margaret Thatcher was the best psychologist that he had ever encountered. She had taught him more about the misuse of political power as the fulcrum of personal suffering than any one before, or since. In The Origins of Unhappiness (1993), he described how, by the middle of the 1980s, he had found himself trying to treat more and more individuals afflicted by emotional ills that they often attributed to their own failures of adjustment or personal resolve. Like many other NHS psychologists in this period, and in addition to his traditional constituency – comprised of people struggling with enduring impoverishment and harsh social circumstances – David also found himself treating growing numbers of middle-class professionals. He saw that, in their different ways, the malaise experienced by both groups pointed to the arrival of cold and unsettling times, which included the first moves in the retrenchment of the welfare state and in the enforced dismantling and privatisation of public institutions that has marked the decades since, and which has sped up, during the current period of ‘austerity’ (see Clark & Heath, 2014; Jones, 2014). Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

David’s work was remarkable not just for these observations, which were strengthened by psychiatric survey data and other health indices, such as rising rates of depression amongst the growing mass of unemployed people and climbing suicide rates for young men – (both of which revealed the shadow side of 1980s Britain) – but because so few of his colleagues seemed to officially notice what had been happening. The counselling and self-help industries expanded massively during this period – not because there had been any new scientific developments, but because of the openness of so many therapists and psychologists to the new business values. Anyone who could conceivably turn a profit out of the marketing of make-believe did so. David himself was a victim of these social and political changes. In the five years before his retirement, he was unable to stop the fragmentation and destruction of the service thathe had built, when the NHS fell prey to the first stages of the internal ‘business revolution’ that is now all but complete (Jones, 2014; Pollock, 2009; Tallis & Davis, 2013). After retirement, David continued to work as a visiting lecturer for several therapeutic psychology-training courses across the UK, and he maintained links with community psychology groups in the Midlands, where his patient encouragement and advice was always appreciated. David also kept writing. In Power, Interest and Psychology (2005) – his last book, and the one which he felt offered the best summary of his thought – he charted the outlines of what he called a social-materialist version of psychology: one which places the experience of distress firmly in an environmental context, and which embraces the extent to which our feelings, thoughts and conduct are shaped by the sticks and carrots of economic and social power. Rather than the self-creating entities posited by all too many purveyors of psychological techniques, we are real, embodied beings, living in an equally real world that resists wishful thinking. David observed that, if we want to understand why we are 7

The Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle

unhappy, then, rather than the traditional idea of ‘insight’ into a mythical interior psychological space, we need to cultivate ‘outsight’ into the external world. Dismissed by less reflective colleagues as ‘negative’, ‘depressing’, or even as ‘cynical’ – for David, this viewpoint was exactly the reverse: since it encourages personal modesty, an appreciation of the importance of good and bad fortune in our lives, and a compassionate acceptance of our shared humanity. In the last 12 years of his life – despite or perhaps because of his disillusion with what he saw as the increasingly hubristic claims of the leading practitioners of talking therapy – David found renewed zeal as the founder of the Midlands Psychology Group (MPG). A close knit collection of critically minded academic and therapeutic psychologists, the MPG was created in 2002, with the aim of exploring the implications of social-materialist psychology, which it did through the organisation ofanational conference and through articles published in a range of journals and other outlets, including The Guardian newspaper. In 2013, the group published a manifesto, which explored the relevance of David’s ideas to the understanding, ‘treatment’ and prevention of distress, and in early 2014 edited a special edition of The Psychologist magazine, which took a sceptical look at recent UK coalition government policies in relation to ‘austerity’ and their effects upon the mental health of the British population. Within the group, David both gave and received inspiration and good humour in equal measure; and the resolve of the MPG to continue his work is yet another testament to the enduring richness of his intellectual and personal legacy. Back in 1987, David concluded that, if we are to ease human distress, then we have no option other than to drop our naïve faith in therapy, and to try to take better care of each other. For his many readers, colleagues and friends, these words have an even deeper resonance today. David is survived by his wife Uta, and by his two children, Alastair and Deborah, and five grandchildren. 8

Bibliography Clark, T. & Heath, A. (2014). Hard times: The divisive toll of the economic slump. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Dillon, J., Johnstone, L. & Longden, L. (2012). Trauma, dissociation, attachment and neuroscience: A new paradigm for understanding severe mental distress. Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, 145–155. Dineen, T. (1998). Manufacturing victims. London: Constable. Epstein, W. (2013). Empowerment as ceremony. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Epstein, W. (2006). The civil divine: Psychotherapy as religion in America. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Jones, O. (2014). The Establishment: and how they get away with it. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Moloney, P. (2013). The therapy industry: The irresistible rise of the talking cure and why it doesn’t work. London: Pluto Press. Newnes, C. (2014). Clinical psychology: A critical examination. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books Ltd. Pollock, A. (2009). NHS Plc. The privatisation of our health care. London & New York: Verso Books. Smail, D. (1984). Illusion and reality: The meaning of anxiety. London: Dent. Smail, D. (1987). Taking care: An alternative to therapy. London: Dent. Smail, D. (1993). The origins of unhappiness: Towards a new understanding of psychological distress. London: Constable. Smail, D. (2005). Power, interest and psychology: Elements of a social materialist understanding of distress. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books Ltd. Tallis, R. & Davis, J. (2013). NHS SOS: How the NHS was betrayed – and how we can save it. London: Oneworld Publications.


Changing the Self: The affective plot in literary narratives David Smail FTER A LONG PERIOD OF NEGLECT, narrative has received a great deal of attention in the last 20 years from psychologists and literary theorists. Despite this, we are still some way from understanding the processes of response to literary narrative, or understanding the role that reading stories and novels plays in the life of the reader. My main aim in this paper is to sketch some of the components of a model of response. I will be arguing that the central component, which has largely been neglected, is affect, and that a reconsideration of affect will enable us to go some way to seeing how the life of a story and the life of the reader interrelate creatively. But I will also review some of the existing theories of narrative which I find helpful, which will provide a framework for the model I will be presenting. But to begin, I will indicate one of the main themes of my talk by looking at the opening works of a well-known literary narrative, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: 1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Even this first sentence provides quite a lot of information about situation and characters. If you knew nothing about the novel, you would already be inclined to think that the situation was one of remoteness and solitude; you would be aware that there are two characters, the speaker and the landlord, and that, if you stopped to think about it, the relation between them is one of property – landlord and tenant. But, more important, such a sentence invites the reader to take up an attitude towards something. In this sentence it is the

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phrase ‘troubled with’ that does the trick: ‘the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with’. The speaker appears to welcome the solitude: and because the verb is in the future tense, ‘shall be’, it also seems that the situation is a new one for the speaker. Perhaps the novel seeks the reader’s complicity in this preference: it speaks to that in us that (from time to time) seeks out remoteness or solitude. I will argue that we read literary narratives for this affective view or perspective, rather than for information. If this is correct, then the primary vehicle of response to narrative is affect. However, a literary narrative works to shift or alter in some respect the focus of the emotions it arouses in the reader. To account for the work that narratives do in this way, I will later point to several properties of emotion that are frequently neglected. At the same time, I want to show how this view relates to some current accounts of narrative by psychologists and literacy critics: in a number of ways it sits well alongside story grammars, and the structuralist and reader response views. Each of these contributes an important dimension to the view I want to present. To demonstrate the issues which must be taken into account, if we are to understand the process of reading literacy narratives, I’ll return to the opening of Wuthering Heights and look at it in a little more detail.

Going beyond the reader’s assumptions Here is the first paragraph as a whole (it consists of five sentences): 1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a 9

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situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. As I said, the first sentence seems to invite you to share the speaker’s welcome for the solitude. The continuation certainly reinforces that attitude: he says the country is beautiful and completely remote from society, ‘a perfect misanthropist’s heaven’. Now, love of solitude, celebrating the remoteness of the wilder parts of England, had become rather popular by the time the novel was published in 1847. The Romantic revolution in taste had been accomplished. Wordsworth in particular, from his station in the Lake District, had established the cultural value of the scene in Nature containing only one or two (or perhaps no) human figures. This value, in the opening paragraph, is the starting point of Bronte’s novel. The speaker seems to be a type of refugee from society (as Wordsworth was), and he invites us to identify ourselves with his pleasure in this new situation. However, the value is a double-edged one, and the phrase ‘misanthropist’s heaven’ hints at potentially negative implications. Although for the speaker himself the phrase is probably fairly trivial, a kind of pleasantry (appropriate for the social world he has left behind, perhaps – and this helps us to locate the speaker’s social position), its effect is ironic. It undermines the virtues which he seems ready to assign to solitude. Halfway through this paragraph, then, there are already two opposing values in play, relating to the virtues and the vices of solitude. The virtues are the overt theme of the passage, however, and for the reader at this stage it may be that the ‘misanthropist’s 10

heaven’ would be a passing dissonance that is hardly noticed. But we then immediately get what looks like a description of a misanthropist in Mr Heathcliff: his black eyes are withdrawn in suspicion, his fingers shelter jealously in his waistcoat. If we have located the speaker in a social class, prompted by the style of his remarks so far, we may also suspect that his attitude to Heathcliff is mistaken. His assumption of equality, of fellowship in solitude – ‘Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us’ – may be too easy: it may be overlooking something more malevolent than mere, lovable, misanthropy. The question of property is also raised again, indirectly, in the phrase referring to Heathcliff’s fingers sheltering ‘with a jealous resolution’ in his waistcoat – it seems that Heathcliff has something to defend, since he seems to treat the speaker’s visit as a kind of trespass. And the next few pages will show that the speaker, who is called Lockwood, is indeed mistaken about Heathcliff. By the end of this first paragraph, then, the reader has both been invited to share in the speaker’s feelings about solitude, and at the same time has received signals (ambiguous so far) of the possible negative implications of solitude. In some way the novel, as it proceeds, must develop the issue which this presents, and furnish evidence for thinking further about it. The reader’s own emotions relating to solitude will provide an agenda of issues which he or she might expect the novel to raise (such an agenda need not be present consciously): the reader will, in other words, from the first paragraph, be anticipating certain possible outcomes and further values. Indeed, one can readily imagine two quite different types of reader for this novel: the Wordsworthian reader, looking for the advantages and wisdom which flow from the solitude amidst nature; the other on the watch for the destructive effects of isolation and the abuses of property. There is plenty of evidence as the novel gets underway to supply both readers, but it must be said that Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

Changing the Self: The affective plot in literary narratives

neither could be entirely satisfied with the novel as a whole (although both types of readings have been argued at length in print). Whatever values the reader applies, the novel will almost certainly require their modification of suspension, since the novel (I believe) is actually about something beyond that particular issue. But my purpose is not to offer you a third way of reading the novel, but to discuss the principles for understanding narrative which the example demonstrates. I want to point, first, to the knowledge and assumptions that the reader must have in order to support their reading; then I will indicate in what ways reading requires us to go beyond our assumptions, and suggest how affect probably provides the primary vehicle for doing so.

Narrative and the reader’s knowledge This first paragraph, then, requires that you deploy your knowledge of solitude, and the assumptions you make about it. It suggests a value which most readers will readily understand, whether they share it or not (and surely most modern readers do). At this level a narrative depends on the readers world knowledge and a set of pre-existing values and conventions. In psychological terms these are often described as scripts or schemata. In the present instance they also include conventions about narrative (this opening, for example, with the year provided and the tense of the first phrase, proclaims itself a journal entry). But first of all literary narratives obviously depend on world knowledge: information about situations, people, events, places. Cognitive scientists have developed whole theories of narrative around this point. Called story grammars (a related domain is text grammars), They are based on an analysis of the structure of schemata and our ability to remember schema-based inf ormation and relate items across schemata (examples of such work include Bower, Black & Turner, 1979; Graesser, 198l; and Mandler, 1984). In this approach the various elements of a narrative can be Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

assigned to one or other category. Graesser’s model, for example, includes physical or mental events, goal modes, and style elements, and these are related accordingly to various well-defined narrative links. The categories by which story grammars divide up knowledge, however, tend to be too rigid to account for the often indeterminate or ambiguous elements of literacy narrative. The explanation of response to stories that are given by the story grammarians really only work well for relatively simple stories, such as folk tales or fairy stories, which tend to be constructed from conventional situations and stereotyped characters. And despite the empirical basis of the theories, repeated experimental testing has not resolved some fundamental ambiguities over how schemata are conceptualised and how they relate to reading (Smail, 1989). It is obvious that schemata, or some equivalent structure of world knowledge, must be involved in reading. But a literary text is distinguished from other texts by requiring that the reader go beyond the schemata that are given: the text calls the adequacy of the schemata into question, and initiates a search on the part of the reader to find or develop a more adequate way of accounting for the issues presented by the story. To read is, in this respect, necessarily an active, creative process, in other words, the reader of Wuthering Heights cannot take the cultural value of solitude that Lockwood holds for granted: it will be tested, questioned, and perhaps superseded as the novel proceeds. But this novel doesn’t merely ask the reader to change his or her mind about the value of solitude: it requires the reader to find a perspective from which to view the issue of solitude and see why it is problematic – and this is a creative process. The studies of cognitive science have paid considerable attention to how schema are deployed, but it has been acknowledged that so far very little is understood about how a schema (if that is the construct we need) is created (e.g. Rumelhart & Norman, 1978). 11

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Literary texts also, as I mentioned, draw on conventions which are specific to a given genre, such as narrative. these are signalled by various narrative structures and devices, which indicate the time frame, the point of view, which character is the protagonist, and the like. The reader new to Wuthering Heights, for example, must not only recognise the journal convention, but also consider whether Lockwood will be the protagonist, and what role, if any, will be assigned to Heathcliff (who appears at first to be a typical antagonist from a Gothic novel). Much valuable and detailed work has been carried out by structuralist critics on these aspects, especially in France. For example, following Propp’s (1928/1968) analysis of standard situations in folk stories, Greimas (Bal, 1985, pp.26–36) developed a typology of roles in narrative. Asking who is the protagonist, who is the antagonist, who or what helps (inanimate objects can also be ‘actors’), shows that characters fulfill certain functions within a story, and allows for the fact that one function may be fulfilled by more than one character. The approach serves to emphasise the structural relationships at work in a narrative: it diminishes the psychological emphasis on individual characters (against the tendency of the naive reader to respond as though such individuals really existed), and it shifts emphasis onto the play of actions in the narrative. Similarly, Genette’s (1980) work offers a productive analysis of narration and plot, the handling of time, mood and voice in narrative. in the case of time, for example, as well as showing the ways in which narratives make use of retrospection and (less often) anticipation, Genette also examines the frequency of events, or what he calls more precisely, iteration, which is an event described as having happening only once, or was it a recurring event? Compare the differing effect of these narrative fragments. The first describes something that takes place only once: l I went into town to visit the market. Near the West gate I saw Mr Alvani the music teacher. He was walking with a limp. 12

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I used to go in to town to visit the market. Near the West gate I would see Mr Alvani the music teacher. He walked with a limp. The first seems to be a fragment from a plot, perhaps involving the appearance of Mr Alvani – a degree of suspense is already present. The second seems rather the account of a situation, a description of what was typical at a certain time and place. In terms of a plot, nothing has happened as yet, but the passage creates an atmosphere of a certain kind. It can be pointed out that in their affective tone the two passages differ considerably, although this is an aspect that hardly concerns Genette. Following the work of Greimas, Gennette, Roland Barthes, and others, we now have a sophisticated theoretical apparatus for describing the elements of narrative. From my perspective, however, the main problem with such accounts, however exhaustive they are, is that they either assume that the categories they describe determine the reading process, or the process of reading as such is left out of account. For example, in Genette’s study, Narrative Discourse (1989), which is one of the most detailed and scrupulous studies of narrative available, the reader is hardly mentioned until the very end. Interestingly, what Genette then does is to offer a quotation from Proust on the act of reading which is unexpectedly subversive of his own theoretical edifice. According to Proust, the reader is constructing his own book out of the instrument provided by the author. Proust concludes: ‘in reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self’ (cited, p.261). While this comment does not in itself invalidate Genette’s own approach, it does raise the question to what extent the reader notices and is influenced by the array of narrative elements that Genette catalogues. However, unlike story grammarians, structuralist theorists have been uninterested in empirical research to test their view of narrative. If the reader is reading ‘his own self’, this proposes a quite different starting point for Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


an investigation of narrative. The issues that concern the self of the reader will throw a kind of filter over the narrative features that Genette described: some features will influence the reading, others will not be seen. The reader’s concerns will determine what overall structure will be given to the narrative. Whether any or all of the features in the structuralist account are relevant to this process remains to be established, although it seems certain that many of them must be. My own work with readers of narrative has suggested that, whatever meaning a reader brings to or finds in a text, all readers, for instance, might respond in a significant way to a certain passage of iteration, as shown by their comments or by ratings for importance; but the emotional meaning they attribute to the passage may vary considerably from one reader to another. Knowing what structural features are present inanarrative doesn’t in itself tell you what meaning readers will come to see in it: such features don’t determine how a text will be read (cf. the criticism of Genette by Van Rees, 1985).

The process of reading The process of reading a literary text seems to begin in this way: The reader must contribute their existing knowledge – their schemata – in order to understand the referential world of the text, and they must find within their own experience the values that the narrative seems to require. But the language of the text and perhaps various structural features conspire to call in to question the adequacy of their values and their schemata. The opening of Wuthering Heights has already provided an example of this process: the hint of irony surrounding Lockwood’s first paragraph undermines the positive value as signed to solitude in a remote part of the country. In this way the narrative indicates that your schemata as a reader must be reconsidered. The concepts and values by which you understand the world are being put in a different light: what is to you familiar and unquestioned the way the world Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

is – becomes defamiliarised. It is this sense of the inadequacy of your familiar schemata that, in part, drives your reading, because you are now obliged to create a perspective in which the unfolding narrative is meaningful. Defamiliarisation is often cited as a standard effect of literary texts: critics from Coleridge (1871/1965) through Shklovsky (1917/1965), to Roger Fowler (1986) have argued that a primary function of literature is to dehabituate perception. For example, according to Coleridge (in a famous passage of the Biographia literaria), the intention of Wordsworth’s poetry is to arouse the reader by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand (Coleridge, 1965, p.169). The defamiliarising work takes place throughout the text, thus the reader will experience a conflict of fluctuating perspectives. One of the major reader response critics, Wolfgangiser, remarks that as we read, ‘we oscillate to a greater or lesser degree between the building and breaking of illusions’ (Iser, 1980, pp.62–64). In his terms, our schemata or world knowledge constitute the ‘primary code’ of the narrative; but the activity of the reader transcends this as they bring in to being the secondary or ‘aesthetic code’ (Iser, 1978, p.92). As we read on in Wuthering Heights, a major focus of attention in the first four chapters is the inadequacy of Lockwood’s understanding as he encounters Heathcliff’s world. In this sense Lockwood represents the reader’s own prior perspective, except that we know from those first ironies that in attempting to understand the situations and the characters he meets, all the concepts that Lockwood applies are already too conventional and shallow. But so far we probably have nothing adequate to set beside them. Lockwood is 13

David Smail

then replaced as the main narrator for most of the novel by Nellie Dean, who has been a witness to the strange events involving Heathcliff and Catherine. But the reader eventually realises that there is a greater significance in the events that Nellie relates than she herself can understand. This inadequacy of the narrator is itself a defamiliarising technique, requiring the reader to search for a more adequate meaning – there are, in fact, no reliable narrators in the novel, and this places a special burden on the reader’s values and creativity. Now critics such as Iser offer, I think, an accurate account of what the reading process looks like. Iser also, and perhaps with better reason, reaches the same conclusion as that of Proust, which I quoted earlier, the significance of the text, he says, ‘does not lie in the meaning sealed within the text, but in the fact that meaning brings out what had previously been sealed within us… Thus each text constitutes its own reader’ (Iser, 1978, p.157). But there is little help from Iser, or the others who work within this mode, towards understanding the psychological processes that make such reading possible. While they accept the role of the text in arbitrating the reader’s new understanding of the self, as well as referring to the affective implications of this process, the methods used to account for reading are still predominantly cognitive. But affect appears to me the primary candidate for understanding how reading, in the defamiliarisation model, is possible. In the last part of my paper, I will briefly sketch some of the properties of affect, or emotion (I use the terms interchangeably), that may be involved.

Emotion and narrative I should also say at once that the points I want to make about emotion and narrative cut across a long-standing and still current debate about the place and role of emotion among psychologists. As I understand emotion, its organising power over such cognitive functions as perception, memory and problem-solving, 14

has generally been underestimated. Indeed, the standard view has usually been to associate emotion with disruptions of the cognitive system: for example, the ‘interrupt’ model, elaborated by George Mandler (1984, p.46); another recent and more sophisticated model in this tradition is that of Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987) who claim that emotion comes into play during the transition between one cognitive process and another. There are alternative views, but so far they seem marginal to the mainstream work of psychologists. You are probably familiar with the debate started by Zajonc (1980), following which Zajonc (1984) and Lazarus (1984) in further papers argued over whether affect or cognition is ‘primary’. Even in this debate, despite all the empirical evidence that Zajonc brought to bear on his claim for the primacy of affect, the work of affect was somewhat underestimated. Zajonc suggested that affect can determine the tenor of a response, without the need for a prior cognitive appraisal. I’m sure this is correct (cf. Derryberry & Rothbart, 1984, who point to the existence of brain pathways that would support such a process). But more important, having established a response, I will argue that affect can also then organise cognitive functioning to support or elaborate it. To illustrate this, here is a comment by Coleridge. He is talking here, in his notebook in 1803, about the emotion of grief, but what he says is true, I think, quite often of other emotions as well. It is best to talk of a grief, he says since: Unspoken grief is a misty medley, of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle-blows the Horn, to a scattered mob of obscure feelings. Perhaps, at certain moments a single almost insignificant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy – (Coleridge, 1957–1973, 1, 599) As this shows, emotion is able to transcend the normal logical boundaries by which we Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


categorise experience: I will call this the cross-domain power of emotion. The stories we tell about ourselves often follow this quite different logic of emotion: having established a certain emotion, a series of different, otherwise unconnected events are brought in as evidence to extend, augment, or justify it. Another feature of this aspect of emotion is that it brings into play, as Coleridge puts it, other ‘obscure feelings’ and ‘little relicts’ of previous events: in other words, emotion organises, below the level of consciousness, a series of memories or ideas, in advance of our conscious awareness of the relation between them (perhaps some cannot be made conscious). In this sense, emotion anticipates trains of thought that may only become conscious later. And perhaps, by linking certain memories and ideas, new connections and new implications may be generated in thought (almost this probably doesn’t happen in a significant way very often). Thus emotion anticipates, and helps to guide a cognitive process. Given the importance of affect in organising cognitive functions (if you accept the argument so far), it has also seemed to be probably that what we call the self must be defined primarily in terms of the emotions. I won’t argue this in detail here (see Smail, in press): but I have felt that the predominantly cognitive account of the self provided in social psychology – the self as schema (Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984) – is too static: it makes better sense to conceptualise the self in more dynamic terms, embodied in emotions which, through their power over the memory and their anticipatory function, present issues for action. The self is always working to some end, whether to maintain its position or to gain new ground. Speaking very simply, a given emotion anticipates a future state of the self, and this requires action either to avoid it or to bring it into being. The work of McCoy (1977), working within Personal Construct Psychology, is helpful here. She takes further Kelly’s Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

account of emotion, suggesting the specific issues that the main emotions present in relation to the self. Speaking of the self as the core construct system, McCoy then shows systematically how the emotions arise in relation to this system. For example, love is ‘validation of one’s core structure’, etc. The advantage of this approach lies in its fertility for suggesting the agenda of significant experiences, memories, and ideas, that are likely to be implicated by a given emotion. In summary, there are three functions of affect that can help to explain the process of reading. In the empirical work I have been doing with readers I have begun to obtain evidence for each of these functions. First, affect is cross-domain; where a significant affect has been elicited by the text for a given scene, for example, other information to account for the affect is available from the reader’s own experience – information which may normally be unavailable to interpert the schemata relevant to the scene. In this way the reader is impelled to re-evaluate the schemata currently in use. The crossdomain work of affect also serves to relate narrative elements across conceptual boundaries. A simple but very common example is the transfer of mood from the weather to interpret the meaning of a meeting between two characters or a certain event. Second, affect is anticipatory. During reading the meaning of the text as a whole (probably several alternative and conflicting meanings) is created at a level beyond the contributory values and schemata: this is kept on line, as it were, by a series of affective controls over relevant information an implications. The important of stories in helping us to anticipate has already been pointed out: through stories, says William Doty, ‘we extend ourselves towards becoming other than we are’ (Doty, 1975, p.94). It has also been shown empirically that readers of narratives anticipate, but that readers of ordinary discourse don’t (Olson, Mack & Duffy, 1981). This affective sense of the potential whole acts something like a hypothesis, 15

David Smail

guiding the reader to seek for evidence to support or disconfirm it. Thirdly, affect is self-referential. By arousing affect in the first place, the text draws into play some of the major concerns of the self, perhaps concerns that would normally remain hidden. Through the defamiliarising work of the text, the reader is required to some degree to re-evaluate their aims and their self-concept. Given that the concerns of the self are reshaped by the text, it can be seen how each reader, as Proust and Iser claim, creates their own text during reading. whatever the obstensible meaning of the narrative – for example, the story of Lockwood’s encounter with the strange tale of Heathcliff and Catherine – the reader knows that the story being told didn’t happen in reality. The real, but submerged, plot of every literary narrative is the changing of the self of the reader: that shift in the position and meaning of the self that an attentive reading of a literary text brings about. Much more work, both theoretical and empirical, is needed to develop this approach, but I feel that the several existing approaches to narrative that I have discussed

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– the story grammarians, the structuralists, the reader response critics – all provide important elements for the framework of such a model. A better understanding of the role of affect will enable us to make real progress in accounting for the dynamics of the response to literary stories. This approach is not entirely new: once again, Coleridge, although he never worked it out in detail, provided a succinct statement of the outlines of a theory of response based on feeling. This is a remark he jotted in a notebook in 1804, he is actually thinking of Shakespeare, but his remark applies just as well to narrative: Poetry [is] a rationalised dream dealing … to manifold forms our own feelings, that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal selves … there are truths below the surface in the subject of sympathy, and how we become that which we understandly [sic] behold and hear, having, how much God perhaps only knows, created part even of the Form. (Coleridge, 1957–1973, 2, 2086). David Smail



References Bal, M. (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative (C. van Boheemen, Trans.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bower, G.H., Black, J.B. & Turner, T.J. (1979). Scripts in memory for text. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 177–220. Coleridge, S.T. (1957–1973). Notebooks (Ed. K. Coburn). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Coleridge, S.T. (1965). Biographia literaria (Ed. G. Watson). London: Dent Everyman. (Original publication: 1817) Derryberry, D. & Rothbart, M.K. (1984). Emotion, attention and temperament. In C.E. Izard, J. Kagan & R.B. Zajonc (Eds.), Emotions cognition, and behaviour (pp.132–166). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doty, N. (1975). The stories of our times. In J.B. Niggins (Ed.), Religion as story. New York: Harper & Row. Fowler, R. (1986). Linguistic criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Genette, G. (1980). Narrative discourse (J.E. Lewin, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Graesser, A.C. (1981). Prose comprehension beyond the word. New York: Springer-Verlag. Greenwals, A.G. & Pratkanis, A.R. (1984). The self. In R.S. Wyer & T.K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition, Vol. 3 (pp.120–178). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Iser, W. (1980). The reading process: A phenomenological approach. In J.P. Tompkins (Ed.), Reader-response criticism: From formalism to poststructuralism (pp.50–69). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Lazarus, R.S. (1984). On the primacy of cognition. American Psychologist, 39, 124–129. Mandler, G. (1984). Mind and body: Psychology of emotion and ustess. New York: Norton.

Mandler, J.M. (1984). Stories scripts and scenes: Aspects of schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. McCoy, M.M. (1977). A reconstruction of emotion. In D. Bannister (Ed.), New perspectives in personal construct theory (pp.93–124). London: Academic Press. Smail, D.S. (1989). Beyond the schema given: Affective comprehension of literary narratives. Cognition and Emotion, 55–78. Smail, D.S. (in press). Anticipating the Self: Towards a personal construct model of emotion. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology. Oatley, K. & Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1987). Towards a cognitive theory of emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 1, 29–50. Olson, G.M., Mack, R.L. & Duffy, S.A. (1981). Cognitive aspects of genre. Poetics, 10, 283–315. Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folk tale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (Original publication: 1928) Rumelhart, D.E. & Normand, A. (1978). Accretion, tuning, and re-stucturing: Three models of learning. In J.W. Cotton & R.L. Klatzsky (Eds.), Semantic factors in cognition (pp.37–53) Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Shklovksy, V. (1917/1965) Art as technique. In L.T. Lemon & M.J. Reis (Eds. and Trans.), Russian formalist criticism (pp.3–24) Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (Original publication: 1971). Van Rees, C.J. (1985). Implicit premises on text and reader in Genette’s study of narrative mood. Poetics, 14, 445–464. Zajonc, R.B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151–175. Zajonc, R.B. (1984). On primacy of affect. In K. Scherer & P. Ekman (Eds.), Approaches to emotion (pp.259–269). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Originally published in the Psychotherapy Section Newsletter, No. 8, June, 1990.


17

The fictional nature of introspection Simon King-Spooner

T

HE TERM ‘introspection’ comes apparently, from the Latin words ‘spicere’, ‘to look’ and ‘intra’, ‘within’. The idea is that we can know our mental states or events or processes – that is, our motives, desires, emotions, thoughts and hopes, our decisionmaking and problem-solving, and so on – by some kind of direct internal observation. There are two main points I want to make about this notion. The first is that we do not have such a capacity in the sense in which it is usually understood – I will look at the position taken by the philosopher William Lyons, who argues that ‘introspection’ in this usual sense is a ‘myth of our cuture’. My second point is that we have, nonetheless, varying degrees of access to our cognitive and appetitive and emotional states and processes, and that this is possible partly because such states and processes have their existence not in some Cartesian inner vessel, nor solely within the boundaries of our physical selves. but in a complex interaction which includes the world outside our skins. The ideas on which I base this claim come largely from another philosopher, Michael Polyanyi. (Though the source of the underlying principle is Wittgenstein.) A point about the bearing of all this on psychotherapy: It seems to me that it is generally taken for granted in psychotherapy that much or all of a client’s supposedly inner world of emotions. hopes, desires, beliefs, motives and so on can. at least in principle – perhaps after the relevant defences, selective blindness or whatever have been overcome – be observed and reported. Even where such statements are subject to a high degree of interpretative scrutiny, as in psychoanalysis or transactional analysis, one possible outcome of such scrutiny is that the client’s (patient’s) assertion be taken at face value — Freud discusses 18

this at some length in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, where he argues that an analyst is entitled to judge whether the explanation of his or her slip of the tongue given by their patient is accurate or whether it should be interpreted in terms of their defences. A few more big names: Rogers postulates ‘three ways of knowing’, by one of which, ‘subjective knowing’, I may (to give his examples) check whether I love her or not, or realise that I don’t really hate him but that my feeling is one of envy; Kelly discusses introspection as a technique in connection with fixed-role therapy; Assagioli also has it as a technique in its own right in psychosynthesis; although clear references to introspection are not easy to pin down in Eric Berne’s writing, his pre- and post-therapy ‘script check lists’ include such introspection – requesting items as ‘Do you like to show that you are able to Suffer?’ and Can your Adult talk straight to your Parent and Child?’ (as well as ‘Have you taken off your sweatshirt?’ and ‘Have you cut down your reachback and after-burn so they do not overlap?’); and Perls (with Hefferline and Goodman), in Gestalt Therapy seems to be suggesting that the client be asked not just to introspect, but to examine the way in which he or she does so – thus perhaps completing the first spiral of an infinite regress. A stand against this tendency to take a capacity to introspect for granted is made (characteristically) by David Smail in his book Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. The points made in the book are illustrated by sketches drawn from clinical experience; one such runs as follows: Jeremy was a 10-year old in the care of the local authority. He had spent the first two hours of one particular morning barricaded in his room. systematically Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

The fictional nature of introspection

destroying every object in it eventually he was extracted by the staff and subjected to a searching enquiry by three child care officers as to what was disturbing him. Anxiously concerned, gently and without any threat, they asked him in every way they knew how why he had done it, what was worrying him. They racked their brains to present him with possible alternative explanations, but always with a request for his affirmation or denial. In other words, they were absolutely convinced that he knew the explanation for his conduct, and that he could in principle put that knowledge into words. However, it seemed clear from his expression of pain, confusion and bewilderment that Jeremy had not the slightest idea why he had acted as he had. What he desperately needed (and did not get) was someone to tell him why, so that he could acquire a verbal purchase on his anguish. David Smail goes on to make a general assertion that the explanations we give for our conduct – our reports of decision, intention, motive, and so on (he does not seem to include emotion) – are not based on any privileged access to cognitive and appetitive processes, but that we are obliged, like any other observer of our behaviour, to ‘read off’ the reasons for our actions from the actions themselves and their context; he adds that the various forms of self-interest often result in an actor’s own accounts being less accurate that those of disinterested observers. Smail’s position points towards that developed more fully by William Lyons. The greater part of Lyons’ book The Disappearance of Introspection consists of a discussion of the main attempts psychologists and philosophers have made to explain what is going on when we report on our ‘mental events’, with in each case a painstaking refutation of the explanation given. I will pass over these arguments and go on to Lyons’ next move: the assertion that there is no need for these variously tortuous Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

and heroic attempts to explain what we are doing when we claim to introspect, because there is nothing requiring special explanation; that our ‘faculty for introspecting’ is, as he puts it, the ‘Loch Ness Monster of Philosophy of Mind’. Some of his reasons for saying this are as follows: 1. Already mentioned, the consistent failure of theorists of introspection to give a plausible account of what might be going on. 2. In the several decades in which introspection was an accepted and much used method in experimental psychology, and despite increasingly Byzantine attempts to elaborate and refine it as such it failed to come up with much in the way of results; indeed the famous dispute between the Cornell and Hurzburg schools over the existence or imageless thought demonstrated the flimsy and problematic nature of such findings as there were, and suggested that cultural factors (in a broad sense) were important in producing them. 3. Children seem to have to learn how to introspect, only attaining apparent proficiency at somewhere around the age of 8 – contrary to what might be expected if some straightforward process equivalent to the various kinds of sensory perception was involved. 4. People of some other cultures – such as the Balinese the Maori, and the Ifaluk (of the Northern Pacific) – do (or did) not seem to have anything like our notion that we can report on what is going on in our minds, and indeed have strikingly different ideas of ‘self’ and ‘mind’ anyway. 5. A number of striking findings from experimental psychology indicate that we are very often unaware of why we do things, and on such occasions give explanations for our conduct which make no mention of factors which are demonstrably influencing it. Two examples, cited in a review of such evidence by Nisbett and Hilson follow. (a) In a mock consumer survey, subjects 19

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were asked which of four identical pairs of stockings they preferred. There was a strong position effect – the pair on the subjects’ right was chosen almost four times as often as the pair on the left. When asked why they had made the choice they had, no subject mentioned position; …when asked directly about a possible effect of the position of the article, virtually all subjects denied it. usually with a worried glance at the interviewer suggesting that they felt either that they had misunderstood the question or were dealing with a madman. (b) Latane’s and Darley’s studies of the bystander effect show that: ‘…people are increasingly less likely to help others in distress as the number of witnesses or bystanders increases’. Subjects appeared to he oblivious to this effect, and denied it even when it was directly suggested as a possibility. The same result was found when subjects were asked to predict how others would behave, suggesting that such denials could not he put down to reluctance to make an embarrassing disclosure. or whatever. Nisbett and Wilson point out that subjects’ accounts of their cognitive processes are not only no more accurate than those proposed by observers or other non-participants, but are actually very similar to them. This and other considerations lead them to make the following proposal: …when people are asked to report how a particular stimulus influenced a particular response, they do so not by consulting a memory of the mediation process but by applying or generating causal theories about the effects of that type of stimulus on that type of response. Such causal theories, it is suggested. may be idiosyncratic, or they may originate in a person’s culture or subculture. And this proposal goes a long way towards presaging the position Lyons finally takes on what is really going on when we are allegedly introspecting. He says that: 20

…‘Introspection’ is not a special and privileged executive monitoring process over and above the more plebeian processes of perception, memory and imagination; it is those processes put to a certain use. What he means is that when we ‘introspect’ our motives. Decisions, desires. plans, and so on, we derive or construct more or less plausible ‘stories’ about these things from our perceptions and form the percept-like imagery of memory’ and imagination, using our implicit folk-psychological theories to do so. The validity of the stories we come up with will be limited by the validity of these theories, however rich the evidence of our senses and our imagery. And (by implication) when a particular influence on our actions has no place in our system of implicit theories we will have no way of knowing about it or reporting on it, however powerful it might be. Lyons’ argument seems powerful and persuasive. I want to make room for something a little nearer our naïve assumption that we have access to mental events of a higher level than percepts and experiences. However, partly by shifting their location form ‘within us’ to some less easily construed arena which in part comprises the world about us. But I would first like to question, albeit tentatively. Lyons’ implied position that the only content of our consciousness are percepts and percept-1ike images. There seems to be at least one such content which is by definition not percept-like, yet the reporting of which seems to be unproblematic and to have a high predictive validity – the ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, the sense (or ‘sense’) that a word, usually a name, that has been temporarily forgotten is on the edge of recall. and there is a grander version – the feeling, in intellectual pursuits, that a sought-for formulation is about to be achieved. The poet Stephen Spender talks of: …a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words, and Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


Einstein, of …a feeling of direction, of going straight towards something concrete persisting for several years of his search for the principle of relativity. Part of my unhappiness with Lyons’ position is that I am sure ‘imageless thoughts’ of various kinds slither about continually on the edge of my consciousness. though I admit they seem to have an eel-like resistance to capture – indeed it may be a necessary characteristic that they cannot he brought into focal attention. The alternative picture I want to put up may have more room for dim clouds, senses of absence, and any number of other problematic ‘inner events’. First, though, I need to sketch out some of the ideas of another philosopher, Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was a distinguished chemist – he was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Manchester for 15 years – who later moved into philosophy, a field in which his original and idiosyncratic approach has no doubt contributed to his neglect. His best known book is probably Personal Knowledge, published in 1958; the ideas I am using here were more fully developed in a later book, The Tacit Dimension from 1967, and in two papers also published during the 1960s. The main notion that I want to take up is one that forms the heart of Polanyi’s conception of knowledge – ‘knowledge’ being in his system one of a cluster of terms, with ‘skill’, ‘perception’, ‘awareness’, and ‘meaning’, whose mutual boundaries are unclear. Polanyi sees knowledge as necessarily having

a ‘subsidiary’ (or ‘proximal’, or ‘tacit’) term and a ‘focal’ (or ‘distal’, or explicit one, such that we know the focal from the subsidary; all knowledge, he claims, and all meaning, has this ‘from-to’ structure. The best way to get hold of this idea is by looking at some examples (see box below). The first two were used by Polanyi in a number of writings. The simplest example might be that of a probe. To quote: …Anyone using a probe for the first time will feel its impact against his fingers and palm. But as we learn to use a probe … our awareness of its impact on our hand is transformed into a sense of its point touching the objects we are exploring. This is how an interpretative effort transposes meaningless feelings into meaningful ones … We become aware of the feelings in our hand in terms of their meaning located at the tip of the probe … to which we are attending. There are one or two points worth making here. In this case the ‘from-to’ structure involves literal, physical distance between our hand sensations and the tip of the probe – in other instances the separation of the two terms is of a less concrete kind. Again in this case the sensations that form the ‘subsidiary’ term are potentially available to consciousness (though this may not be so if kinaesthetic feedback is also involved); if, however, we draw our attention back from the tip of the probe to our hand sensations they immediately lose their meaning and become just

FROM (Subsidary)

TO (Focal)

PROBE

Sensations in hand

Tip of probe-shape of cavity

RELATIVITY

Conventional physics Paradoxes from thought experiments Metaphysical beliefs (?) Non-Euclidian geometry Tensor calculus Etc.

Relativity


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sensations, rather than the means by which something is known. (In other cases some or all of the constituents of the subsidiary term are non-conscious in principle.) A third point, related to this loss of meaning when the subsidiary components are attended to, is that we always know more than we can tell – because, as I understand it even if we can in principle direct our awareness to the subsidiary components the consequent destruction of their meaning leaves us with no means of verifying any attempt to catalogue them; and even if this were not so also we could not describe them while actually knowing from them – that is we never, at the time anyway, know how we know. And finally, any act of knowing is always active – meanings are not passively assimilated but are achieved, through a process that seems to be closely analogous with, if not simply a broader application of the achievement of closure in the Gestalt Psychology of perception. The second example is that of knowing a face from its features. This is a little more elusive, partly because both the subsidiary and focal components appear to have the same location. But the same points apply: we see the ‘meaning’ of a face – that is, we recognise it, or see its expression – from its features, and if we focus on the features we lose the meaning. The implication is, I think, that we must be wary of the tendency to locate meaning – the Focal term – other than very vaguely, except where (as with the ‘probe’ example) the location is, in some sense, the meaning. And secondly, we do not know how we achieve that meaning – we are unable to say what it is about the features that would enable us to distinguish that face from (literally) a million others, let alone how we know whether a smile, say, is joyful or resigned, guizzical, lecherous, strained, obsequious, or vacant, tender or sadistic, triumphant or humble. The third example, Einstein’s discovery or formulation of the principle of relativity, shows the comprehensiveness of Polanyi’s theory – it also relates, in connection with the earlier point about Gestalt closure, to a view 22

he was already taking 20 years before The Tacit Dimension that science can be seen as ‘a variant of sensory perception’. Here we see that the components on the ‘subsidiary’ side of the ‘from-to’ structure do not have to be perceptual in nature. They can come from our indefinitely extensive repertoire of cognitive models and operations, from relatively simple recollections and expectations to the most sophisticated and abstract theoretical structures. In the previous example, for instance, the way in which I see your smile, see the meaning of that configuration of your mouth and whatever other features, might be partly determined by such additional subsidiary components as any knowledge that you are recovering from Bell’s Palsy, or the prejudices I have about people with large mouths or stiff upper-lips-cognitive components join the perceived ones, your features, in the subsidiary term, and are made use of in an essentially similar way. So also if Einstein’s long struggle towards the principle of relativity the subsidiary comoponents included, no doubt among others: thorough knowledge (presumably) of the physics of the day; an awareness of paradoxes in conventional physics. derived at least partly from ‘thought experiments’ such as the famous one on which he imagined himself riding on a beam of light: possibly metaphysical beliefs. such as a belief in an essentially orderly universe (God does not play dice …); and his assimilation of what were then very abstruse and speculative branches of mathematics. Including Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry, and tensor calculus. Then what? Going back to Gestalt closure, there is a well-known ‘degraded image’ that appears at first to consist of random or near-random black blotches on a white background. Once you have stared at it for a while, looking for the image that you know to be there, you suddenly see a Dalmation sniffing a kerb. So with Einstein – the subsidiary components in which he immersed himself (knowing ‘something was there’) are the blotches. ‘relativity’ the dog. A final point – the focal term in one act of Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


knowing can be a subsidiary component in another – the theory of relativity, once made explicit, can become a blotch in some other cognitive enterprise. All of which should, I hope, provide some of the subsidiary components for an understanding of ‘introspection’ on Polanyian principles. The claim I want to make is this: that when we report, reflectively and in good faith. on our thoughts, motives, intentions, desires, emotions, and so on, we generally do so on the basis of subsidiary components from several fields. and that the statements we come up with are (or at least reflect) the focal knowledge drawn from, and comprising the meaning of, those components. 1. Sense data. 2. Percept-like imagery. 3. Imageless thought? 4. Bodily perturbations 5. Muscular tension (miniature behaviour?). 6. Beliefs, expections, etc. 7. How things look. The first two categories seem to be the main ones William Lyons is saying we make use of when we introspect (using folk-psychological theories) from. The third section is a dubious one that includes the tip of the tongue phenomenon and so on. The fourth field comprises the results (not necessarily potentially reaching awareness) of autonomic nervous system activity — stomach churning, swelling tear glands, increased heart rate, and so on (the term comes from Ron Harre). Field five – ‘muscular tension’ (again not necessarily available to consciousness) – may seem selfexplanatory. But I quite like Skinner’s idea of covert behaviour – both Polanyi and possibly Merleau-Ponty seem to be hinting at this, and it seems clear that at least occasionally muscular tension is something like a physical equivalent of muttering under one’s breath (think of people at a boxing match, where the constraints that keep the behaviour covert start to break down). Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

The sixth category. ‘beliefs and expectations’, is meant to cover any relevant parts of our cognitive systems, including especially implicit, folk-psychological beliefs (and in the psychologically learned, of course, our explicitly held, non-folk beliefs). I want to claim that the last section comprises a particularly interesting and instructive field of subsidiary knowledge, perhaps the one that our cultural presuppositions most effectively blind us to. The proposition, odd as it might sound, is that an important part of our knowledge of our minds derives at least sometimes from the way in which we see the world in whole or in part (how we see, not what we see) – that to a significant degree our cognitive, appetitive, affective states can be discerned as much out there as in ourselves. In certain extreme cases such effects are so powerful that they break through into awareness, against all the investment of our cognitive system (and our culture) in, as it were, holding the world steady. It might happen much more often that eloquent changes in our phenomenal worlds remain unnoticed while acting as subsidiary components of our ‘introspections’. What I am trying to get at is obviously difficult to talk about in the abstract or to give any kind of account for, so I will use a few annotated examples. Perhaps the best known instances of overall changes in the perceptual tenor of the world occur with depression. Two examples: My senses all seemed to have become less acute: food was tasteless; I didn’t notice smells, such as a gas leak, that I’d formerly have picked up; my fingertips seemed insensitive to texture; I was less aware of where my various extremities had got to; even my sense of pain was attenuated. Ordinary objects were altered. Tables and chairs, or whatever it might be, now appeared as sinister, devoid of familiarity, drained of the feeling formerly invested in them. Virginia Woolf describes such ‘ontological draining’ as Roger Poole has 23

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called it in his analysis of her madness in relation to her life and work – no doubt from her own experience. For example, in The Waves …the scene beneath me withered. It was like the eclipse when the sun went out and left the earth. flourishing in full summer foliage, withered, brittle, false The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. Later in the same passage the process is reversed, meaning floods back: …Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. Powerful descriptions of such flooding-in of meaning occur in accounts of conversion experiences; here are sections from two of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience: …The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. …I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world. Something very similar can occur with being in love, particularly the sense of newness (there is a powerful long passage in Lawrence’s Women in Love, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to break down into quotable chunks). As well as such general effects, the loved one is undoubtedly seen differently from others – a vision in some sense becoming more generous, tender, with greater enthusiasm for detail. There is a strange finding, apparently, with the Ames 24

Room illusion, which is reported not to work if the person in the room is one’s spouse. (I am not sure if it goes for any spouse, or only where the couple are fairly recently married.) Fear is another state of mind that can be seen in the phenomenal world. There are some nice accounts by people who were taken in by the famous Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds, when half of New York apparently thought the Martians had landed. Whatever they saw from their windows confirmed their worst fears – if there seemed to be more than the usual number of cars on the street, people were fleeing; if fewer, they had gone to ground. The world. as it were, was imbued with threat. Film makers, perhaps most impressively Hitchcock, often have and exploit a powerful sense of what is involved in such seeing-with-fear. There are any number of instances of specific parts of the perceptual world being touched by intense preoccupations (in addition to ‘the loved one’). It has been pointed out that the spectators of opposing teams do not, literally, see the same game; the polite smile with which a hostess covers her boredom at the anecdotes of a male guest is seen by her morbidly jealous husband as the crudest of invitations; the anorexic girl sees herself as fat; and so on. Okay. To summarise – I am claiming that our ‘introspections’ are, or can be, derived from an indefinitely large and remarkably varied ground of subsidiary components. It might be worth remarking that the position I have outlined gives unlimited scope for getting it wrong, especially where our folk psychology blinkers or misleads us – though, unlike Lyons, I am suggesting that it is possible in principle to transcend our culturally determined beliefs. And the possibility is also there of indefinitely refining our capacity to absorb ourselves in (‘dwell in’) the relevant subsidiary fields, and so, through something like the cultivation of skill or sensibility, gain greater knowledge of ourselves. (I believe something like this can happen through meditation.) Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


I have really had two main aims: the first, to try and rescue ‘introspection’, or some of it from its critics, by re-construing it: and the second, to push for a notion of our cognitions and motives and emotions and so on as complex constructs whose subsidiary components are in both us and the world.

Simon King-Spooner

References Assagioll, R.M.D. (1980). Psychosynthesis: A collection of basic writings. New York: Thurnstone Press. Berne, E. (1974). What do you say after you say hello? London: Andre Deutsch. Freud, S. (1922). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Third lecture (trans. Joan Riviere, trans.). London: Allen & Unwin. Ghiselin, B. (1952). The creative process. New York: Mentor. Gregory, R.L. (1966). Eye and brain: The psychology of seeing. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, referring to W.H. Ittleson (1952), The Ames Demonstration in Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, W. (1958). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Mentor. (First published 1902) Kelly, G.A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. New York: Norton. Latane, B. & Barley, J.M. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: Why doesn’t he help? New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts. Lawrence, D.H. (1960). Women in love. London: Penguin. (First published 1921) Lindsay, P.H. & Norman, D.A. (1972). Human information processing: An introduction to psychology. New York: Academic Press. Lyons, W.E. (1984). Towards a new account of introspection. Paper presented to London conference of the British Psychological Society, December. Lyons, W.E. (1986). The disappearance of introspection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyons, W.E. (1988). The disappearance of introspection. New York: MIT Press.

Nisbett, R.E. & Wilson,T.D. (1977). Telling more than we know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3). Perls, F.S., Hefferline, R.F. & Goodman, P. (1973). Gestalt therapy: Excitement and growth in the human personality. London: Penguin. (First published 1951) Polanyi, M. (1946). Science, faith and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Polanyi, M. (1955). The structure of consciousness. Brian, 88. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a postcritical philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Polanyi, M. (1967). The tacit dimension. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Polanyi, M. (1968). Logic and psychology. American Psychologist, 23, 27–43. Poole, R. (1931). The unknown Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rippers, V. & Williams, R. (1985). Wounded healers; mental health workers’ experience of depression. New York: Kiley. Rogers, C.R. (1964). Toward a science of the person. In T.N. Mann (Ed.), Behaviourism and phenomenology; contrasting bases for modern psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smail, D. (1984). Illusion and reality; the meaning of anxiety. London: Dent. Wertheimer, M. (1945). Productive thinking. New York: Harper. Woolf, V. (1931). The waves. London: Hogart Press.

Originally published in the Psychotherapy Section Newsletter, No. 8, June, 1990.


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Siblings: An exploration A one-day Psychotherapy Section Workshop, was held at the British Psychological Society’s London Office on 26 November 2014. There follows four short reports from delegates who attended this workshop.

Terry Birchmore The one-day workshop, ‘Siblings: An exploration’, was held at the Society’s London office in November 2014. My intention was to provide participants with research and other material touching on sibling relationships, and to use two unstructured group sessions to provide an opportunity for participants to explore this material more fully and to discuss personal sibling relationships if they wished to do so. The day began with a brief showing of a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GoLLn1a6DPU) which showed the psychotherapist Juliet Mitchell talking about siblings. I then gave a 30-minute talk starting with a number of quotations about personal sibling relationships, and then going on to cover psychoanalytic views of sibling relationships; sibling dynamics in teams and

Erica Brostoff Our Editor, Terry Birchmore, cannily devised a workshop on ‘siblings’ to coincide with the AGM of the Psychotherapy Section in November 2014. The majority of us have siblings, so that this topic was likely also to ensure a quorum for the AGM, together with an audience keen to learn more about this little-addressed topic in the psychotherapy literature, up to the last decade or so. For this event, 13 members of the Section found themselves able to attend on that day, a truly Agatha Christie setting. Terry set the scene in his first presentation, drawing attention to the mysterious lack of siblings in Freuds’s writings, which has been attributed to a double bereavement in his earliest years. Freud’s younger baby brother, Julius, died before Freud reached the age of 18 months. Freud’s uncle, also named Julius, died in roughly the same period. Much is made in 26

organisations; and the methodology and conclusions of research into sibling relationships. After a coffee break the participants moved into a 90-minute unstructured group. After lunch I gave another talk focused on siblings in literature: the biblical stories of Cain and Abel and Joseph and his brothers; Lemony Snicket’s A Bad Beginning; and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child. I ended with a presentation of Anna Freud’s research and work, shortly after the Second World War, with the Bulldog Bank Children. Finally, we moved into a second 90-minute unstructured group to discuss all of the above themes and associations to the day. Reference Freud, A. & Dann, S. (1951). An experiment in group upbringing. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 6, 127–168.

psychoanalytic circles, about what is not said, and what cannot be said; the lacunae created by unresolved pain and loss. Freud’s noticeable lack of mention of siblings in his writing is attributed by biographers to these early events; his mother’s likely grief and ‘unavailability’ and to his own possible sense of guilt and confusion. The family also moved home to another town, away from their relatives, due to his father’s business failure. Freud claimed to have been haunted by a sense of loss for the rest of his life. After this presentation, we met together to share thoughts about our own siblings, and this continued after the second presentation by Terry after lunch. This second presentation concerned Biblical siblings, in which older siblings acted upon their resentment toward the favoured younger or youngest sib. Abel the younger brother, who found ‘greater favour in the sight of the Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

Siblings: An exploration

Lord’, was murdered by the older and envious brother. When questioned, Cain denied any responsibility, in the timeless words ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ In the other well-known Biblical story of brothers – the envious older brothers of Joseph were tempted again by murderous thoughts. Instead, Joseph was sold into slavery. Bought by chance by Potiphar who was responsible for the Pharaoh’s court, Joseph later rose to highest rank through his wise interpretation of the Pharaoh’s premonitory dreams. Joseph ultimately became reconciled with his brothers, a compassionate advance on earlier Biblical stories. The 13 of us present, formed a miniresearch forum, each speaking in turn about our own sibling experience. It was striking that each of those who had one other sibling, had experienced the most difficulties in the sibling relationship: in two instances this relationship took on a Cain and Abel character, with overwhelming behaviour of the ‘partner’ sibling experienced in the form of harassment or rejection. Although the siblings present were professional psychologists, clearly no resolution had been possible. Little access to effective advice seemed available, especially to the one who was a twin. The opposite example of offering care and support to an older sibling ‘partner’ who became ill, was the experience of a younger sibling; changing career to become a psychotherapist. One who was expecting a second child, was concerned about the future sibling relationship and how to handle conflict. Three who were younger siblings from a large family, spoke of the greater responsibilities and expectations to continue family traditions resting on the shoulders of the older sibs. leaving them relatively free, among other things, to pursue their professional careers. Women seemed more preoccupied with sibling relationships and determining who was responsible for family distress. A question was raised about the mother’s role, but not answered. Singletons mentioned finding childhood companionship in books. The strongest Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

exchanges were between those who were most frustrated by their sibling partners, but without being able to offer each other any comfort in their dilemmas, and these dilemmas also seemed to leave the group ‘at a loss’. Terry had mentioned that in 1946, Anna Freud and Sophie Dunn studied six war orphans, aged between 3 and 4 years, who had bonded together and provided each other with the care and protection which had not been available from adults in their extreme situation in a concentration camp. This is a reminder that sibling/quasi-sibling relationships depend very much on context. Real neglect of one child is possible even in favourable circumstances, if demands on a mother are too great – sometimes only noticed by grandparents or therapists. If a sibling is ill, or needing greater attention, this perceived preference can lead to powerful feelings of thwarted entitlement. Even twosome siblings who grow up together in mutual support and creative play, which is a joy to watch, may have some lingering conflicts. Therapists will often be faced with disentangling a hidden web of feeling between siblings, which may show up strongly in a group therapy or work settings, as well as in the family. It had been hoped that more would attend, so that mini-groups could meet to share experiences according to family type. The event was instructive in its own right, especially as regards the defusion of conflict possible in a larger family, via shifting alliances – which also occur in group therapy settings. It is said that modern life increasingly encourages groupings of the likeminded outside the family, but I found myself somewhat envious of these larger and potentially harmonious families of many sibs. The day ended on a collegial note in which several were co-opted into the larger family of the Psychotherapy Section Committee. The family ritual of the annual report was satisfactorily concluded. Potential new family members were due to be vetted by ‘grandparents’ in the form of British 27

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Psychological Society requirements and procedures. The many unasked or unanswered questions of the day, and potential subtleties of interaction in our group, left us wanting more. Siblings are the topic of several recent new books published by Karnac, and also in the following list.

Zara Rahemtulla I attended the workshop, ‘Siblings: An exploration’, with very little conscious idea of what the day would entail. I did not have other sibling-related workshops to compare, and I was not aware of the topics that might be discussed. Naturally I was curious about how the day would be organised and how the topic would be approached and, of course, how many people and whom would be present. I attended with my own research agenda, but also with my own experiences and knowledge about what the word siblings meant for me. I was keen to share experiences with others who might have a research interest in sibling relationships and ascertain what others thought about the significance of this relationship. The structure of the day began from a research perspective, however, the majority of the day was dedicated to what the title of the workshop clearly stated – exploration. We spent the day in an analytic group style situation whereby people were invited to speak about their experiences, thoughts and musings in relation to siblings; both on a personal and professional level. Admittedly I was not prepared for such an open and perhaps exposing discussion, particularly with people I had never met before, and it certainly was not what I had initially had in mind for the rest of the day.

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References Coles, P. (2003). The importance of sibling relationships in psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Coles, P. (2007). Transgenerational conflicts between sisters. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 23(4), 563–574. doi:10/111/j.1752-0118/2007.00051.x Fearon, R.M.P., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J. & van IJzendoorn, M.H. (2013). Jealousy and attachment, the case of twins. In S.L. Hart & M. Legerstee (Eds.), Handbook of jealousy (pp.362–386). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

I was amazed not only at how quickly my opinion began to change about the task, but more significantly how my feelings of comfort towards talking about myself and listening to others’ experiences (some of which were indeed distressing) changed. Indeed, something about the process of talking with others about this topic invited more stories to emerge and allowed people to feel more at ease about disclosing their perhaps more private thoughts and experiences. Once we began to speak it was as though everyone had a story to tell and I found the afternoon enlightening and illuminating – it has left me feeling curious and even more interested in the way people experience their sibling relationships. In summary, although consciously I did not know what to expect during this siblings day, I wonder if unconsciously I hoped to share my sibling story amongst others who wanted to do the same. Did we all attend hoping to discuss a topic which does not get addressed in our everyday lives and that society does not perhaps prioritise as a conversation worth having? The day was very well organised and the hospitality was also great, which I think contributed to the overall feelings of ease, understanding and compassion that were generated throughout the day.


Siblings: An exploration

Steve Heigham The first part of the workshop started with a video and other presentations, and was focussed in a general way on sibling relationships and their importance throughout life. All participants contributed personal and clinical experiences of the richness, variety and depth of such relationships, and the group got to know each better. After lunch the second part of the workshop looked in more detail at the two most important themes that have emerged from psychotherapeutic research on the subject: sibling rivalry and siblings as attachment figures. On the first of these, the material presented stimulated some lively debate and disclosures of fairly intense rivalry in childhood, and some indications of what individuals had found healing for these original hurts. On the second theme some participants contributed personal and clinical anecdotal evidence about how supportive some clients had found sibling relationships in child-


hood, supporting ideas that Judy Dunn has put forward about how sibling relationships may be some of the most important attachments some people experience in their life, especially where parents are unable to provide that stability and love. This led on to a discussion of how this is more implicitly so in many other cultures around the world where (particularly) older sisters are very much surrogate parents in large families that rely on subsistence agriculture. Again this relates to psychological research by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on the importance of surrogate parenting in less developed cultures everywhere. It was also mentioned that this aspect of sibling relationships is included in the current research of two participants on the course. Overall, I came away from the day both better informed about the importance of including sibling relationships in work with clients where appropriate, and quite moved by the depth of feeling that such relationships invoke in us, even as adults.

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Listen to the Group! Group music therapy – a part of the music therapy students’ training at Aalborg University Charlotte Lindvang

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ELF-EXPERIENCE and personal therapy are implemented as a mandatory part of the five-year music therapy training programme in Aalborg University (Department of Communication and Psychology), Denmark. The fact that personal therapy processes are highly prioritised can be traced back to the analytical music therapy orientation (Pedersen, 2002; Priestley, 1994). A unique aspect in Aalborg is that the students are involved in therapeutic activities from the very beginning, and the personal developmental work happens parallel to theoretical and musical learning. It is considered a benefit that the self-experience training is integrated in an academic culture and the experiences from the self-development processes are involved in the understanding and the communication of psychological and music therapeutic theories and music therapy methodology (Wigram et al., 2002). The aim is for the future music therapist to develop and constantly tune her person and personality as the most important instrument in the therapy, in order to become aware of her own subjectivity and to be more open-minded, containing and empathic in meetings with clients in the future (Pedersen, 2007). In the Aalborg programme it is considered to be of high importance, that the therapy that the students undergo is primarily music therapy. The American music therapist Ken Bruscia suggested that every music therapist should experience music therapy as a client in order to truly understand the medium he/she is 30

using: ‘In terms of the old adage, “Physician heal Thyself!”, I am saying not only that a music therapist should heal himself, but also that he should take his own medicine’ (Bruscia, 1998, p.116). During the therapy training the students experience the power of music to explore their own inner life and as a tool for reflection of emotional states, communicative and relational patterns, personal limitations and potentials, etc. Through music they will know more about their own strength as well as vulnerability and they will learn that the therapeutic use of music can lead to contact with conflictmaterial as well as resources and creativity. In this paper I will concentrate on aspects concerning group music therapy which is the first subject that the students attend in the therapeutic track of the training. The music therapy students start with group music therapy in the first three semesters, all in all about 120 hours of group music therapy over a period of 18 months. Concerning group music therapy one of the aims is to develop the group identity and that the students experience the potential power and strength of being a part of a group. The students learn to share authentic material; they work with their own role within the group and develop their consciousness about themselves and the others. In group music therapy the students have extraordinary good conditions to explore who they are; they get the mirroring, resonance and support from the other students and they witness and resonate with the processes of their peers. Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

Listen to the Group!

The room where group music therapy takes place is equipped with a number of chairs (placed in a circle) equal to the number of people who are a part of the group. The main contrast from regular psychodynamic oriented group work is that music therapy draws on the music, a nonverbal medium, alongside the ordinary verbal exchange. Thus the room has different instruments, melodic instruments, rhythm instruments and string instruments in different material and different sizes. The instruments have various possibilities of expression and evoke various sensations and emotions in each group member. One of the important things in the learning process in the group is that the students learn how to work with improvisation in music therapy. I will now focus on describing the use of improvisation and offer some vignettes to illustrate some aspects of this work. In an improvisation the music is not composed beforehand; it is a ‘sound-picture of the hereand-now’. With other words a room for playing is created or a ‘space for action’ where the students’ feelings and needs can be expressed and exchanged in the spontaneous interaction. Different than in a verbal discussion more people can ‘talk’ (make sounds) at the same time in a musical improvisation without doing any harm. It even makes it clearer that each person contributes and is a part of the group as a whole. An improvisation can be framed as a free space that allows free expression without a specific play rule corresponding to a free discussion in a verbal therapy group. Or it can be structured to various degrees, for example, with a musical play rule as a common starting point (for example: ‘start by playing only one note at a time, and then after a while allow yourself to play more notes’) or with a common theme that the group wants to or are asked to investigate by the group therapist (for example: ‘being visible or invisible in the group’). In a music therapy group with students the verbal parts and the non-verbal/musical parts of the group therapy process are Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

weaved together, and the improvisation can be used in many ways during the group work. First of all the improvisation can be a meeting place, that is, the group may start the session with an improvisation with the task of trying to ground themselves through the music and from there investigate the possible contact with the others in the music. And after the improvisation they may get a few minutes to make a spontaneous drawing to hold on to a certain aspect of their experience in the music. This non-verbal part is then followed by a verbal part where the group members have the possibility of putting into words how they felt in the music. The group was together again after a long holiday. After the initial welcoming I invited the group to improvise to investigate ‘the temperature of the group’. The sounds and the music that they played were characterised by a rather chaotic and sometimes fragmented type of expression. Afterwards the discussion about what was going on in the improvisation was characterised by some very different experiences and different feelings among the students, from happiness to frustration and feeling lost. The group discussion led to the recognition that the group was not really a group yet since many of them had not really arrived with their whole being yet. Acknowledging this they took an important step in the direction of being together as a group. Another important aspect of the improvisation is that this way of spontaneous interaction and non-verbal communication lead the participants to play and to access both their inner source of creativity and the source of creativity that springs from the interactive space between them. Improvisation is a creative method framing the space and time for a group inquiry and most common the improvisation will hold moments of surprise. The group creates something new together in the moment. After an improvisation it is a possibility to let the music speak for itself or to invite the group members to reflect verbally upon what 31

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happened and why. An improvisation can be described concretely in terms of what was being heard, and what is often interesting for the group work is to listen to how each member experienced the improvisation; what is each person concerned with, what kind of inner pictures and what kind of feelings and memories were evoked? The creativity is continued after an improvisation in the verbal part because the shared ‘sound-picture’ can be interpreted in many ways. Sometimes the commonalities will be put into words and sometimes the experiences are totally different and the group is momentarily in a state where subgroups are appearing. Through these experiences the aim is that the group will come to acknowledge that multiple experiences are illustrating how complex and manifold a group of people are. Thus the improvisation gives the group members a potential space to investigate themselves and each other, to listen deeply to each other without losing their own perspective and thereby they get the possibility of developing their ability to contain the differences among them – both within the music and outside the musical space. As a group leader I try to balance between following the process of the specific group of students and offering a structured frame for the group work. I may invite the group to work with a specific theme. For example, the theme ‘the inner child’ and a focus within this thematic frame could be to facilitate the group work with their senses, and the group is invited to approach the instruments as if the saw them for the first time. Each of them holds his or her instrument, feels the different material it is made of and probably smells it. Next they investigate the instrument like a child would do, trying out the sounds that it can make. As the group members investigated the instruments the sounds were so cautious and so fine to start with; one student touching one string of the guitar with a fingernail, one student fondling the skin of the drum, and another gently sounding her voice inside the piano, etc. Then little by little the group 32

started to experiment and make a lot of funny and unexpected sounds which started laughter in the group. Afterwards several group members put into words how liberating and redeeming this improvisation was, allowing them to immerse themselves in an inquiry and to allow the impulses to sound. Further the theme of safety was mirrored in the group discussion – some of the group members discovered that they did not feel safe enough yet to let go and be playful. Fear of ‘doing something wrong’ was shared. My role as group music therapist (called ‘educational therapist’ in our curriculum) is to guide the group through learning areas described in the curriculum and as a part of that facilitate a space for improvisation and interaction. I usually do not take part in the improvisations; I focus on listening and holding what they express in my mind as well as safeguarding the frames around the group work. In some ways the metaphor from Foulkes about the therapist as a conductor could be used to describe my role as the group music therapist. As a conductor I work to facilitate a therapeutic space for the group and for each of the participants in the group. I encourage the group to participate and engage, communicate and reflect. On the other hand, since this is a group therapy as a part of an education I am sometimes very much in front in order to secure a certain structure, to sum up and make clear what the group is working with, and sum up the themes that are revealed. I also start each group session by going briefly through what the group has been working with last time in order to create a common place to start from and to show that I hold the group in mind in the long breaks between the group meetings. Concerning the role as therapist the approach is inspired by mentalisation-based group therapy (MBT-G). The improvisation can expose dynamic themes within the group. For example, it will show who is loud and powerful in the music and who is softer or barely audible, who is in the front and who is in the back, which person is playing together with whom, who is Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

Listen to the Group!

following, who is leading, etc. The ambition of the improvisation is to be honest or authentic, not to be harmonious or correct in any way. The aim is to create a safe space for a here-and-now experience, and thereby create group material for reflection in order to stimulate the students’ development of self-awareness as well as relational awareness. The improvisation is a tool in the process which clarifies relational patterns and gives the possibility of changing these patterns into a more appropriate pattern. A woman told about her nightmare in the group. One of the main points was that she was in a kind of prison and she needed help but there was no help to get. A group member drew the attention to elements in the dream pointing at her ability to reach out for help. I asked the woman to express this resource – the ability to reach out for help – in an improvisation, with the support from the group. Afterwards she told that her energy was transformed and she had a completely different feeling about her dream. She realised how used she was to be alone and to manage everything by herself, and how much she needed other people, and needed to go out and reach out more. The improvisation is like a potential space; if the group has built a safe common ground, it is possible inside the improvisation to experiment and investigate new ways of being and acting. All in all the improvisation gives each participant in the group a possibility to explore and expand herself and creatively find new ways of expressing and relating. Sometimes an improvisation can capture something that the group is not conscious about yet or are not ready to investigate in the verbal realm yet; then the theme is taken into the non-verbal potential room of the group, shared in sound.


To end this paper I have a few general reflections about music and therapy groups. The therapeutic process or you may say the learning process of a group takes place on different levels, both the verbal and the nonverbal, regardless of which kind of group we are talking about. Every therapy group could be viewed as a musical group with its own sound and with its own pulse and unique way of expression. Group dynamics may be sensed, felt or heard – not only in the contents of what is said, but indeed in the way things are said, in the sound of the voice or the melody of the language or in the way the members are having a ‘communicational dance’ together. We get a lot of information from each other in the pauses and through the tempo of the speech. Each member of the group plays his or her own instrument and has his or her own voice you might say, and like an orchestra the group works with the dynamics between the instruments and voices. It can be an experience of joy and strength when there is a harmony and synchronicity in the group and the group moves on common ground in polyphony and in a shared pulse. But the diversity of expression in a group is a challenge, and in every group there is a process of learning to listen and attuning to each other and sound together. Charlotte Lindvang Music Therapist PhD, Associated Professor. Email: [email protected]

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Negative capability: A phenomenological study of lived experiences at the edge of certitude and incertitude Anil Behal The study examined what it was like for leaders in academia, private practice, and business organisations to be in a state of negative capability during periods of uncertainty and conflict in the workplace. ‘Negative capability’ is an expression that was coined by the English romantic poet John Keats and suggests a peculiar disposition to stay in mysteries, doubts, and uncertainty without the irritable reaching after fact and reason. Interviews were conducted using the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) methodology. The analysis indicates that the context in which a leader is embedded does not have a significant bearing on how that individual experiences and makes sense of negative capability. The majority of participants interviewed appear to have a diminished capacity to contain uncertainty when faced with paradoxical dilemmas. In such situations, they resort to behaviours such as problem solving, consulting others, shutting down, and dispersing as a means of defending against the uncertainty. An interesting correlation seems to exist between negative capability and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This warrants future research, and is reported in the final section of the paper under ‘deviant findings.’ Keywords: John Keats; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); negative capability; OCD; paradox; levels of abstraction; certainty; uncertainty; dialectics; Zen Buddhism; dispersal; social defenses; reframing. ‘The danger (of this enterprise), in short is that instead of providing a basis for what already exists, one is forced to advance beyond familiar territory, far from the certainties to which one is accustomed, towards an as yet uncharted land and unforeseeable conclusion.’ Foucault. ‘…let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive – budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit – sap will be given us for meat and dew for drink. John Keats.

Part One Preface The danger (of this enterprise), in short is that instead of providing a basis for what already exists, one is forced to advance beyond familiar territory, far from the certainties to which one is accustomed, towards an as yet uncharted land and unforeseeable conclusion (Foucault, 1972, p.39). I first came across the Keatsian expression ‘negative capability’ in a paper by French (2000) in which the author makes important linkages between the poet’s aesthetic notion, dispersal, and the containment of emotion. I was so captivated by the 34

phenomenon that I continue to follow it with great curiosity. Cusa (1440) suggests that as we accumulate knowledge, the darkness of ‘unlearned ignorance’ is diminished; however, the more knowledge we acquire and the more we learn, the greater our awareness of how much we do not know. This new awareness, he refers to as ‘learned ignorance.’ I make an analogy between the notion of ‘unlearned ignorance’ and Bion’s (1984) formulation of ‘knowing’ which he described using the symbol ‘K’. In direct contrast to the former, Bion conceptualised Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

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‘O’ as the ultimate embodiment of truth that is unknown and unknowable. Bollas (1987) conceptualised this construct as the ‘unthought known.’ While the truth-in-themoment may never enter the realm of knowledge and certitude, Bion believed that it is through the encounter at the edge of knowing and not knowing that we may come under its influence. As Eigen (1998) writes, ‘It can be creatively explosive, traumatically wounding, crushingly uplifting’ (p.78). As I make sense of my own uncertainty, it seems as though I am lost in reverie, allowing myself to be receptive and yet, perturbed by the experience. Introduction ‘Negative capability’ is not an expression that is very familiar outside the realm of English literature. Even those who have read Keats may not be particularly conversant with the construct – after all, the poet only used it once in a letter to his brothers in a moment of intense speculation. It is a unique capacity for introspection when we are open to thoughts, feelings, and sensation, such that we are able to stay with mysteries, doubts, uncertainties, and ambiguity without the irritable reaching after fact and reason (Keats, 1817). Simpson and French (2006) posit that attending to the present is a ‘refrain,’ a means of avoidance that is both ancient and modern. It implies the ability to live with uncertainty, tolerate frustration, and make room for multiple perspectives that may require a certain degree of patience and passive acceptance. The authors suggest that the practice of negative capability calls upon us to remain in this unsettling mental space in order to face the terrifying pressure of the present where most problems seem to reside. The refrain that they address, is refraining from action. ‘In the pressure of the moment, “what we know” may not be available to us. What we thought we know, or did indeed knew once, can disappear in action when we are “under fire”, to use Bion’s metaphor’ (p.245). Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

An idea so rich – steeped in the dialectic of predictability and unpredictability captivates my imagination. The predictability arises from the fact that all leaders from time to time are thrust into conditions of uncertainty and perplexity. Ironically though, holding this tension requires a unique state of mind – a peculiar disposition such as negative capability where one is comfortable with doubt, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Batchelor (1990) suggests that ‘such doubt is neither a cognitive hinge, nor a psychological defect, but a state of existential perplexity’ (p.16). Research question What is it like for leaders to be in a state of negative capability during periods of uncertainty and conflict in the workplace? I suggest that negative capability represents a dialectical tension that is virtually endemic to the human condition. We are thrust into these perplexing spaces wittingly and unwittingly. These discursive tensions are evoked in every relationship, regardless of whether it is personal or professional and may be defined as core tensions or opposing values that arise when two seemingly incompatible forces coexist in the mind. Some examples might be the dichotomous relationship between autonomy and connectedness, disclosure and secrecy, and intimacy and abstraction. We seem to oscillate between these values, often unconsciously, and may view them as contradictions or internal conflicts. These conflicts may sometimes produce the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish. Study objective and need The study was an attempt to understand how leaders experienced the phenomenon of negative capability during periods of uncertainty and conflict in the workplace. They often find themselves in difficult situations such as this, when the pressure to react is strong. Israelstam (2007) suggests that tensions evoked in dialectically charged situations often create new spaces for learning 35

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and growth that are related to mindless states. Regardless of whether a leader exercises restraint or decides to take quick action, these tensions may never be truly resolved. My interest in conducting the study was to explore these phenomena in order to shed light on this predicament. While the study was not specifically directed to the lived experience of psychotherapists, it should come as no surprise that in order to practice good therapy, one must have mastery over this unique skill set.

Part Two Literature review Several interrelated theories and paradigmatic frameworks inform the study. These include conversations from the field of organisational psychodynamics (Argyris, 1990; Laiken, 2001, 2002; Raab, 1997) and the work of contemporary theorists who have extrapolated the concept of negative capability to developing a better understanding of servant leadership (Greenleaf, 2008). Additionally, literature from poetry (Keats, 1817), Tibetan and Zen Buddhism (Batchelor, 1990, 2000; Eigen, 1998), and dialogism and dialectics (Bakhtin, 1981; Baxter & Montgomery, 1996) was reviewed in order to explore the connections between these meta-theoretical perspectives and the topic of the study. Elson (2010) contributed to an understanding of levels of abstraction. Johnson’s (1992) ideas on polarity management and paradoxical thinking are particularly worthwhile when thinking about negative capability. This paper is an extrapolation from a much larger body of work that constitutes the author’s doctoral dissertation. Given the space limitation, it is not possible to discuss all the theoretical constructs that inform the study, however, in order to provide the reader a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, literature from a primary field of inquiry is reviewed below.

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Dialogism and dialectics Dialogism and dialectics are meta-theoretical paradigms and core conversations that inform the study. They address the sophisticated subtleties of negative capability in a way that none of the other paradigms can achieve singularly. While the literature on dialectics does make occasional references to Keats’s aesthetic concept (see below), no studies were found that directly address the phenomenon from the standpoint of dialectics. The origin of dialogism as a philosophical doctrine is attributed to the Russian philosopher Bakhtin (1984), who until recently was best known in literary circles only. It would be fair to say that ‘dialogism’ has not been a part of mainstream social science, and scholars interested in studying interpersonal relationships are only just beginning to reference his work. ‘Dialectics’ has its roots in dialogism, therefore it may be important to understand its meaning and significance. Bakhtin believed dialogue to be the essence of all interpersonal communication. Unlike monologue, dialogue is multivocal and characterised by at least two distinct voices. Bakhtin (1981) writes, ‘our own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of others’ words that have been acknowledged and assimilated’ (p.345). He comments about and contrasts dialogic and monologic works. Unlike the latter, Bakhtin believed that dialogic work informs and is informed by previous works. It is an ongoing, bidirectional conversation between language and discourse (both past and present). Bakhtin (1984) further suggests that all meaning making is a dialogue and may be understood literally and metaphorically as a fusion of different systems and discourses. Participants engaged in dialogue must to some extent fuse their perspectives in order to construct a shared meaning. Conversation therefore, is a form of unity of different perspectives, even though participants retain their own unique perspectives on the topic. Multiple perspectives on the same phenomenon, co-constructed by the participants and Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

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myself added a richness and depth to the study. Dialogism has been around for thousands of years in ancient cultures such as China, India, and Japan. It has helped shape these cultures very dramatically, and yet it seems difficult to provide a singular answer or definition of what constitutes dialogism. More contemporary authors such as Altman, Vinsel and Brown (1981) look at dialogism as having two meanings: (a) a style of reasoning used to establish the truth and validity of ideas; and (b) a worldview or conception of the nature of phenomena. Both are germane to this study, particularly given its phenomenological focus and methodology. It is important here to make a distinction between a dialogic process (Bakhtin, 1984) and a dialectic process (Hegel, 1977, 2003), despite the complementarity of the two constructs: l Various existential approaches seem to co-exist in a dialogic process. It does not have a great deal of rigidity and strategies are open to changes. The outcome is often open-ended and no closure is typically sought. l In a dialectical process as conceptualised and formulated by Hegel, the goal seems to be to merge point and counterpoint (thesis and antithesis), thereby arriving at a compromise (synthesis). The end result of the process is a desired outcome – a solution that establishes primacy over other alternatives. In constructing their grand theory of ‘relational dialectics’, Baxter and Montgomery (1996) choose to use the words dialogism and dialectics interchangeably, even though Bakhtin and other scholars have made a distinction between the two seemingly alike, but different constructs. They write, ‘To Bakhtin (1984), the essence of dialogue is its simultaneous differentiation from, yet fusion with another. To enact dialogue, the parties need to fuse their perspectives while maintaining the uniqueness of their individual perspectives’ (p.24). ‘Just as dialogue is simultaneously unity and difference, Bakhtin Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

(1981) regarded all social processes as the product of ‘a contradiction-ridden, tensionfilled unity of two embattled tendencies’, the centripetal (i.e. forces of unity) and centrifugal (i.e. forces of difference)’ (p.25). The self may be constituted as a result of the fusion of these forces, that is, the simultaneous need to connect with and separate from the other. It is this interplay between the opposing forces (centripetal and centrifugal), which creates contradiction and difference and brings about a dialectical voice. Bakhtin (1986) was a critic of Hegelian-Marxist dialectics in the following way: ‘Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualising ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness – and that’s how you get dialectics’ (p.147). Dialectical tension is produced as a result of the friction between what appear to be contradictory or opposite phenomena. ‘Hegelian dialectic’ is an argument that posits a thesis and antithesis (point-counterpoint), which are then resolved through a synthesis. A dialectical tension can take many forms. As an example, let’s take the tension between Blacks and Whites, Christianity and Islam, and public and private. The events that are currently occurring in the Middle East may be a result of dialectical tension. Baxter and Montgomery (1996) find their own dialectical voice based on the actual and imagined dialogues with scholars such as Bakhtin. They highlight several key themes borrowed from Bakhtin’s work on dialogism, from which to formulate their own emerging meaning of social and relational dialectics. ‘These themes reverberate with Bakhtin’s notion of ‘dialogue’ as enacted communication, ‘dialogue’ as centripetal – centrifugal flux, ‘dialogue’ as chronotopic, and ‘dialogue’ as distinct from ‘monologue’’ (p.42). Baxter and Braithwaite (2008) comment, The central proposition of ‘relational dialectics theory’ (RDT) is that all of communica37

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tion is rife with the tension-filled struggle of competing discourses – the discursive oppositions of sociality. An analysis of communication framed by RDT seeks to understand this dialectical process by: (a) identifying the various discourses that are directly or indirectly invoked in talk to render utterances understandable and legitimate; and (b) asking how those discourses interpenetrate one another in the production of meaning. (pp.352–353) In an interesting analysis of the interpenetration of discourses, the authors use the expressions ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ to describe the emergence of meaning in dialogue. Diachronic means occurring over time, while the former is taken to mean a single moment in time. Even though meanings may appear to be fixed at any given moment in time, they may also be fluid and changing in the next. Participants may jointly reinforce an old meaning or simply construct a brand new meaning in an ongoing process of production or reproduction. The authors believe that it is this interpenetration of competing discourses that constitutes social reality. Bakhtin (writing as Voloshinov, 1973, p.85) believed that it is not experience that organises expression, but the other way round – expression organises experience. The relational dialectics theory (RDT) is unique in that it is the articulation of the ‘tensionality of difference’ as a mechanism that constitutes reality (Baxter, 2006). This process of constitution involves a decentring of the sovereign self that Keats may have referred to in his own way as the annulment of the self. It is through multiple perspectives on the same phenomena, as studied in different contexts, that we may be able to derive meaning through convergence and divergence. The literature that I have reviewed informs negative capability in some way and points to one thing – being in an ephemeral state of not knowing, ambiguity, and liminality all call for holding and managing dialectical tension over time, and are characterised by different, often contradictory ways 38

of thinking about something. We may experience dialectical tension when our worldview includes two seemingly contradictory (not necessarily dissimilar or unrelated) thoughts, or at least competing ways of thinking about a given topic with no real way to resolve the problem. Some examples of dialectical tension are as follows: l Group members’ struggle between wanting process and content. l Autonomy (abstraction) vs. intimacy. l Togetherness vs. separateness. l Privacy vs. disclosure. l Introversion vs. extroversion. l Emotion vs. cognition. We are often called upon paradoxically to hold very conflicting and often-painful dialectical tensions that cannot be easily resolved and may leave us emotionally and psychologically paralysed if left unmanaged. Like a state of liminality, we are not fully vested in either polarity. We are at both ends at the same time. It would be like standing at the edge of the boundary that separates the two positions, and yet fully taking up one position means giving up the other; and what makes this quandary even more difficult is that both positions are somehow interrelated, not mutually exclusive, even though at first they might appear to be. I see dialectical tension as the common thread that runs through the bodies of literature that I have been discussing, and yet, this tension resides as subtle nuances in each discipline. A practicing Buddhist who is in a state of mindful awareness and reflective inaction might experience the tension differently from an adult learner. A psychoanalyst, who by virtue of training and expertise holds the dialectical tension with a patient, might experience it very differently from a poet or an organisational consultant. I was interested in contextually understanding how these subtle nuances contribute to the lived experience of participants. In his 1939 monograph on ‘negative capability’, Bate (2012) discusses disinterestedness, passiveness, sympathy, impersonality, and annulment of the self as key elements. Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

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While most scholars who are familiar with Keats’s literary genius, would support Bate, I have often wondered if there isn’t something radically important that has been overlooked in the literature. As an organisational consultant who has done some work with Keats’s ideas over the past 10 years, it has been my experience and that of other colleagues whom I have worked with, that negative capability represents a quandary – a rather perturbed and conflicted frame of mind that may be steeped in dialectics. A search for the expression negative capability on several academic sites, including the Fielding Graduate Institute library of journals and dissertations, returned several pages primarily featuring the work of scholars in organisational psychodynamics and articles critiquing the Keatsian construct in aesthetics. As the search was narrowed to include the expressions ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘Buddhism’, a plethora of resources was found that make references to the construct. As I previously discussed, negative capability is not a mainstream expression that everyone is familiar with. People relate to it in different ways and may think of it as containment, refrain, mindful awareness, reflective inaction, and liminality to name a few. Even Keats, after having used the expression only once, subsequently thought of it as diligent indolence, disinterestedness, annulment of the self, and restless imagination – all of which may suggest an openness to sensation and feeling, the ability to transcend rationality, and the rejection of epistemological bounds.

Part Three Research method, design, and methodology A qualitative research methodology entitled interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was deployed to study negative capability. Given the novelty and innovative nature of the topic, IPA was best suited to study the phenomenon.


Unlike the natural science that studies objects of nature, human science inquiry is about the study of persons or beings that have consciousness. Van Manen (1990) writes, ‘Phenomenological research is the study of lived experience. It is seeing the world without taxonomising, classifying, or abstracting it. It does not test hypotheses or theories, but offers plausible insights’ (p.9). ‘Phenomenology’ is an attempt to understand the true meaning and essence of experiences as recounted by participants (Heidegger, 1962; Husserl, 1970; van Manen, 2007). In doing phenomenology, one is immersing in the life world of the participants and reliving their experiences or rethinking the actors’ thoughts, consistent with the philosophical tradition known as ‘Verstehen’ (Martin, 2000). It also involves setting aside (bracketing) assumptions, biases, and judgements that may otherwise impede the data collection process. Study design Fourteen leaders were recruited from academia, private practice (self-employed practitioners), and business organisations, following the selection criteria below. None of the participants had previous sentient ties with the researcher. In-depth interviews were conducted on the Go To Meeting web platform and digitally recorded. Examining negative capability from multiple perspectives and contexts added depth and complexity to the study. Smith, Flowers and Larkin (2009) suggest, ‘in multi-perspectival studies, the exploration of one phenomenon from multiple perspectives can help the analyst to develop a more detailed and multifaceted account of that phenomenon’ (p.52). Participant selection criteria The selection criteria were as follows: 1. Participants should be US residents within the age range of 35 to 65. 2. Should be currently employed (or selfemployed in the case of private practitioners) and have at least five years’ experience at their place of work. 39

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3. Be familiar with the notion of negative capability. 4. Must have experienced significant anxiety at work where they find themselves in a state of uncertainty and conflict. 5. Must be comfortable sharing their experiences with the researcher. 6. Must agree to sign the informed consent form and be willing to have the conversations digitally recorded and shared anonymously in the dissertation and subsequent journal articles and presentations. Data collection The data gathered during the interviews were personally transcribed and analysed by the researcher in consultation with the research supervisor. The Inq-Scribe software was used for transcription and analysis. Data management With each of the four transcript readings, the data collected were coded and recoded by the researcher, then finally coded as a whole in order to identify any emergent themes and patterns. As a reiterative process, it called for checking and rechecking with the participants’ accounts to make sure that what was being recorded is what they intended to convey in the interviews. All data were treated with the utmost confidentiality and securely stored.

Part Four Analysis and interpretation It is important to note that I conducted the analysis by interpreting the text at two levels. Ricoeur (1970) writes about these levels of interpretation, using the expression ‘hermeneutics’ to refer to the theory of interpretation: l The ‘hermeneutics of meaningrecollection,’ which provides a faithful disclosure of the participants’ accounts as they make sense of the phenomenon. l The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ may involve going below the surface and often behind the phenomenon being studied, 40

in order to understand and interpret its deeper meaning. The researcher conducting this level of analysis tries to make sense of the phenomenon from the participants’ accounts, as the participants are making sense of the phenomenon from their own standpoint. This is known as the ‘double hermeneutic’. Bracketing In phenomenological inquiry, the researcher is intimately involved in each aspect of the study, beginning with recruiting and interviewing participants, to thoroughly gathering the data, and final analysis and interpretation. It is a solitary role. Given the complexity of this process, it is anticipated that the researcher’s bias and preconceived notions may interfere with the robustness of the approach and integrity of the data collected and analysed. For this reason, I carefully reflected on and set aside (bracketed) my own paradigmatic framework, assumptions, and familiarity with the negative capability phenomenon so I could study it more objectively. This meant consciously assuming a state of negative capability (refrain) myself, without regard for the doctrinaire of knowledge. Assumptions 1. Even though the leaders that I recruited claimed to have a good understanding of negative capability, I had some apprehension that they clearly under-stood the phenomenon, given the obscurity of the construct in everyday life. 2. During various stages of recruitment, I provided a clear definition of negative capability, including an example of what might constitute it. Despite that initiative, I had assumed that leaders might not be able to clearly articulate how they made sense of the phenomenon. 3. After I replaced the negative capability expression with other, more familiar words such as uncertainty, ambiguity, and perplexity in the interview schedule, I suspected that we might end up Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

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researching the conditions, rather than the disposition itself. Group analysis After completing the individual analyses of transcripts from the 14 interviews, the data were then analysed for the entire group. The interview data are too voluminous to be reproduced here. The analysis was conducted in four steps: l Listing of the recurring emergent themes, including key phrases and metaphors. l Clustering of group level themes (derived from the previous step). l Master listing of superordinate themes (extrapolated from the clustering of themes). l Group narrative. Verbatim extracts from the original transcripts that address the superordinate theme titled ‘intermingling of personal and professional lives’ (see group narrative below) are provided as an example of the kind of data that were analysed. In part five of this paper under ‘deviant findings’, excerpts from a participant interview (Amanda) are reproduced to illuminate the peculiar relationship of negative capability and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Participant Leader 1 ‘First of all, I think that no one can truly compartmentalise their personal and professional lives. It may be the noble lie we tell each other, that what happened at home can be separate from work. It’s like saying what happened in our childhood would never influence our lives. That is a grand illusion. Everything affects everything else.’ Participant Leader 2 ‘Absolutely! Not to do with my work, but personal life. I have to deal with mental health issues in my family. As you can imagine, with mental health, your best tools don’t serve you well. You are dealing with things that your mind cannot rationally determine. Right or wrong are irrelevant. How do you manage yourself in the face of Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

extreme stress? I have most definitely been in situations where there was a great deal of chaos. A great deal of emotion and danger, where my past tools and experiences were in many ways, of little help to me.’ Group narrative Several superordinate themes emerged from analysis. Some of the more salient recurring group themes are stated below. l Exercising servant leadership. l Intermingling of personal and professional life. l Discomfort with managing and holding polarities and paradox (Figure 1 below is a schematic representation of the theme). In the interviews, leaders commented that they typically adopted one of four stances when faced with paradoxical dilemmas: l Go into a problem-solving mode in order to understand the situation. l Consult confidants at work who may shed light on the situation. l Emotionally shut down in the face of an impasse where no clear resolution was in sight. l Disperse into action, which may include engaging in a string of explanations or rationalisation in order to break the impasse or bind. If the anxiety becomes too intolerable, the leader may decide to exit the organisation. This is the most crucial finding of the study. In particular, there seemed to be an inner conflict between how leaders perceived their own style of leading (such as servant leadership) and the manner in which they reacted to conditions such as uncertainty and conflict (by dispersing into action). It would be fair to say that a servant leader ideally has a highly developed capacity to stay with uncertainty and hold the paradox rather than reacting and fleeing into action when she finds herself in a state of perplexity. This was not found to be true in the majority of interviews, and leads me to believe that the negative capability frame of mind is one that needs cultivation over time. It is not a naturally occurring phenomenon for most leaders. 41

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Figure 1: Schematic representation of holding polarities and paradox.

Problem solve

Disperse

Holding polarities and paradox

Consult others

Shut down

Part Five Discussion, findings, experiences, and implications Leaders are expected to get things done most effectively, most efficiently, and within a designated timeframe. Action therefore takes a higher status than reflection, leaving little or no room for thoughtful meditation and the inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives. I consider this to be a serious challenge facing organisations. Unless this is addressed, important voices will continue to be muted or marginalised, making organisations the perfect ground to breed tension and hostility, both of which are counterproductive. Batchelor (1990) suggests that there are three factors that need to be cultivated in our quest for new knowledge: great faith, great doubt, and great courage. The ‘faith to doubt’, writes the author, ‘does not refer to the kind of wavering indecision in which we get stuck, preventing any positive movement. It means to keep alive the perplexity at the 42

heart of our life, to acknowledge that fundamentally we do not know what is going on, to question whatever arises within us’ (pp.16–17). As leaders learn to be more comfortable with doubt and uncertainty, it is hoped that a new cadre of leaders will begin to emerge who can then become trailblazers for others to follow. Findings The outline of individual and group analyses in part four illuminated how leaders made sense of uncertainty and conflict in a variety of ways. They typically chose to deal with perplexing situations rather than sitting and reflecting on them patiently. They became ‘instruments of action’ rather than ‘instruments of thought’. The analysis indicates three important findings: (a) The context in which leaders are embedded may not have a significant bearing on how they experience and make sense of negative capability; (b) the majority of leaders interviewed appear to have a diminished capacity to contain uncerPsychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

Negative capability

tainty when faced with paradoxical dilemmas; and (c) they resort to behaviours such as problem solving, consulting others, shutting down, and dispersing as a defense against the uncertainty. As I conducted the in-depth interviews and explored the leaders’ workplace interactions, it was interesting to observe the outpouring of highly sensitive personal issues. It seemed to me that there was an intermingling of personal and professional issues. I had not expected that the leaders would share issues of a personal nature with a total stranger like myself, especially because the focus of the interviews was the workplace. Is it perhaps possible that when faced with uncertainty, conflict, and perplexity at work, many leaders regress to the comfort of their personal lives as a means of escape and avoidance? Is it also reasonable to expect that their openness and transparency were an outcome of the perceived safety and comfort that they felt with me? Deviant finding: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Negative capability In participant interview number 1 with Amanda, there was a unique connection established between negative capability and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). While this was not a shared theme among the remaining leaders, I consider it to be worthy of further exploration. In IPA studies, it is not completely unusual to discover something that at first seems to have no relevance to the study phenomenon, and yet, adds significant value to the project. I share this finding here with the hope that it may contribute something worthwhile to the existing body of qualitative literature on OCD. I provide below excerpts from my interview with Amanda. Case 1: Amanda (private practice) Amanda is a highly articulate independent consultant of British origin who lives in the US with her husband and children, and works predominantly with high-end clients in the health care industry. She is a certified Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

coach who seems to be greatly influenced by the work, thinking, and methodology of Kegan and associates. Amanda is struggling with serious mental health issues of her two sons, one of whom suffers from chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and the other with a severe form of anxiety. Both sons are grown, but still live with her. While she feels very competent and qualified to handle even the most challenging issues for her professional clients, she feels utterly hopeless, uncertain, and shaky on the home front. Even though Amanda came to the interview extremely composed and confident, the enormous tension that she must feel on account of her personal issues was palpable throughout our conversation. During the interview, I pursued the linkages between uncertainty, negative capability, and OCD in order to better understand how Amanda made sense of her state of perplexity that seems to have been exacerbated by the hopelessness of her unique situation. As a leader in private practice, how does one deal with the everpresent threat and danger of having to confront these huge challenges in one’s personal life? Verbatim excerpts from my interview with Amanda follow. Intermingling of personal and professional life When asked to talk about a time that she found it particularly hard to determine (make sense of) certain experiences, Amanda commented, ‘Absolutely! Not to do with my work, but personal life. Wait! I am just going to check if I am in a place in the home where I can speak openly. Wait a moment.’ (She seemed very guarded and anxious about the situation on her home front.) ‘Okay, so I can. I have to deal with mental health issues in my family. As you can imagine, with mental health, your best tools don’t serve you well. You are dealing with things that your mind cannot rationally determine or figure. Right or wrong are irrelevant. How do you manage yourself in the face of extreme stress? I have most definitely been in situations where there was a great 43

Anil Behal

deal of chaos. A great deal of emotion … danger, where my past tools and experiences were in many ways, of little help to me.’ Obsessive-compulsive disorder Amanda: ‘So two of my children have had very significant struggle. One was diagnosed with severe OCD. I talked a bit about that when we last spoke. And it’s a condition in which the brain gets stuck on certain intrusive thoughts that become rooted. They live with those thoughts and sometimes they come to faulty conclusion that if they do certain rituals they will either manage the anxiety or prevent the feared event from happening. ‘My mother is going to die. If I count backward from 100, I can stop it. If I do that, she will be safe.’ The secret to getting better is by reframing the fear (it’s just the OCD) and enduring it without engaging in the soothing ritual, because the brain then gets habituated to the fear. Every time you perform the ritual to get rid of the anxiety, you actually make it worse in your neural network in the brain until you break the connections.’ Amanda: ‘When they have the thought and don’t perform the ritual, there is absolute terror at first. In that space there is absolute terror. It is a life and death situation for them. It’s about brain chemistry because if you force yourself to experience the fear and don’t perform the ritual, you will gradually feel less fear. You will break the faulty connections that say ‘If I do X, Y will happen.’… Neurons that fire together, wire together and OCD is a faulty connection you need to break.’ Ritualistic behaviour during uncertainty Amanda: ‘OCD is a doubting condition. You doubt everything. It is only when you embrace doubt integrally that you can free yourself from it.’ She further commented, ‘I would not necessarily say it is irrational. It may be irrational from my perspective, not theirs. People are constantly managing their fears … fear of looking stupid, fear of losing relationships, fear of not progressing, etc.’ 44

Levels of Consciousness (Abstraction) and Work of Kegan (1994) Amanda: ‘So I hesitate using the word OCD about a situation other than a disease. When you know someone who has it, you find the use of OCD for other than disease, insensitive.’ ‘There are repetitive behaviours based on narratives just as OCD is based on narratives. A good coach helps them see narratives they have created and then call them into question. So what Kegan would say is that the goal is our foot on the gas, but the things we are protecting ourselves from … whatever they may be … are our foot on the brake. We get stuck. Underneath those fears, we find the stories and when we tease apart the stories that maybe served us in the past, we realise that they may be completely false today.’ Amanda: ‘Going from one level of consciousness to the next is about taking the unconscious and making it conscious. Kegan talks about the socialised mind, selfauthoring mind, and self-transforming mind. How little we can really control. Control is such an illusion. We cannot change the uncertainty, but only our attitude toward it. I cannot be like some Buddhists who are able to stay with the uncertainty and accept things without wanting to change them. I want to have an impact.’ Managing polarities Amanda is a leader who has a good conceptual understanding of negative capability, and so I directly broached the topic with her and inquired how she made sense of the construct. Her response: ‘It is an approach which is both-and, not either-or. My philosophy of leading is not one thing or another – it is keeping people psychologically safe and holding them accountable. There can be tension there – polarity management. American business used to say you can have cost or quality – not both. The Japanese showed that it was a false dichotomy. Manage the polarities and you can come up with a win-win, both-and solutions. Is negative capability a transient stage? Leaders exist to Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

Negative capability

create results and so leaders need not be paralysed by not knowing. To be able to acknowledge that they don’t know, but perhaps use their past experiences to figure out something that might work and try it out. It is comfort with discomfort!’ Quite often it is not a matter of taking an either-or approach to solving problems, but rather asking whether the problem is indeed solvable or if it requires holding paradoxes and polarities. Amanda shared in the interview that she does not think that there is a resolution on her home front, as it relates to her sons’ illness. She seems to have come to terms with her helplessness. All she can do is continue to hold the tension (see the following theme). Negative capability Amanda: ‘Negative capability is called accepting uncertainty – or embracing uncertainty because it is the need to know [certitude] that drives the behaviour. And if you can live with doubt when you have OCD, you can get better. I don’t know that if I count from 100 backward that my mother would die. Maybe she will, but parents are not comfortable with letting their children struggle and experience anxiety – they are enablers – they clean the entire house with Lysol; they act as though they themselves have OCD. The importance of not enabling is central – it is absolutely central. Every time you create an illusory safety, you are playing into the problem by running away from uncertainty and not knowing.’ In order to better understand the correlation of negative capability and OCD, I paraphrase Keats’ definition. ‘Negative capability is the capacity to remain in mysteries, doubts, and uncertainty without the irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ Remaining in mysteries, doubts, and uncertainty for any length of time is not easy. OCD is a chronic ‘doubting condition,’ one in which the sufferer is overwhelmed by recurring and intrusive thoughts. As Amanda (case 1) shared: ‘There is absolute terror in that space. There will be explosive behaviour Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

if you get between the thought and the ritual.’ As the patient’s anxiety is heightened, so is the impulse to alleviate it by performing a ritual. While performing the ritual is a patient’s defense mechanism for managing and containing the anxiety, it serves to both alleviate and perpetuate it. The key would be to help the patient break the linkage between a thought and a ritual. Not performing a ritual would be tantamount to resisting the impulse to reach out with action, fact, and reason. It is hoped that this initiative may help alleviate the suffering of those who are afflicted with moderate to severe OCD. Experiences and continuing research In addition to the findings, I would like to share other experiences. As I undertook the study, I had speculated that negative capability was an ephemeral state of mind that may easily give way to an overwhelming need for certitude. I had also hoped, on the other hand, that there would be some leaders that could potentially stay in a reflective mindset while resisting the temptation to engage in dispersal. Clearly, that has not been the outcome of the study in all three contexts. It seemed as though leaders tried to make sense of the phenomenon as it related to their emotional and psychological conditions such as uncertainty, doubt, ambiguity, and perplexity, but found it difficult to relate those conditions to negative capability as a frame of mind. In future studies of a phenomenological nature, especially those involving the research of an abstract phenomenon such as negative capability, it may be helpful to invest more time into recruiting a more purposive sample. It is not sufficient to take participants’ assurances for granted that they comprehend the research topic. They must also demonstrate their understanding of it. Perhaps, they should be required to answer a short questionnaire or respond to a case scenario before they are finally selected. I am entertaining the notion of conducting a further study on negative capa45

Anil Behal

bility in the future, solely with participants who come from a psychotherapeutic background. My reasoning for this is that therapists, by virtue of their training and expertise, would perhaps have a deeper understanding of the complexities involved. Consequently, they may be able to shed more light on this intriguing phenomenon. Negative capability and team creativity I am wondering if negative capability is an ‘internal constraint’ or a ‘transformative mindset’. Based on the study, one could reason that the phenomenon could be examined either way. On the one hand, it creates a great deal of anxiety, which as we have seen, may be defended against by actions that seem to alleviate the pressure that a leader feels. By taking action, the leader rids herself of that tension and escapes the quandary. On the other hand though, leaders that have cultivated the capacity to stay in mysteries, doubts, and uncertainties without the irritable reaching after fact and reason, may successfully create and negotiate an environment in which transformations may occur. Is it possible that highly creative people working in teams can manage internal and external constraints while remaining true to teamwork? The study indicates that contrary to the commonly held belief that internal and external constraints impede creativity and transformation in groups, the reverse can be true. Internal constraints such as negative capability may help catalyse creativity by thrusting team members in a state of not knowing. It provokes them to think, reflect, and find new ways of being. On the other hand, external pressures such as deadlines, limited resources, and emphasis on metrics do not suppressive creativity. They may actually enhance it.

Redefining negative capability: Final thoughts This study is important because an increasing number of professions demand that leaders be able to deploy negative capa46

bility as part of their jobs. The construct is fascinating, but when it comes to practice, people seem to find it challenging. There may be a need to develop a postmodern definition of negative capability that is more pragmatic and realistic for our times. The practice of negative capability presents a strange paradox as we attempt to hold two contrasting and conflicting attitudes together, resulting in a state of tension. What makes the predicament even harder is that the two positions (polarities) may not necessarily present us with an easy choice (either-or). They very often are complementary and interdependent, not mutually exclusive. And yet, the creative tension that we speak of is a result of contradiction, which is necessary for discourse and dialogue. While homogeneity and consensus are congenial, contradiction and difference, on the other hand can be terrifying. Research scholars, especially those that are engaged in qualitative studies, may find that the practice of negative capability may provide a means of holding their anxieties and tensions in what can be a very messy process that is replete with uncertainty. Denzin and Lincoln (1994) write, ‘The field of qualitative research is defined by a series of tensions, contradictions, and hesitations’ (p.15). On the one hand, a researcher with a post-positivist mindset who takes a detached, hands-off approach in the interview may create more objective space, but on the other hand, the individual may also be viewed as disinterested and distant. So how does one hold this difficult dialectic? Glesne and Peshkin (1992) suggest that a successful researcher is one who can remain ‘paradoxically bilateral’ (dominant, but also submissive). Oakley (1981), a feminist researcher contends that the goal in most interviews is best achieved when the interviewers and interviewees are in a nonhierarchical relationship, with the former willing to invest their personal identities in the relationship. I made an attempt in this study to remain paradoxically bilateral – subjective and objective at the same time. The study Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

Negative capability

was full of challenges and contradiction, and yet, it was in the very nature of the inquiry that I discovered new insights. I would not have been able to engage in the study if I could not practice negative capability myself. Scholars with a positivist mindset, entering qualitative research for the first time, may do well to cultivate a negative capability frame of mind. Being in a negative capability mindset is like undertaking a journey without a clear destination. Phenomenologists are called upon to constantly work in liminal spaces. Bentz and Rehorick (2008), using the metaphor of a wild horse to describe the final stage in hermeneutic phenomenology write, ‘In level 3, one rides the wild horse, taking the risk of ending up in a place one did not expect. One lets the horse become the guide’ (p.21). It may be that in contemporary times, staying in the present without regressing to the past or fleeing into the future is all that we can learn to do. Attending experiential conferences in the Tavistock tradition is a unique way to cultivate a ‘here-and-now’ awareness that may build the capacity to contain perplexing experiences and stay with the present. It provides an opportunity for members to experience what it is like to face and make sense of anxiety. Such experiences bring us face-to-face with unconscious and tacit processes that are pervasive in groups. Nearly 200 years after its coinage by a romantic poet in his early 20s, negative capability continues to be raised by scholars to a canonical status. There is no finality, and if I were to put a definition around something so elusive, I am indulging in the pursuit of knowledge, as opposed to staying with the not knowing. If I profess to know all that there is to know about negative capability, I will have failed miserably in this endeavour. What I hope I have tried to do is engage the reader’s questioning mind. Batchelor (1990)


suggests that where there is great questioning, there is great awakening. Where there is little questioning, there is little awakening. Where there is no questioning, there is no awakening. Understanding that the void of ‘not knowing’ is the womb for new creations and breakthroughs, is perhaps a powerful enough awareness that may lead to change and transformation in society. It is my hope that many courageous leaders will continue on that journey and set an example for others who are too anxious or fearful to embark on that path. Notes: 1. This is a significantly condensed version of a larger body of work that constitutes the author’s doctoral dissertation. The latter may be accessed in its entirety at the following URL: http://gradworks.umi.com/ 36/24/3624967.html 2. Phenomenological studies of this nature are often reported in the first person. The researcher takes a paradoxically bilateral position and is intimately involved in every step of the research, beginning with in-depth interviews with participants, and followed by data collection and analysis. Dr Anil Behal Dr Behal holds a PhD in Human and Organisational Development and a Master’s degree in Human and Organisational Systems from the Fielding Graduate University, California, US. His areas of expertise include applied communication theory, phenomenology, and the psychodynamics of organisations. He is the managing director and founder of ORGDYNE Training and Consulting, LLC (http://www.orgdyne.com).

Correspondence Email: [email protected]

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References Altman, I., Vinsel, A. & Brown, B. (1981). Dialectic conceptions in social psychology: An application to social penetration and privacy regulation. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 14, pp.107–160). New York: Academic Press. Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organisational defenses. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds; V. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX; University of Texas Press. Batchelor, S. (1990). The faith to doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist uncertainty. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press. Batchelor, S. (2000). Verses from the center: A Buddhist vision of the sublime. New York: Riverhead Books. Batchelor, S. (2000). Negative capability, emptiness, Nagarjuna, and Keats. Podcast of lecture delivered at the Trinity College, CT on 11 April 2000. Retrieved 17 July 2013, from: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/ program/1817 Bate, W.J. (2012). Negative capability: The intuitive approach in Keats. New York: Contra Mundum Press. Baxter, L.A. (2006). Communication as dialogue. In G.J. Shepherd, J. St. John & T. Striphas (Eds.), Communication as perspectives on theory (pp.101–109). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Baxter, L.A. & Braithwaite, D.O. (Eds.) (2008). Engaging theories in interpersonal communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Baxter, L.A. & Montgomery, B.M. (1996). Relating: Dialogues and dialectics. New York: Guilford Press. Bentz, V.M. & Rehorick, D.A. (2008). Transformative phenomenology. New York: Lexington Books. Bion, W.R. (1984). Attention and interpretation. London: Karnac. Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. New York: Columbia University Press. Cusa, N. (1440). Learned ignorance (publisher unknown). Czander, W.M. (1993). The psychodynamics of work and organisation. New York: Guilford Press. Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, U.S. (Eds.) (1994). Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Eigen, M. (1998). The psychoanalytic mystique. London: Free Association Books. Elson, L.G. (2010). Paradox lost: A cross-contextual definition of levels of abstraction. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

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Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock. French, R. (2000, summer). Negative capability, dispersal and the containment of emotion. Bristol Business School Teaching and Research Review, 3. Glesne, C. & Peshkin, A. (1992). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction. New York: Longman. Greenleaf, R.K. (2008). The servant as leader. Westfield, IN: The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Oxford: Blackwell. Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Israelstam, K.V. (2007). Creativity and dialectical phenomena: From dialectical edge to dialectical space. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88, 59–607. Johnson, B. (1992). Polarity management: Identifying and managing unsolvable problems. Amherst, MA: HRD Press. Keats, J. (1817). The letters of John Keats, 1814–1821 (2 vols.) (H.E. Rollins, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laiken, M.E. (2001). Models of organisational learning: Paradoxes and best practices in the postindustrial workplace. In C. Rarick (Ed.), Conference Proceedings of the 21st OD World Congress (pp.1–16). Vienna, Austria: 16–21 July. Laiken, M.E. (2002). Managing the action/reflection polarity through dialogue: A path to transformative learning (NALL Working Paper #53). Toronto, ON: NALL Martin, M. (2000). The uses of understanding in social science: Verstehen. Edison, NJ: Transaction. Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms. In H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing feminist research (pp.30–61). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Phillipson, S. (2014). Obsessional thinking. In Anxiety Care UK. Retrieved 26 February 2014, from: http://www.anxietycare.org.uk/docs/ obsessionalthinkingonline.asp Raab, N. (1997). Becoming an expert in knowing: Reframing teacher as consultant. Management Learning, 28(2), 161–175. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press Simpson, P. & French, R. (2006). Negative capability and the capacity to think in the present moment: Some implications for leadership practice. Leadership, 2, 245. doi: 10.1177/1742715006062937 Smith, J.A., Flowers, P. & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. London: Sage.


Negative capability Van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Van Manen, M. (2007). Phenomenology of practice. Phenomenology & Practice, 1(1), 11.

Voloshinov, V.N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language (L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Academic research on ‘premonitions’, ‘presentiments’ and/or ‘intuitions about the future’ A member of the Psychotherapy Section is conducting research on this topic, using qualitative interviews, in a novel approach to such experiences, and involving psychological and attachment-based concepts. Such experiences have mostly been studied within the framework of paranormal or anomalous research. This research is based on the premise that such experiences possibly can b explained largely by existing psychological concepts. Some potential respondents have insisted that they do not believe in the paranormal, and the researcher makes clear that claims to have such experiences does not imply such a belief. Enquiries about participation from members of the Psychotherapy Section would be greatly welcomed, as familiarity with careful attention to processing internal and external sources of interpersonal information is directly relevant to the qualitative interviews. Expenses and a small monetary reward are offered. For further information, please contact Erica Brostoff, MSc, at: [email protected] This research is being conducted as part of an postgraduate research programme at the University of Greenwich, Department of Psychology, Social Work and Counselling, and is supervised by Dr David Luke and Professor Pam Maras.


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The language of resistance in a counselling group: Dynamics of authority and power Phey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong, Vilma D’Rozario & Rhodas Myra Bacsal This study presents a qualitative exploration and analysis of the experiences of eight trainee group counsellors from Singapore, Malaysia, China and Japan, in an in-class face-to-face and online support group. The study sought to understand how participants co-constructed their experiences of the critical incident of resistance, which they had identified as significant in their post-group reflection papers. Conversation Analysis was used to analyse all session transcripts During the analytical process, it was found that two co-facilitators and one member had used interactional features such as the turn allocation process, conversational practices, declarations and prescriptions, to create and implement their authority and power in influencing the other group members in ways which were considered judgemental, disempowering and offensive by one member, who in turn became increasingly resistant.

R

ESISTANCE is a phenomenon that can emerge in any counselling situation, even when the most experienced and expert counsellors use counselling approaches exactly as prescribed and taught in counsellor training programs (Watson, 2006). However, resistance has been conceptualised differently by different theoretical frameworks. For example, resistance has been seen as: (a) an unconscious defence (protective) mechanism to block painful, anxiety provoking memories and insights (psychoanalytic viewpoint) (Busch, 1995), or a means to prevent changes to the current interaction patterns and balance of power within the family (family systems theories) (Watson, 2006); (b) the result of clients’ difficulties with coping with challenging circumstances and/or disbelief in the efficacy of counselling (Behaviourist model) (Shelton & Levy, 1981); or (c) a by-product of the counsellor-client relationship (post-modernist view) (Guterman, 2007, 3 March). In the first two conceptualisations, resistance is seen as coming from within and/or being created by the client. The counsellor’s task is to help the client to access and acknowledge one’s own inner subjective experiences (ISE), and reinterpret, reframe 50

or challenge one’s perceptions of these experiences in more adaptive ways (Leahy, 2001; Watson, 2006). In the third conceptualisation, resistance can only be reduced when both counsellor and client are aware of their roles in creating the resistance and modify their behaviours accordingly (Guterman, 2007, 3 March; Watson, 2006). Since it is only possible to know another person’s ISE through his/her explicit verbal expressions (Hansen, 2005; Rudes & Guterman, 2007), counsellors and their clients essentially accomplish their work via the use of verbally expressed language which seeks to elicit, express and process the clients’ ISEs. Similarly, while clients’ ISEs from the past or environment outside of the counselling session may be the source of resistance to counselling, the client’s ISE of the counsellor’s verbal and non-verbal behaviour could also contribute to resistance. As such, the counsellor’s ISE of the client, is also the result of the counsellor’s personal ISE from other aspects of his life which he brings into the relationship. From the psychoanalytic perspective, the impact of ISEs on the therapeutic relationship and resulting work or lack thereof would be termed as transference and countertransferPsychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

The language of resistance in a counselling group: Dynamics of authority and power

ence, and the post-modernist perspective posits that the results of this counsellorclient interaction are co-constructed through the use of language. Post-modernist philosopher, Lyotard (1979/trans. 1984), suggested that one key production of language games between speakers is the creation and legitimisation of authority ingroups and societies. Within the therapeutic context, authority is derived from the expertise and knowledge of the speaker (Anderson, 2001). This expertise and knowledge is communicated through the language game (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984), whereby new meanings and knowledge are continually co-constructed by the speakers (Anderson, 2001; Gergen, 1994; Shotter, 1993) in this fluid and dialectical relationship (Sutherland & Strong, 2010), thus creating a power differential between the therapist and client (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009). Although, therapists tend to be perceived by clients as authority figures because of their expertise and knowledge (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009), they can choose to share their power with their clients by allowing them to be the experts on their issues, and by involving them in the comanagement of the therapeutic process (Anderson, 2001; Strong, 2002; Sutherland & Strong, 2011). By the same token, it can be argued that therapist behaviour in managing the use of power during any therapeutic conversation, can result in either the reduction or increase of resistance in the client. In this study, we therefore attempt to understand how trainee group counsellors use their authority and power to manage conversations with group members to build resistance. We have chosen to focus on how undesirable counselling outcomes are created, so that counsellors may avoid them in the future.

Method In order to understand how language can be used in interaction patterns to build resistance in clients, we chose to use the qualitative method of conversation analysis (CA) to Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

examine how therapists and clients organise and negotiate the content and process of their dialogues, so as to generate and convey new understandings to each other during their therapeutic conversations (McLeod, 2006). In this study, we examined how Group Counsellors-in-Training worked with each member, each group subsystem and the group as a whole, while simultaneously attending to relationships among group members, much in the same way that a therapist would do with clients in family therapy (Pinsof, 1995). The categorisation and sequential organisation of talk-in-interaction was analysed minutely by working directly with the detailed renderings of naturally occurring interactional activities, such as transcripts and recordings. This allowed us to take into account the details and subtleties of interaction that are not found in other approaches (ten Have, 2007). Participants Given the nature of this study, it was decided that having counsellors-in-training as respondents would be appropriate, as trainees are more likely to engage in non-facilitative than facilitative conversational practices compared to professional counsellors. There is only one Master’s level group counselling course in Singapore that uses authentic support groups in-class, whereby participants self-disclose and worked on their personal issues. Hence, participants were selected using purposive and convenience sampling methods. Purposive and convenience sampling methods were used to select Master’s level trainee counsellors attending the only group counselling course in Singapore which uses uses authentic support groups in-class. Although 16 graduate students in the group gave their written consent to participate in this study, this study only focuses on the work produced by eight students, whose group maintained resistance throughout the group sessions. To protect their identities, Western pseudonymns are used here and ethnic backgrounds are not revealed. 51

Phey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong, Vilma D’Rozario & Rhodas Myra Bacsal

The eight graduate students (three men, five women) ranged in age from 22.58 to 43.25 years (M=31.93 years). There were four Singaporean Chinese, one Singaporean Indian, one Malaysian Chinese, one Chinese from the People’s Republic of China and one Japanese. Five participants had some experience in individual counselling, and only two had prior experience doing group counselling. Research team and auditors The research team included a primary researcher, two research assistants and two advisors. At the time of data collection, the primary researcher was a doctoral student with a Master’s degree in counselling, while the research assistants were Bachelor degree holders, and the advisors were doctoral degree holders. All research team members were effectively bilingual in English and Mandarin/Malay. Two external auditors were also engaged to monitor the analytical process, and to provide a check against possible researcher bias towards or against participants (Hill, 2005). Both auditors had Master’s degrees in counselling, were effectively trilingual in English, Mandarin and Malay/Japanese, and had significant qualitative research and multicultural counselling experiences in the Asia Pacific region. Site of study The participants were randomly paired as co-facilitators for one or two sessions in their group. This sequence of sessions is detailed in Table 1. Before and after each support group session, co-facilitators were briefed and debriefed by their process observer, who was a member of the research team. Each face-to-face support group was given its own room, so as to ensure privacy for group members. The support group sat on chairs in a circle in the middle of the room, during each face-to-face session. Each group also had its own asynchronous forum page with separate threads for each asynchronous on-line session, which ran continuously throughout the week, and which participants could participate in as they desired. 52

Procedure Data collection. Since Conversation Analysis (CA) assumes that social life is the outcome of talk-in-interaction, which in turn is a ‘situated’ achievement, it was, therefore, necessary to capture such naturally occurring data live, rather than retrospectively. Naturally occurring data was captured live, with the use of audio and video recording equipment, and transcribed using a simplified form of the Jefferson Transcription System (Jefferson Convention), thus allowing the elaboration, clarification and explication of phenomena (ten Have, 2007). Data analysis Selection of the episodes of resistance. For example, Co-facilitator Janice explained that the group tried to offer Resistant Member Vivian, ‘a supportive environment to clarify her misunderstanding within the group and encourage her to stay with the group to work through her resistance’; while Co-facilitator Sean reflected that, ‘Vivian showed resistance by declining to participate actively in the support group.’ Member Susan said of Vivian, ‘I sensed her reluctance to be part of the group’; while Member Alice said, ‘I thought that she was really being difficult as she kept voicing out differing opinions.’ Even the identified resistant member, Vivian, reflected that the group ‘do [sic] not accept disagreement and difference style till (the) end’. I rarely felt that it was a safe and genuine place to fully express myself … During group sharing, the atmosphere did not allow me to use the ‘pass’ privilege despite my feeling of insecurity. I felt really obligated to talk about [sic] at least ‘something’ even when I have vague feelings and ideas of what the group was discussing about sometimes…’ In addition, the primary researcher also independently reviewed the seven hours of video-recordings and accompanying transcripts, as well as six on-line session archives to identify emerging phenomena from all sessions. Twenty per cent of the phenomena which the primary researcher deemed significant to the group outcomes were deemed Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


Table 1: Group session sequence for support group used in this study. Week

Session Number [Face-to-Face (FTF) Online (OL)]

Co-Facilitators

1

Post OL debrief and Pre-FTF session briefing FTF 1 Post-FTF session briefing OL 1

Vivan and Clarissa

2

Post OL debrief and Pre-FTF session briefing FTF2 Post-FTF session briefing OL 2

Adam and Susan

3


Sean and Janice

4


Alice and John

5


Vivian and Clarissa

6


Sean and Janice

7


Alice and John


53


significant by the participants in the group, and these phenomena were all present in the same episodes of resistance highlighted by the participants. Following this, the research team then referred to the existing literature to confirm that the identified episodes could indeed be defined as that of resistance. The primary researcher started the first phase of the analytical process by reviewing all data from the identified episodes, taking note of behaviours and talk that were interesting or significant, and referring to the process observer’s field notes. She would also constantly reflect on and discuss with the research team on a weekly basis, her feelings and reactions to the data. Transcript analysis process. The primary researcher conducted a Conversation Analysis using the four types of interactional organisations: (1) turn-taking organisation; (2) sequence organisation; (3) repair organisation; and (4) the organisation of turn design (ten Have, 2007). Key interactional features of the group conversations that had contributed to the dynamics within the group were identified, and the analysis was then checked by the research team and two external auditors. There was unanimous agreement between the research team and the auditors about the findings.

Results This section focusses on a description of the key interactional features that were observed in the creation and maintenance of a group member, Vivian’s, resistance. Allocation of turns of talk. The turn-taking process is important because it allows the parties present to be participants in the conversation. Speaker change can happen via selection of the next speaker by the current speaker or self-selection by a new speaker (ten Have, 2007). In this group, co-facilitators, Sean and Janice, present themselves as authority figures (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) by 54

controlling talk, and allocating speaking rights to themselves and selected group members (Freebody, 2003). In Excerpt 1, Co-facilitator Sean opens the session (Lines 1 to 3), thus exercising first-starter rights in determining the topic and allocating the next turn to another speaker (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). In Line 5, Sean also allocates a turn to one member, John, when he opens an adjacency pair by asking the latter for his opinions (Line 5). Co-facilitator Sean’s action also serves to invest Member, John, with authority, which he and Janice further reinforce by agreeing with him (Lines 14 to 15). Declarations. The co-facilitators’ also controlled the direction of the group discussion by using declarations. An example of a declarative statement that participants accepted as a fact without verifying its validity (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) is seen when Co-facilitator Sean declares that Members Vivian, Alice and Clarissa (Lines 1 to 3) are bold and honest about their preferences and feelings. Alice responds with the agreement token, ‘Ok’ (Silverman, 2001). This is immediately followed by John’s declaration, which he further objectifies (Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, 2011) and legitimises (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) by beginning his statement with the third party pronoun ‘it’. Later on (Excerpt 2), John declares that ‘Vivian has a really big problem’ (Lines 254 to 255). Vivian attempts to exercise her power by weakly rejecting (Pomerantz, 1984) John’s declaration of her having a big problem with an interruption which indicates her frustration with the discussion. She ends her statement by emphasising her point with a micro-pause (‘(.)’) followed by ‘really’ (Lines 256 to 257) (Strong, Busch & Couture, 2008a). Prescriptions. When one participant prescribes a course of action for other participants, he or she places himself in a position of authority, while placing a clear expectaPsychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


Excerpt 1 from Face-to-Face Session 3. Line Speaker

Talk

Line Speaker

Talk

254 John 255

Just to talk generally, Vivian has really big problem and we have to give her credit for that. The fact that she’s being honest about that, right?

256 Vivian 257

Yeah, actually, I had a choice. I feel maybe ishould just shut up (.) really.

1 2 3

Sean (F)

I realise that the both of you, the three of you actually have the same characteristics, being bold, being able to voice out what you #like (.) and what you #feel.

4

Alice

OK.

5

Sean (F)

John, what do you think?

6 John 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

A good point. As in being able to accept differences between ( ). There will be differences but we still can look at commonality in the sense. (1.9) That, so that is the:: key of group message. With all these difference, (.) but we are here, let us focus on the common rather than the difference. (.) It's good that they are expressing themselves rather than being politically correct.

14 Sean (F) 15

That's true. (1.2)

16 Janice (F) 17 18 19 20 21 22

I agree with John about (.) the commonality…So ah:: Vivian actually brought at some point that (.) she did not feel sense of belonging to this group. Just want to know, how everybody can help to br(hh)ing her feeling of belongingness to this group? (1.3) Yeah.

23 Vivian

Excerpt 2 from Face-to-Face Session 3.


Talk

109 110 Sean (F) 111

Perhaps it's good time ask around rather that to assume. Adam, zero to ten, ten being (.) the most sense of belonging, zero being completely nothere, (.) where would youstand?

112

Adam

I am not sure, ( )

113

Sean (F)

So if I were to ask you to give a number now?

114 115 Adam 116

I think it's still high? (Because I have seen the group sharing struggles and fears.) There's some form of trust in it. ( ) If I were to give a number, around eight.

117 Sean (F)

Ok, Clarissa?

118 119 Clarissa

Six to seven. Yeah, because I think it's still fear (.) and not confident with what ishare, what isay.

Ok, th(h)at's me. You asking the group? ((all mumble))

(F) denotes Co-facilitator for session


55


tion that the other participants would perform the action. For example in Excerpt 1, Co-facilitator Janice asks the group to provide solutions to help Vivian feelasense of belonging to the group. By addressing Vivian’s sense of belonging as if she is not present, and asking the group to solve this issue, Janice implies that Vivian has a problem that has to be solved by the group. The prescription is offensive to Vivian, as she asks Janice why she is asking the group to solve her issue. In Excerpt 3, Co-facilitator Sean asks the group members to rate their sense of belonging on a scale of 1 to 10 (Lines 109 to 111). Member Adam initially declines to give a number (Line 112), and Co-facilitator Sean seeks to repair this trouble source (Schegloff, 1992) by asking Adam to give a number now (Line 113). Adam accedes (Lines 114 to 116). As a result, several members, including Clarissa, follows suit by giving her rating (Lines 118 to 119). Co-facilitator Sean’s authority is thus legitimised by group members when they respond as required. In Excerpt 4, when Vivian responds to Sean’s question by gave her rating of ‘three’, she is asked to justify her rating. Vivian responds with silence, and though this prompts Janice to assure her that she does not have to respond, she uses the conversational device, ‘but’ (Jefferson, 1992), to voice her disagreement to Vivian’s silence and reinforce her authority on what members may or may not choose to do, by prescribing a group norm that implies that Vivien would have to respond eventually so that the group can remain cohesive. Another form of prescription that served to build Vivian’s resistance in this group was implicit in the conversational practice of speaking about group members as if they are not present in the session, by using third person pronouns such as ‘she’ or ‘they’ (Farlex, 2013b), or by using the person’s name, instead of using personal pronouns such as ‘You’ (Farlex, 2013a), to address the person. This occurs when the group follows 56


Talk

129 Vivian

°About three.°

130

About three? How you feel about the big difference? Generally it's about seven to eight, and then, the lowest is three?

131 Sean (F) 132 133 Vivan

(50.1)

134 Janice (F) Let's not be pressurized on talking. 135 Sean (F)

WE HAVE A 'PASS' RULE. ((all laugh))

136 Janice (F) Don't feel pressurized to share. 137 Sean (F)

Anyone else?

I mean if you don't feel that you want to share, you 138 don't like to really talk 139 Janice (F) about your feelings, it is 140 alright to say ‘pass’. But (.) ultimately, we need to be together as a group.

the speaking style of the speaker who first broaches a topic or issue. For example, in Excerpt 1, Member John, having been vested with the authority to state his opinion and make a prescription, starts to speak about Vivian, Alice and Clarissa, as if they are not present (Lines 12 to 13). This conversational practice is subsequently adopted by Co-facilitator Janice (Lines 16 to 20). Consequently other group members follow suit in the following excerpts. Excerpt 5 demonstrates how being talked about in the third person can be disturbing to the member who is being talked about. This is seen in Vivian’s response, where she expresses in relatively undisturbed speech her surprise at being ‘the center of attention’ (Turn 25, Line 103), and being talked about by the group. However, her speech becomes turbulent, as evidenced by expressive caution in the form of a hesitations (Turn 22, Line 100: ‘eh::’) when she starts to Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


Excerpt 5 from Face-to-Face Session 3. Line Speaker 96 Sean (F) 97 98 99

Talk So what we are all saying here is that (.) it's very important for her to be able to be in the group so that we can move forward as a group. But at the same time, we can also acknowledge that the issue of trust (.) takes a while to build.

100 Vivian

Eh:: I, I have a question actually.

101 Sean (F)

Mhm::

102 Janice (F) Mhm:: 103 Vivian 104

I am quite ( ) surprised that I am the center of attention now? Everybody's talking about me, how we can help me?

talk about her initial thoughts about others feeling the same way as she did. Her turbulent delivery pattern indicates that she considers her opinions as potentially problematic for the rest of the group members (Silverman, 2001).

Discussion Resistance in a group member can arise from the way co-facilitators use interactional features during group conversations to position power structures to create and use authority in a group. This is represented in Figure 1. Creation of authority. Group participants who took on the role of co-facilitators were automatically vested with a higher level of authority and power than members, while other participants complemented this role by taking on the lower status membership role of docility, by following the co-facilitators’ and Member John’s prescriptions (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) and conversational practices. This unequal status between the two parties resulted in a smooth and productive interaction between both parties, and is reminiscent of Tracey’s (2002) interpersonal perspective of power. The following of conversational practices is supported by Bandura’s modelling theory in which leaders shape group norms by modelling behaviours for other members to adopt (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005). The only person who deviated from the norm of following the leaders was Resistant Member Vivian, who effectively placed

Figure 1: Misuse of authority and power in creating and maintaining resistance in therapeutic conversations. Creation of Authority and Power l

l

Investment Role-defined authority l Self-selection of turns l Invested authority l Allocation of turns l

Usage of Authority and Power l

l

Control Turns of talk Prescriptions

l l

Judgement Declarations

l

Legitimisation l Evidential support l Accepting prescriptions l Following conventional practices l Moral support l Agreement with prescriptions


Resistance l

l

Creation Disagreement with declarations and prescriptions

l

Maintenance Assertion of rights Objection to conversational practices

l l

57


herself at the same power level as the co-facilitators and challenged their authority when she asserted her right to pass a question. Hence, there was a symmetrical interaction between the co-facilitators and resistant member, which resulted in a tense interaction and increase in resistance (Tracey, 2002). In other words, client resistance can arise from client rejection of the counsellor’s authority. Co-facilitator Sean also invested one member, John, with authority, by using the turn taking process to allocate the next turn to him, and further strengthening his authority by agreeing with and legitimising his views. In doing so, Co-facilitator Sean also strengthened his own position of authority on what direction the group should take. Co-facilitator Sean’s action is supported by the literature on the theory of Social Influence (Frank, 1961; Goldstein, Heller & Schrest, 1966; Strong, 1968), which contends that individuals tend to give interpersonal power to those whom they perceive as having the resources to meet their needs. When viewed through this lens, Member John may be seen as having been given the power to influence the group because his viewpoint was the resource that the co-facilitators needed to move the group in the direction that they wanted it to take, thus allowing them to control the group process indirectly. Usage of authority and power. The co-facilitators and Member John used the power inherent in their authority, as well as their position as first speakers, to judge group members’ behaviours (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009) by making declarations about members (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984). They used interpersonal power to influence the group to view Vivian in the same negative way (Strong, 1968). The authority figures’ declarations of Vivian served to invest the group with the expert power or epistemic authority to solve her problem for her (Heritage & Raymond, 2005), and their conversational practice of indirect talk allowed group participants to criticise Vivian, 58

while strengthening their belief in their authority to solve her problems. These actions were unacceptable and possibly offensive to Vivian, as it neither gave her information on how her behaviour impacted others, nor empowered her to make changes about her interpersonal style (Stockton, Morran & Krieger, 2004). While this practice of indirect talk is not uncommon amongst members, skilled and experienced facilitators would always instruct speakers to look at and speak directly to the person they want to talk about, as this would open up communicational channels among members and empower them to take responsibility for reaching their personal and group goals (Corey, Corey & Haynes, 2014). The literature on interpersonal behaviour in the therapist-client relationship also posits that critical behaviour elicits distrustful behaviours (Leary, 1957; Tracey, Sherry & Albright, 1999), which in turn serves to build client resistance towards the therapist (Shelton & Levy, 1981). The co-facilitators also used their authority and power to control the group processes by using prescriptions. This was because the co-facilitators together with Member John, used the conversational device ‘but’ to set the group norm that all members should talk about their differences so that group cohesiveness can be achieved. According to Glasser (2000), the use of external control psychology results in disconnecting the controlled from the controller. External control behaviour includes punishment, which is seen in this instance when Vivian was asked to account for having a lower rating for belongingness than other members. It also accounts for why Vivian later reflected in her reflection paper that she seldom felt safe in this group, and her lack of safety resulted in her increased resistance to the group process. Implications for counsellors. This study shows that group counsellors need to be aware of the power which their roles bestow on them Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


and how accidental misuse of this power could impact the group. Hence, they need to understand their motivations for wanting to control group conversations and directions. They also need to understand how to use conversational devices and practices in ways that allows the co-sharing of power and use of collaborative language (Sutherland & Strong, 2011).

This research was supported by the RSAA Grant RS-AA 10/08, awarded by the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.

Limitations. This study was limited by the small number of participants, though measures were taken to triangulate the findings by using multiple sources of data, and by providing sufficient information about the learning context of the study so that readers were able to draw their own conclusions. It must also be noted that the use of Conversational Analysis also limited data collection to in-situ talk-in-interaction data, as it posits that post-conversation reflections are often inaccurate, as participants might not remember exactly how they felt or what prompted them to speak in a certain manner, after the fact (ten Have, 2007). Hence, the researchers only had limited information gathered from the participants’ written reflections from which to understand how the participants justified or reinterpreted their actions in the group following its closure.

Rhodas Myra Bacsal Early Childhood and Special Education Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.

The Authors Phey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong & Vilma D’Rozario Psychological Studies Academic Group, Nanyang Technological University.

Correspondence Phey Ling Kit Psychological Studies Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, NIE 2-03-101, Singapore 637616. Email: [email protected]

Implications for future research. Given these limitations, it might, therefore, be helpful to conduct a quantitative study of the prevalence of the key interactional features in the wielding of authority and power in creating and maintaining resistance. Future qualitative studies in the area of resistance might also include semi-structured interviews that could be analysed for the meanings ascribed by group counsellors and members to their experiences of resistance, and how this might affect their conceptualisations and subsequent interventions. The study of lived experiences can be conducted using other qualitative methods such as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009).


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Individual transformations in groups: The role of focal person in periods of archetypal paradoxes Anil Behal ‘The notion of the “archetypal paradox” was advanced as the group context in which the “focal person” emerges. Within the period of the archetypal paradox, the focal person serves to crystallise and to name the sense of the entrenchment that members feel and the unconscious concerns that are at the core of the archetypal paradox, to challenge and to critique the present order of things, and/or to energise the group toward transformation of the social order. Through these three key functions, the focal person facilitates a reframing of the group’s situation and movement through the paradox.’ (Dirkx, 1991, p.92)

O

UR ATTENTION SO FAR has been on transformative learning as it occurs on an individual level; however, given that group work is an inescapable reality in today’s day and age, it would seem only natural that we make an attempt to understand how individual learning and transformation unfold within the context of a small group. My own experience of group work has thus far been in psychodynamic ‘self-analytic’ settings where much of the work is self-directed and experiential, with little or no direction or guidance from a group moderator. Drawing from the early and contemporary work of theorists such as Lewin, Bion, Rice and others who have extensively researched and contributed to a greater understanding of group dynamics, it seems the group has a powerful impact on individual learning, both at conscious (manifest) and unconscious (tacit) levels. Whilst the focus of human process facilitators who work in the National Training Laboratories (NTL) tradition, seems to be on the ‘individual’ participant and how she relates interpersonally to others within a group setting, consultants that work in the Tavistock/AKRI Group Relations traditions, are primarily concerned with ‘group-level’ (covert, irrational, and unconscious) phenomena. Both traditions are deeply 62

embedded in social systems, of which the individual, group, and institutions are an integral part, but it does not seem very clear in either methodology, what if anything, has undergone transformation within the system. Perhaps, the difficulty arises from the fact that ‘what and how’ an individual learns in these groups, is entirely left to that individual to figure out. This is not an easy process to understand, let alone internalise. For the novice, it presents an even greater challenge. On another note, the social, cultural, and personality systems in which this rich work progresses, seem to take a back seat. References are sporadically made to the personality system in NTL work and the social/cultural systems in the Tavistock model; however, the discussions barely scratch the surface of what is clearly a much deeper and more complex phenomenon. In order to address these perplexing concerns, I decided to engage with the thinking of Boyd (1991) and associates, as it pertains to personal transformations in small groups (viewed through the Jungian lens). This means opening up an entirely new way of looking at groups and understanding transformations that seem to occur in those settings. As I studied Boyd’s work, I felt both excited and a bit overwhelmed. My excitePsychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

Individual transformations in groups

ment stemmed from knowing that Jungian thinking had already made its way into individual transformation within groups, previously thought of as the domain of psychodynamics. Depth psychology, for the most part, has centered on the individual rather than the group. Jungian analysts have typically shied away from what is commonly known as group analysis in psychoanalytic settings. I refer here to psychoanalysis as distinct from Jungian (depth/analytical) psychology, even though there are many commonalties between the two disciplines. My feeling of being overwhelmed came from the realisation that there was a lot that I did not know about transformation in groups from a depth psychology standpoint. The literature is so vast that it simply would not be possible to explore it all within this paper. I therefore decided to focus on something that is typically not addressed in mainstream transformative learning literature, that is, the emergence and role of a ‘focal person’ in a group, especially at times of emotional upheaval, conflict, and strife when the group is going through periods of archetypal paradoxes. Based on my own experiences and group study, I speculate that it is during periods of ‘dialectical tension’ that we may witness dramatic individual and group transformation. This kind of tension always exists within groups as an outcome of the paradox of uncertainty, however, it seems as though there is a tendency to somehow alleviate the tension and anxiety, rather than explore and work with it. In trying to quickly restore civility and normalcy to a group, we may be shortchanging the natural process of growth and evolution that all groups must go through as they progress through different phases of development. In addition to Boyd’s work which is centre stage in this paper, I will also draw from the work of other theorists such as Nitsun (1996) who have made a significant contribution to group analytic literature.


Boyd’s Matrix model Boyd (1991) makes a compelling argument that in understanding and defining the leader’s role in a small group, it is important for the leader to clearly have in mind a conceptual metaphor/framework of the group and the assumptions on which that metaphor is based. The observer’s ‘Weltanschauung,’ that is, worldview or philosophy of life (Boyd, 1991, p.15) dictates in part, the structural aspects of the group that come together in a meaningful way and facilitate the process of sense making. This is not to suggest that a universally accepted paradigm may help explain all the small group complexities. It is conceivable that a different set of paradigms and worldviews may in fact converge and form a mental picture of what the group represents to the leader, who may then draw from different perspectives as she makes sense of what might be happening in the group. Any conceptual framework of the group, according to Boyd, must deal with the following points of view: 1. Structural: Personality system, social system, and cultural system 2. Developmental/adaptive point of view (each of the three systems in #1 above must face the three primary tasks of defining the nature of its identity, establishing modes of relating (norms), and developing means to respond/relate to reality-adaptive demands (Boyd, 1991 p.15) 3. Transactional point of view states that what is happening in one constituent part of the matrix, affects all other part as well. 4. Gestalt: Viewing the group-as-a-whole and using a metaphor such as an ‘organism’ to describe it is central to an understanding of what might be transpiring within it at any given point in time. 5. Content point of view: refers to the forms the transactions take in the life of a group. These are not primarily the interactions between members, but also between the personality, social, and cultural systems, which may or may not be readily observable, but are present nonetheless. 63

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In summary, what Boyd seems to suggest is that all three systems, that is, personality, social, and cultural will inevitably face the three primary tasks of defining the nature of the identity, ways of relating (emotionality, norms, boundaries, etc.), and developing the means to relate to reality-adaptive demands. Using Erickson’s (1950) epigenetic theory as a basis, Boyd posits that the stages of group development may coincide with stages of ego development. The struggle of the group around the issues of trust/mistrust in the early stages of formation, may often remind group members of their personal struggle with trust/mistrust. There will always be a dialectical tension in the group, between intimacy and isolation; togetherness and separateness; love and hate; idealisation and devaluation. The small group then is a microcosm of similar tensions in the lives of group members. So is the case with identity formation in the cultural system, which is but a reflection of human nature. At the level of emotionality (ways of relating), Bion’s basic assumptions (BaG) group is contrasted with the more visible (manifest) WG (work group) and provides a unique framework for understanding the unconscious tensions that are mobilised when group members come together for any stated purpose. Building on Bion’s popular theory of group dynamics, that is, basic assumptions dependency (BaD), basic assumptions fight/flight (BaF/F), and basic assumptions pairing (BaP), Boyd proposes another framework to understand the emotionality expressions of the personality system. Drawing on the research work of the Chicago group, he discusses six types of emotionality that small group members typically express: 1. Dependency; 2. Counter-dependency; 3. Fight; 4. Flight; 5. Pairing; 6. Counter-pairing.

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Depending upon the effect that each of these six valencies of emotionality has on group transactions, they are classified as negative, positive, or neutral. This provides a more complete picture of the tensions that exist in the group. It is not uncommon to concurrently observe the social and cultural emotionality mobilised at the same time, but with entirely different dynamics. For instance, at the social system level, the group may be struggling with basic assumptions ‘dependency’ (BaD), while the cultural system may tell a different story. At the cultural level, there may be a basic assumptions ‘pairing’ (BaP) being enacted between members. Boyd’s model is a departure from traditional psychodynamic group theory and it is interesting to observe how different systems may be operative at the same time. A trained observer can often make sense of these systems and feed the observations back to group members as needed. Skill and timing are critical factors to be considered, for there is always a judgment involved in whether or not to intervene in the small group process. The timing of an intervention may be a critical factor. The third and final primary task faced by all three systems is the reality-adaptive task that needs to be defined and understood in the context of analytical psychology, particularly with reference to the Gestalt, development, and transactional points of view. The unconscious content of this task is examined at the symbolic level (archetypes). In the initial phase, the small group is considered to be at the ‘Uroboric Stage’ or Great Round and the group members feel they are in a circle that contains and defines. This often catalyses anxiety in some and a feeling of security in others. Once these issues are worked through, the group moves into the next phase of expansion of consciousness, the ‘Great Mother.’ This too is a phase that is characterised by dialectical tensions and paradoxes such as feeding and devouring, nurturing and denying, and caring and abandoning Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


(Boyd, 1991 p.36). Members realise that something is happening within the group that is comforting and painful; exciting and anxiety producing; good and bad; however, the archetypal content and images are, for the most part, unconscious and reveal themselves to the group matrix in mysterious ways. Members who are prepared for the challenges that lie ahead (as the group progresses through successive stages) are often the ones that will experience the most transformation. According to Boyd, groups in which the moderator typically assumes a silent, nondirective role and/or chooses not to identify the images and archetypes of the Great Mother, Great Father, etc., will experience the greatest turmoil, but also significant opportunities for transformation.

Group transformation through the focal person concept Having completed a brief overview of Boyd’s Matrix model, we can now move ahead and discuss the concept of the ‘focal person’. Dirkx (1991) writes, ‘It is a common observation that certain individuals in small, face-toface groups develop considerable influence with the rest of the members. Despite the fact that these individuals are usually not in designated positions of leadership, they become the centre of the group’s attention during critical periods. It is as if the entity of the group has developed a certain relationship with these individuals’ (Dirkx, 1991, p.65). Also referred to as ‘influential member,’ this unique dynamic can be observed in many small groups with strikingly similar undertones. In particular, self-analytic experiential groups with no fixed agenda or directive leadership will invariably see the emergence of one or more focal persons who initially self-authorise and show up in the group to take charge, challenge, or prod members to engage or not engage in certain behaviours. They seem to have the courage to ‘stand in the fire’ and face the consequences of their deviant behaviour. Through their very act of stepping up, asserting, chalPsychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

lenging, or confronting they may be ipso facto leaders of the group, albeit temporarily. Whether this is unconsciously enabled by the group-as-a-whole through a process of collusion with the focal person, or at the behest of that individual, the differences and confusion that ensue can seriously factionalise or polarise the group members. Dirkx (1991) cites an example from his own work, of a small group that has been given few directions and no curriculum by the moderator. The group is having a conversation around when to schedule breaks during the day, with no clear consensus developing. At this time, one of the group members, Barbara shares how she loves being part of such a group that is so unlike her other groups at work. She feels that she could take the liberty of walking out and taking bathroom breaks, as and when she needed them. Suddenly there is silence in the group and the group’s attention is now centred on Barbara. The group members find it rather odd that she should take things in her own hands without consulting the other members. Barbara remains defiant, but courteous, which further raises the group’s anxiety. They insist that the matter of breaks should be decided by consensus, rather than the free will of a member. Barbara does not feel obliged to go along, given that there were no previously agreed upon guidelines communicated by the moderator as the small group began to meet. Tensions begin to run high, with some members in favor of Barbara, while others admonishing her for what they considered to be a transgression. Soon thereafter, the discussion in the group shifts from emotionally laden conversations to intellectualisation, and concludes with no decision taken on the issue of the breaks. From this brief case scenario it is apparent that Barbara emerged as the ‘focal person’ in the small group, as evidenced by the group’s continued attention on her. Some questions that arise have to do with the circumstances or situations under which 65

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focal persons seem to emerge in groups. Is something occurring in the group at that time, consciously or unconsciously, which seems to draw certain individuals to that role? What are these individuals holding onto for the group-as-a-whole? How are the differences resolved, one way or another? From a sociological perspective, role differentiation, distribution of power, and members’ expectations of peers, may all play a role (Dirkx, 1991, p.67). The functional roles of energiser, encourager, evaluatorcritic, and group harmoniser may be kept in mind from an archetypal standpoint. The psychodynamics approach on the other hand, offers a more covert, irrational, and tacit dimension. Examples include basic assumptions leaders (Bion, 1961), role specialists (Dunphy, 1974), emotional leaders (Beck, 1974), and scapegoats (Eagle & Newton, 1981; Toker, 1972). For the purpose of this paper, I will make an attempt to explore the role of focal person from a psychodynamics standpoint. In particular, I am intrigued by the role of scapegoat and how this individual may be the desideratum for group development and expansion of consciousness. I have experienced deep and profound transformation at times when I have knowingly or unknowingly assumed that role in small groups, hence my interest in exploring it further.

When the individual meets the group Colman (1995) challenges Jungian scholars to think beyond the traditional primacy of the ‘individual’ over the ‘group’ (collective), a problem associated with one of Jung’s most fundamental concepts. He reasons that in true individuation there needs to be a withdrawal of projections; a desideratum for the development of consciousness, that requires a ‘person’ who is a member of a group or collective, on whom these projections have been deposited. Colman views this ‘person’ as the scapegoat, who becomes an important link between the individual and group consciousness, for without the scapegoat, the projections would have no repository. 66

He conceptualises the scapegoat as an ‘ancient archetype and scapegoating an ancient activity, so ancient that there are few primitive societies where evidence of the practice has not been found’ (Colman 1995, pp.7–8). The scapegoat for Colman is thus, ‘a critical intersection’ (p.2), ‘juxtaposition’ (p.5) through which both the person and the collective may individuate. The latter is one of the most important highlights of Colman’s thinking. In a sense then, Colman attempts to go beyond the Western obsession of mentally-driven individualism and individualistic thinking, as it relates to personal transformation, and instead brings to the fore, the powerful influence of the ‘collective unconscious’ on individual and group consciousness. As Colman takes us on his personal odyssey, he boldly challenges the dominance of a primarily Western culture. Consciousness, for Colman, is ‘more than individual’ (p.21); it exists in a variety of ‘non-individual consciousness states’ on a continuum from lower to higher, ‘from individual consciousness to ecstatic merger states of group consciousness’ (p.22). According to this model, the ecstatic merger states that occur in group consciousness are an adult version of infant ‘pre-relational consciousness,’ itself originating in four ‘epigenetic ecstatic merger states’ (p.28), starting with the total merger of the fetus with the mother, through a true symbiotic dyad at six to seven months in which boundaries begin to be perceived, onto merger in the family group (p.30), and, finally, the largesse of ‘shifting group consciousness’ (p.31), within and beyond the family confines. Colman writes, ‘Ecstasy literally means standing outside of one’s person. Ecstatic consciousness can be looked at as a state in which one’s personal boundary, one’s “I” is diminished or lost through merger with something or someone else. If ecstasy can be thought of as a merger experience in which the personal identity is diminished or lost, then … the dynamics of ecstasy reflect and invert the developmental dynamics of infant and child consciousness’ (Colman, 1995, p.22). Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


As I juxtapose the provocative ideas of Colman (with regards to the scapegoat) with the ‘focal person’ construct developed by Dirkx, it seems to make sense that the focal person (scapegoat) should emerge in the small group as it goes through different stages of development, consequently shifting group consciousness. Before we get into a discussion about the archetypal ‘state of the group’ that most attracts a focal person, it is important to understand the dynamics of the scapegoat. Whilst the small group literature does not attribute the quality of charisma to the scapegoat, it is usually an influential person who comes to assume that role in groups. Among the various forms of ‘symbolic influential members’ (Dirkx, 1991), such as prophet (Brueggemann, 1978), charismatic individual (Weber, 1946), central person (Redl, 1942), covert role (Gemmill & Straus, 1988), and hero (Hartman & Gibbard, 1974) it is the scapegoat that stands apart from everyone else (Dunphy, 1974). As a central person, the scapegoat become the carrier of the group’s anxieties and emotionality, so that the group members can unconsciously satisfy and/or get rid of undesirable drives and impulses, thereby avoiding feelings of guilt and shame (Redl, 1942). Hartman and Gibbard (1974) write, ‘The scapegoat symbolises the social system’s reaction to distress and an attempt to locate or identify the sources of distress. The perceived source of the distress is experienced as responsible for producing anxiety in the group or is viewed as abandoning, depressing, or potentially destroying the social system. The social system then seeks to psychologically extrude the source of distress from the group. The source of distress is unconsciously perceived as a “bad object” to be somehow eliminated so that the group ideal in which the scapegoat resides, may be replaced by a “good object”.’ In my previous work, I discussed in some detail the dynamics surrounding the scapegoat and how these forces are intensified when a small group is in the throes of basic assumptions (dependency, fight/flight, and pairing). Ironically, the scapegoat seems to Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

emerge at moments when the group is grappling with psychotic anxieties; which is also to suggest that periods of distress may be an outcome of the group’s struggle with holding archetypal paradoxes; an anxiety that is defended against by enlisting the support of a carrier. It is typical for small group members at this stage, to feel polarised and unconsciously see the scapegoat as a convenient repository for their projections. The scapegoat’s response to these projections is that of a ‘social critic’ with an urgent calling that challenges the status-quo (present way of seeing things), prodding the group to look for alternate strategies. The groups’ refusal to do so, either as an act of defiance or denial, further intensifies the paradox and keeps members deadlocked. It is as though the scapegoat has suddenly become the center of their universe. Paradoxically, for the group, projecting onto the scapegoat is also a means of ridding themselves of the anxieties and moving through subsequent stages of group development. The scapegoat therefore becomes a desideratum for the group’s progress. As consciousness develops within the group, it seems to release its hold on and obsession of the scapegoat. Ironically, the scapegoat’s defensive function in the group also paves the way for transformation. This is a key concept in the idea of the focal person. What starts as a singular voice of transformation led by the focal person, must inevitably take hold in the group-as-a-whole. The focal person is a symbolic representative of the fundamentally archetypal nature of the paradox that exists in the group. Christ (1989) describes symbols as unconscious content, expressing much more than can be put into mere words. While the unconscious content is largely out of awareness and inaccessible, the behaviour, interactions, emotions, and feelings present in the group are a manifestation of what is otherwise hidden. Symbolic representations in the group may also involve archetypal images of the Good Mother and Good Father. What 67

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may otherwise seem to be a rather insignificant, even miniscule issue in a small group, such as deciding when to schedule breaks, may assume the form of what Boyd and associates refer to as an ‘archetypal paradox’ or state of conflicting and contradictory dialectic tension in a group, that is struggling to make sense and find meaning in their social and cultural milieu.

The archetypal paradox The idea of the archetypal paradox is based on the theoretical framework of Neumann (1954) in analytical psychology. Smith and Berg (1987) suggest that the ‘paradoxical perspective is concerned with the observation that groups are pervaded by a wide range of emotions, thoughts, and actions that their members experience as contradictory, and that the attempts to unravel these contradictory forces create a circular process that is paralysing to groups.’ Neumann talks about the struggle with contradictory and opposing ideas as ‘archetypal’ in nature and manifests as universal mythological motifs or symbols which mark the gradual stage-like emergence of consciousness within the social group (Neumann, 1954). Birth of the Hero, Great Mother, Separation of World Parents, Slaying of the Mother and Father, are all mythological motifs according to Neumann and represent the paradoxical struggle which gives rise to the term ‘archetypal paradox,’ the fundamental, primordial, and contradictory forces that groups face as they struggle for increasing consciousness. The paradox is not something that the group is able to resolve on its own, despite its struggle to find meaning; therefore, a focal person often emerges during this stage and helps crystallise and bring clarity to the system’s own feelings toward the archetype. As an example, a group working in a dominant culture of patriarchy may be unconsciously struggling to give expression to its feminine side, as symbolised by the Great Mother. The members are not consciously aware of this struggle, which may surface for 68

them in the person of the scapegoat (in this case a man) with a dominant feminine trait (anima). At first, the group members suppress the softness, compassion, and touchy-feely demeanor of the scapegoat. In the act of suppression, they may be denying their own feminine side and the relationship that they hold with their wives and mothers. The more the group members try to focus their attention away from the archetype of the Great Mother, the greater the dialectical tension that exists in the system between the mother and the father. Until the group is able to internalise the feeling that the father too can have a good and bad side, and possibly find a way to hold the patriarchy and matriarchy together, the scapegoat will continue to play a pivotal role in the group’s struggle for identity. As a result of the scapegoat’s behaviour, the members are more able to mobilise their efforts in the direction of the archetypal paradox. Without the focal person present, the group can potentially remain directionless and undifferentiated. Viewed through the psychodynamic lens of collective ‘projective identification’ the focal person (scapegoat) can also be seen as a repository for the system’s collective projections; feelings, emotions, and affect that are painful to hold together and therefore unconsciously stuffed into the scapegoat, who seems to have a hook on which the group members can hang their collective projections. In doing so, the group is more able to identify with and talk about their feelings. In our situation, the group might stuff the denied feelings of motherhood into the scapegoat who already has a valency for matriarchy and is able to contain those feelings for the group, but not without a great deal of virulent anxiety, emotionality, and possibly even conflict. If the scapegoat succumbs under this pressure, the group may seriously regress and even implode. The focal person must therefore have a certain degree of congruency between her own emotional needs and those felt, but denied by the group. Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015


In summary then, the focal person must have a propensity for representing the unconscious concerns of the social and cultural systems, the ability to critique/reframe the present order, and add a powerful voice for change and transformation. I want to briefly dedicate the final segment of this paper to three freestanding, but not necessarily unrelated theoretical constructs that are a gift to us from the field of psychodynamics. These are particularly germane to a deeper understanding of the paradoxes and tensions that exist in groups, especially those that are self-analytic in nature, with no well-defined structure or primary task other than for members to examine their own processes.

The dependent group and hatred of learning by experience Bion (1961) writes, ‘The problem of a leader seems to be how to mobilise emotions associated with the basic assumptions without endangering the sophisticated structure that appears to secure to the individual his freedom to be an individual while remaining a member of the group.’ Dependency groups often find themselves in the midst of an archetypal paradox and therefore often give rise to a focal person, who may or may not be the group moderator. The discomfort of being in such a group, Bion (1961) writes, ‘Is that they arise precisely from the nature of group itself, and this point should always be demonstrated.’ Such groups are gripped by a sense of fear and paranoia (persecutory anxiety) and the group structures itself such that it can avoid an emotional experience peculiar to basic assumptions pairing and flight/flight. Members abdicate their personal authority and responsibility, with a feeling that the group leader will take care of their needs. Working on your ‘self’ involves a form of learning which a dependency group seems to avoid. The group members seem to have a tendency to focus their attention away from feelings and emotions to intellectualising and theorising (a defense mechanism).


The focal member (scapegoat) emerges in such groups to remind members of their own need for autonomy. This may take the form of challenging an autocratic and highly directive leader to allow space in the group for members to do their work. Members resent the scapegoat because the individual calls attention to something that they find unpleasant. It takes them out of their comfort zones. The leader may also secretly resent the focal person because she may not be unconsciously ready or willing to give up control to that person.

Formation of social defenses in groups and institutions Gibbard (1978) discuss how groups and institutions are used by the their members to reinforce individual mechanisms of defense against anxiety, and in particular against recurrence of the early paranoid and depressive anxieties first described by Klein. In highly bureaucratic social systems, including small groups, the archetypal paradox develops as a result of the enormous tension between the paranoid schizoid and depressive states (see Klein). The balance thus struck as a result of dialectical tension, contributes to the formation of ‘social defenses.’ It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into an in-depth exploration of social defenses; however, I introduce the concept here to further explicate how groups unconsciously collude to defend against the anxiety that may stem from the tension between the gratification and frustration of libidinal impulses. When these impulses do not find expression, they are sublimated to other pursuits.

The Anti-Group: Destructive forces and their creative potential It is to the credit of Nitsun (1996) for developing the construct pertaining to the presence of destructive forces in groups and how their creative potential may be deployed and harnessed. In groups undergoing a lot of turmoil for instance, more active intervention by the group conductor is generally 69

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called for. The conflict and anxiety in such groups is thought of as something that needs to be eliminated or fixed. This can be a technical error on the part of a moderator. An astute moderator will choose not to intervene prematurely because she knows that the expression of hostility is perhaps one of the most important vehicles in groups that are undergoing change and transformation. It is to be seen as hope rather than despair, an opportunity for venting out anger and frustration, which are often followed, by forgiveness and reparation. The paradox faced by the group moderator is to allow members to fight and annihilate each other or use her authority to intervene and do damage control. The members too face a paradox of their own. Should they engage in the fight, withdraw from it or take a neutral position? The ‘life and death instincts’ are very often mobilised in such groups and conjure up archetypal images of the gladiator, executioner, saviour, messiah, and peacemaker. The hostility and aggression in the group, if left unmanaged, can disintegrate the group. On the other hand, if managed too quickly, it can destroy any opportunities for closeness and intimacy to develop. After all, aggression and hostility do serve a defensive function, a defense against the anxiety of exposure and intimacy with peers. Experienced group moderators know the value of ‘containment’. To the extent that they are able to contain the anxieties that are projected onto them by members, the group is able to work with its own.

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I would like to close here by stating that self-analytic groups can be important vehicles for individual and group transformation if one has the capacity to hold and work with differences without prematurely succumbing to the need for resolution. The work is by no means easy and should not be undertaken by someone who is not aware of her own countertransference. There are plenty of other settings more conducive to our temperament and disposition that can provide equally worthwhile opportunities for learning and transformation. Dr Anil Behal Dr Behal holds a PhD in Human and Organisational Development and a Master’s degree in Human and Organisational Systems from the Fielding Graduate University, California, USA. His areas of expertise include applied communication theory, phenomenology, and the psychodynamics of organisations. He is the managing director and founder of ORGDYNE Training and Consulting, LLC (http://www.orgdyne.com).

Correspondence Email: [email protected]



References Beck, A.P. (1974). Phases in the development of structure in therapy and encounter groups. In D.A. Wexler & L.N. Rice (Eds.), Innovations in client-centred therapy. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in groups. New York: Routledge. Boyd, R.D. (1991). Personal transformations in small groups. New York: Routledge. Brueggemann, W. (1978). The prophetic imagination. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press Christ, C.P. (1989). Symbols of goddess and god in feminist theology. In C. Colson (Ed.), The book of goddess past and present: An introduction to her religion. New York: Crossroad. Colman, A.D. (1995). Up from scapegoating: Awakening consciousness in groups. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications. Dirkx, J.M. (1987). The self-analytical group and the great mother. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dirkx, J.M. (1991). Understanding group transformation through the focal person concept. In R. Boyd (Ed.). Personal transformations in small groups. New York: Routledge Dunphy, D.C. (1974). Phases, roles, and myths in selfanalytic groups. In G.S. Gibbard (Ed.), Analysis of groups. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Eagle, J. & Newton, P.M. (1981). Scapegoating in small groups: An organisational approach, Human Relations, 34, 283–301.


Erickson, E.H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Gemmill, G. & Kraus, G. (1988). Dynamics of covert role analysis: Small groups. Small Group Behavior, 19, 299–311. Gibbard, G.S. (1978). Social systems as a defence against persecutory and depressive anxiety. In G. Gibbard, J. Hartman & R. Mann (Eds.), Analysis of groups. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hartman, J. & Gibbard, G. (1974). Anxiety, boundary evolution, and social change. In G. Gibbard, J. Hartman & R. Mann (Eds.), Analysis of groups. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Neumann, E. (1954). The origins and history of consciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nitsun, M. (1996). The anti-group. New York: Routledge. Redl, F. (1942). Group emotion and leadership. Psychiatry, 5, 573–596 Smith, K.K. & Berg, D.N. (1987). Paradoxes of group life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Toker, E. (1972). The scapegoat as an essential group phenomenon, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 22, 320–331. Weber, M. (1946). The sociology of charismatic authority. In H.H. Gerth & C.W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Citations and abstracts from other journals Terry Birchmore Ahonen, H. & Mongillo Desideri, A. (2014). Heroines’ journey – emerging story by refugee women during group analytic music therapy. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 14(1), 1504–1611. There has been some evidence of the benefits of participating in group analytic music therapy with traumatised people. This pilot clinical project investigates the impact of a combination of narrative therapy and group analytic music therapy on refugee/ newcomer women in Canada. An ongoing therapy group met for a period of eight sessions, to share stories and feelings of past experiences and of resettlement. The focus of this group was emotional expression (verbal and musical). Musical listening, improvisation, art, writing, clay-work, and relaxation techniques were used. Several consistent themes re-emerged, including feelings around loneliness, fear guilt, and loss. The analysis of the therapy process showed many commonalities among these women and the process they were going through to deal with their feelings. Ashuach, S. (2012). Am I my brother’s keeper? The analytic group as a space for re-enacting and treating sibling trauma. Group Analysis, 45(2), 155–167. The thesis of this article, is that the analytic group is a place for a reliving and re-enactment of sibling relations. Psychoanalytic and group analytic writings about the issue of siblings will be surveyed. Juliet Mitchell’s theory of ‘sibling trauma’ and how it is reflected in the group analytic group will be briefly presented. It will be argued that the group is a place in which ‘sibling trauma’ is re-enacted and can effectively be treated. My thesis will be supported with clinical examples.

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Balsam, R.H. (2013). Sibling interaction. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 67, 35–36. Sibling interactions traditionally were conceived psychoanalytically in ‘vertical’ and parentified oedipal terms and overlooked in their own right, for complicated reasons. Important work has been done to right this, from the 1980s and onward, with conferences and writings. Juliet Mitchell’s 2000 and, in particular, her 2003 books, for example, have brought ‘lateral’ sibling relations forcefully to the forefront of insights, especially about sex and violence, with the added interdisciplinary impact of illuminating upheaval in global community interactions as well as having implications for clinicians. A clinical example from the analysis of an adult woman with a 10 years younger sister will show here how we need both concepts to help us understand complex individual psychic life. The newer ‘lateral’ sibling emphasis, including Mitchell’s ‘Law of the Mother’ and ‘seriality’, can be used to inform the older ‘vertical’ take, to enrich the full dimensions of intersubjective oedipal and preoedipal reciprocities that have been foundational in shaping that particular analysand’s inner landscape. Some technical recommendations for heightening sensitivity to the import of these dynamics will be offered along the way here, by invoking Hans Loewald’s useful metaphor of the analytic situation as theatre. Dieckmann, H (1997). Fairy-tales in psychotherapy. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 42(2), 253–268. Fairy-tales, like mythologies, can be found all over the world containing the same motif and chains of motifs. In this paper I have presented some theories on the occurrence of this archetypal phenomenon ranging Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 © The British Psychological Society

Citations and abstracts from other journals

from the old migration theory to Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. I have then tried to show how fairy-tale-motifs can appear in various ways in analytical therapy, often in hidden forms. We find them in patients’ dreams as well as in their fantasies and associations. If the therapist is open to them they will also appear in his or her amplifications. He or she might then take note of the fairy-tale or point it out to the patient; in the latter case it might provide better access to the patient’s problems and complexes as fairy-tales have an emotional completeness because of their pictorial character. Finally I have described the favourite fairy-tale of one of my patients and related it to his symptoms, his central complex and his personal ways of experiencing and behaving. This survey of how fairy-tales can be used in therapy with children and with adults far from exhaustive. Edward, J. (2013). Sibling discord: A force for growth and conflict. Clinical Social Work Journal, 41(1), 77–83. Drawing on research findings and clinical experience, this paper considers the contributions that sibling envy, jealousy, and rivalry can make to healthy development as well as the way in which sibling discord may compromise development and in some cases lead to pathology. An account of the treatment of a depressed and anxious woman, Marcia, whose pain and rage at being displaced by her four years younger brother contributed to her pathology, is offered. Through attention to sibling transferences, countertransferences, and the enactments that occurred during the treatment, the paper demonstrates how an individual may misperceive and misrespond to her children as well as her therapist as if they were a sibling rival or the mother who they experienced as rejecting them in favour of a brother or sister. The paper attests to the importance of recognising siblings as persons in their own right who hold an important place in each other’s minds, rather than as simply displacement objects Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

for parents, as they were often regarded in the past. Freeman, M. (2007). Psychoanalysis, narrative psychology, and the meaning of ‘science’. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 27(5), 583–601. Drawing especially on an important essay by Martin Heidegger, entitled ‘Science and Reflection’ (1977), this article argues that case reports can, and should, be written for scientific use. This issue was brought to the fore early on in Freud’s career, upon his realisation that his own case studies read like short stories and that they lacked ‘the serious stamp of science.’ Consoled by the fact that ‘the nature of the subject’ was responsible for this and that more traditional scientific procedures ‘[led] nowhere,’ he would continue with such writing and, through it, continue to fashion and refashion psychoanalytic theory. Freud, therefore, arrived at something of a paradox: even though by traditional standards-including, on some level, his own-his case studies seemed questionable in regard to their scientific utility, it was precisely these studies that yielded the desired insight. Knowingly or not, Freud abided by what is, arguably, the first and most fundamental responsibility of the scientific enterprise: fidelity to the phenomena. Given the clear and obvious value of case reports, it follows that the meaning of ‘science,’ as customarily conceived, is problematically restrictive and that it ought to be reconceived in such a way as to include, rather than exclude, the kinds of literary pursuits that psychoanalysts and narrative psychologists more generally have found to be so central to their efforts to understand and explain the movement of human lives. Freud, A. & Dann, S. (1951). An experiment in group upbringing. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 6, 127–168. The behaviour of the six children in this study confounded all expectations; rescued from the Tereszin concentration camp by the Russians and sent to England with other 73

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rescued children, they were destined to be fostered in the US but funding was provided from the US for a year’s rehabilitation in the UK. Accommodation in England was loaned to the project and the staff were drawn from the Hampstead Nursery run by Anna Freud and the English reception camp to which the children had been sent. Thanks to the dedication of the staff and the careful recording of the children’s behaviour, we have a unique account of development in the absence of adult attachment and recovery from severe deprivation. Giannini, A.J. (2001). Use of fiction in therapy. Psychiatric Times, July, 2001. Article available online at this address: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/ use-fiction-therapy Jennings, L. et al. (2003). Multiple factors in the development of the expert counsellor and therapist. Journal of Career Development, 30(1), 59–72. Expertise in counselling and therapy is both desirable and elusive. Increasing our knowledge about expertise in counseling and therapy enhances understanding of the role it plays in our profession. This understanding has the potential to improve the training of counsellors and therapists. Yet expertise in counseling and therapy appears to be a multifaceted and dynamic concept needing further definition and description. In this article, we outline challenges faced trying to describe expertise in counseling and therapy and present research-based factors that contribute to developing expertise in counselling and therapy. Important factors include: experience, personal characteristics of the counsellor and therapist, cultural competence, and comfort with ambiguity. Nauta, R. (2009). Cain and Abel: Violence, shame and jealousy. Pastoral Psychology, 58(1), 65–71. In discussing the murder of Abel by his brother Cain the dynamics of shame and 74

guilt are explored. An analysis of the psychological drama, more than the brutal fact itself, may help to understand the consequences of negation and love for the contemporary occurrences of family violence. In exploring the separate positions of Cain and Abel the differential effects and consequences of jealousy and envy are analysed as well. Richert, A.J. (2006). Narrative psychology and psychotherapy integration. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 16(1), 84–110. Bruner (1986) and Sarbin (1986) have argued that people make sense of living by actively constructing stories containing characters moving toward goals through time. Both content and structure in these narratives are understood as promoting either flexible, adaptive functioning or psychological distress. Theories of psychotherapy can also be seen as stories about human function and dysfunction that incorporate many of the same ideas about reality, human nature and change that are found in clients’ personal narratives. This narrative perspective, then, suggests that the therapeutic alliance might be improved and an integrative use of different theories might be made by selecting therapeutic approaches and interventions based on the degree of similarity between the nature of the client’s life story and the story of human functioning incorporated in the theory. A classification of theories, examples of classification of client stories and some issues of implementation of this integrative proposal are discussed. Rogers, R. (2012). Storied selves: A critical discourse analysis of young children’s literate identifications. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 12(3), 259–292. A wealth of research demonstrates that as young children acquire literacy they also approximate literate roles and relationships. Such literate identifications, or storied selves, are complex, sometimes contradictory and under construction for young Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

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people. Less research has focused on how young children’s storied selves are discursively constituted across domains of practice. Given this gap in the literature, we ask: How do young children author themselves as literate in the domains of school and home? What social languages, cultural models, discourses, relationships and situated identities do they enact? To answer these questions, we drew on interviews conducted with first and second grade students who participated in a literacy clinic at an urban school site. The children were asked to report on their literacy lives in different domains of practice. Using the tools of critical discourse analysis, we examined the discursive contours of children’s literate identities in different domains. Through cross-case analyses and ‘telling cases’, our findings suggest that young children call on a hybrid mix of discourse patterns to author themselves as literate beings. The students remain positive and enthusiastic about reading and themselves as readers, despite needing additional literacy support. However, the existence of alignment and conflict between the discourses of the home and school domains creates reasons for attending to students’ literate identities in closer detail. Rønnestad, M.H. & Skovholt, T.M. (2003). The journey of the counsellor and therapist: Research findings and perspectives on professional development. Journal of Career Development, 30, 5–44. This article summarises a reformulation of the main findings and perspectives from a cross-sectional and longitudinal qualitative study of the development of 100 counsellors and therapists. The results are presented as a phase model and as a formulation of 14 themes of counsellor/therapist development. The following six phases are described: The phases of the lay helper, the beginning student, the advanced student, the novice professional, the experienced professional, and the senior professional. The themes describe central processes of counsellor/ Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

therapist development. The themes are addressing different issues such as shifts in attentional focus and emotional functioning, the importance of continuous reflection for professional growth, and a lifelong personal/profession integration process. Sources of influence for professional functioning and development are described. The results show consistently that interpersonal experiences in the personal life domain (early family life and adult personal life) and the professional life domain (interacting with clients, professional elders, and peers) are significant sources of influence for professional development. Rustin, M. (2009). Taking account of siblings – a view from child psychotherapy 1. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 33(1), 21–35. This paper argues that siblinghood has had an important place in child psychotherapy thinking for many decades. Both psychoanalytic observation of young children and clinical experience have contributed to this. It discusses some reasons for the renewed interest in siblings in the wider psychoanalytic field and emphasises the existential threat to identity posed by the birth of a new baby to the displaced child in the family. The role of siblings as friends as well as rivals is explored and a link is proposed between the development of symbolic thinking and the capacity to give space to siblings in the inner world. Segun, O.D. (2013). The interface of literature and psychotherapy. IFE Psychologia, 21(3), 121–127. The connection between literature and psychotherapy has received wide critical attention in the past but the eclectic nature of their interdependence and the need for a psychotherapist to acquire literary skill has not been adequately established. This study establishes the need to include literature in the training of a psychotherapist by delving into an exploration of the multifarious influence of literature on psychotherapy and vice versa. This is in order to project the healing 75

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virtues of literary creativity and its significant impact on the psychological practices of the psychotherapist. Sociological approach is used to explore the relationship between the psychotherapist and his patient in this study. It provides a framework for the explanation of the operation of human mind and how literature and psychotherapy have handled its manifestations. An eclectic analysis is deployed to explore and establish the usefulness of literature to psychotherapy. This study is a comment on the humanity of psychotherapy as a bi-dimensional practice that must be unified in order to achieve effectiveness and efficiency. The interface of literature and psychotherapy projects a symbiotic interdependence. Literature aids the performance of psychotherapy in diverse ways and psychotherapy provides the creative artist with material and inspiration for the depiction of the state of mental health care. Psychotherapy professionals have moved from the status of quacks to heroes but the true test of their education in contemporary time as all times will be their ability to provide humane care. The literaiy intervention in psychotherapy cannot be relegated; it is the centrepiece for the measurement of the effectiveness of the profession. We have been able to explore the eclectic interdependence of literature and psychotherapy. A consciousness of the relevance of these two fields to each other will help future scholarly endeavour and psychiatric practices, whether formally or informally.

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Wilke, G. (1998). Oedipal and sibling dynamics in organisations. Group Analysis, 31(3), 269–281. In a context of rapid change, outbreaks of sibling rivalry in organisations act as a defence against the inability to mourn and feel remorse. When changes are imposed on work-teams, sibling preoccupations surface to prevent the working through of the breakdown of relations between the institutional parents and their dependants. Siblings also adopt envy-preventing strategies, engaging in collective self-idealisation by forming sisterhoods or brotherhoods to protect themselves from disillusionment and individuation. Each succeeding generation has to face the fact that a primus inter pares will have to be chosen to inherit the mantle of power from the parental generation and restore the world to its ‘normal’ state of inequality. In the context of recent structural changes in organisations the new managers have acted like borderline parents and fostered sibling rivalry. This dynamic has functioned to deny the guilt and the fear of retaliation associated with fratricide and matricide committed during the ‘re-engineering’ process, when the youngsters sent their parents into early retirement. I want to explore the central importance of authority, disillusionment and mourning and show that the outbreak and suppression of sibling rivalry is connected with the problem of transition and succession in organisations.


Books available for review Terry Birchmore The titles listed below are currently available for reviewing. There is no fee for carrying out a review, but the reviewer may retain the book. A Guide to Treatments That Work Peter E. Nathan & Jack M. Gorman (Eds.) Oxford University Press, 2015. Phenomenology in Action in Psychotherapy Ian Rory Owen Springer, 2015. Psychotherapy: A Very Short Introduction. Tom Burns Oxford University Press, 2015. Beyond the Anti-Group: Survival and transformation Morris Nitsun Routledge, 2015. Please contact Terry Birchmore ([email protected]) if you would like to review any of these books.


Guidelines for book reviews 1. Please include, at the beginning of the review, in plain text: The title, author, city of publication, publisher, year of publication, number of pages, price, ISBN. 2. You may like to start the review with a brief overall description of the book. 3. You may like to consider: l An introduction to the subject matter. l A discussion of contents. l The strengths and weaknesses of the book. l Comments on author's style and presentation. l Whether the author's aims have been met. l Errors (typographical or other) and usefulness of index. l Is it worth purchasing or recommending to a library?

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Current Committee Membership, 2015 Chair (Co-opted): Treasurer: Secretary: (Co-opted) Editor of Psychotherapy Section Review:

Ho Law Neringa Kisler Zara Rahemtulla Terry Birchmore

Ordinary Members (Co-opted):

Steven Heigham Peter Kelly Erica Brostoff Abbie Darlington

Student Representative (PsyPAG):

Professional biographies of Committee Members Dr Ho Law BSc (Hons, Worcester College, 1985), BA (Hons, Open, 1990) PhD (Leicester University, 2000) Post Grad. Cert. (Intercultural therapy, Goldsmith, 2004), Post Grad. Cert. (Learning & Teaching in Higher Education, UEL, 2010). C. Psychol (1991–). C.Occ.Psy (1999–). Ho Law has been actively engaged in the working of the BPS via various Member Network Committees for more than 15 years – some highlights include being the vice chair of the Standing Committee of Promotion of Equal Opportunity in 2001; founding member and Chair (2010) of the Special Group in Coaching Psychology; founder Committee member and treasurer of the Community Psychology Section. For the Psychotherapy Section, Ho was the Section’s Treasurer in 2007 for five years before he became the Chair of the Section in 2014 with aspirations to make psychotherapy more relevant in meeting the challenges we face within the society and the wider community. Ho is also a member of the Transpersonal Psychology Section; and a member of Divisions of Occupational Psychology, Counselling Psychology and Sport & Exercise Psychology (founder member). Ho is a Registered Psychologist, Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Chartered Scientist, and an Associate Fellow of the Society. He has more than 25 years’ experience in private practices and central government – was one of the first equality advisors to the Assistant Permanent Under Secretary of State in the Home Office. Currently, Ho is a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London and the Director of Empowerment Psychology (Empsy Ltd). Ho’s interest in psychotherapy is rooted in his longstanding engagement in the business of empowerment in the areas of implementing the government diversity agenda, the community arts and the professional practice in personal development and inter-cultural therapy. He received numerous outstanding achievement awards including: Local Promoters for Cultural Diversity Project (2003); Positive Image (2004); the first Student Led Teaching Award – Best Supervisor (UEL 2013); and was a nominee for the Division of Occupational Psychology’s Academic Contribution to Practice Award in 2014.

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Current Committee Membership, 2015 Neringa Kisler An Integrated Psychotherapist with experience of working with adult individuals and couples, working in an Independent Practice in the UK. Working with people with variety of issues, however her main interests are in human development, relationships/attachments, eating disorders and addictions. Neringa has achieved a BSc in Human Psychology and holds an Advanced Diploma in Integrated Counselling and Psychotherapy as well as clinical hypnotherapy. Neringa is a graduate member of the BPS since 2007, and an active committee member of the BPS Psychotherapy Section since 2013. Zara Rahemtulla Currently in my second year of the Clinical Psychology Doctorate at the University of Essex. My previous clinical experience has mostly revolved around working with vulnerable young people and their families, within a drug and alcohol setting. I have completed a Diploma in Systemic Family Therapy and I still have interests in this area, as my DClinPsy Thesis will be investigating childhood sibling bullying and its’ potential effects on adult identity development. I have more recently been interested in more transpersonal psychology, compassion focussed therapy and mindfulness practise. In more general terms, I am very interested in the function of bodily experiences and accessing bodily memories within psychotherapy to help with processing certain types of distress. Terry Birchmore I worked in the NHS as a Clinical Psychologist for 35 years before I retired at the end of 2013. I qualified as a Group Analyst in the mid-1990s. I currently teach on the Psychoanalytic Observational Studies Course in Newcastle and I teach ethics, professional development and group therapy on the Teeside Clinical Psychology Training Course. I also conduct a weekly experiential group on the Institute of Group Analysis Foundation Course in Sunderland. I edited Group Analytic Contexts for the Group Analytic Society, International, for eight years before I retired from that position in December 2014. I have been a member of the Psychotherapy Section since 1985. Steve Heigham Bed; Bsc (Hons) Psychology; Msc Evolutionary Psychology; Postgrad adv Dip Integrative Psychotherapy. Originally I trained as a teacher, and spent 20 years in Special schools and special needs departments in mainstream school, working a lot with disturbed teenagers and students with learning difficulties. This background in applied psychology led me to develop a greater interest in the subject which I then went on to study with the Open University, where my interest in cognitive and evolutionary psychology was first sparked. I went on to teach various different aspects of psychology in further education, and trained in Integrative psychotherapy at the Iron Mill Institute. As part of this training I became a volunteer counsellor at Help counselling which I still maintain, as it gives a good balance to my working life, alongside teaching and private practice. Having been involved in partnership work with local government some years ago, I became interested in diagnosis and classification of mental health disorders, and how they are treated in the public domain. I have continued this interest, particularly in relating this to cross cultural psychology, and I now teach these topics alonside my role as first year tutor on the foundation degree course at Weston College.


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Current Committee Membership, 2015

Most recently I have had the opportunity to follow up my passion and studied a taught Master’s course in Evolutionary Psychology at Brunel university, finishing with a dissertation investigating the relationship between empathy and self-awareness, which is still ongoing. I am steadily integrating this into my therapeutic work, and into my teaching and freelance training work.

Peter Kelly I joined the BPS in the early 1980s, and I am currently an Associate Fellow (in addition to enjoying Chartered status both as a Psychologist and a Scientist). I am a member of the Division of Educational and Child Psychology, the Psychotherapy Section, the Group for Independent Psychologists, and I am a BPS Registered Applied Psychology Practice Supervisor. I worked for many years as a Developmental and Educational Psychologist based in Child Guidance Clinics/Child and Family Consultation Services, and in various Local Authority offices in East Anglia, although I am currently employed in private practice based in south London. Erica Brostoff, MSc Erica worked for a period on a fixed term contract at Guy’s Hospital, Psychiatric Department. She was employed as a psychologist and researcher as assistant to Consultant Psychotherapist, Dr Tony Ryle. The project tracked patients who were in a pilot trial of 16 and eight sessions of Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Subsequently she was Research Associate and first author of an EC study of telemedicine, involving video consultations between psychiatrists and patients at separate venues within the Guy’s and Lewisham hospital group. She belonged to the Society for Psychotherapy Research and proposed an annual prize for publishable articles on ethics, which was liked but not actioned at that time. This was before the importance of attachment was understood, and she had become aware of some marginally ethical practices in private psychotherapy practice. She previously worked in three leading advertising agencies as researcher concerned with interpreting and conducting studies based on qualitative interviewing. Currently she is registered for an MPhil at the University of Greenwich Psychology and Counselling Department on ‘The Psychology of Premonitions’. This combines psychotherapy, psychoanalytic and psychological concepts, using qualitative interviews. She has given a paper on this topic to an Imagery Conference hosted by the BPS some years ago and to a recent postgraduate seminar at the London and Home Counties Section, in the BPS London office. She believes that working with both psychiatrists and psychotherapists as both colleague and client, has given her a fairly wide perspective on issues important to both clients and therapists. Abbie Darlington Bsc Psychology, Bangor University, Master’s student of Foundations of Clinical Psychology. Abbie has been a BPS student member since October 2010, completing a BPS accredited undergraduate degree at Bangor University. Since becoming a postgraduate student at Bangor, Abbie has become involved with PsyPAG as the Psychotherapy section representative. Abbie is currently undertaking a Master’s degree in the Foundations of Clinical Psychology at Bangor University. Research to date includes progressive relaxation training in treatment of anxiety, and the effects of alcohol attentional bias on memory recall in social drinkers.

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Research. Digested.

The British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest Blog, email, Twitter and Facebook

www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog ‘Easy to access and free, and a mine of useful information for my work: what more could I want? I only wish I’d found this years ago!’ Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry ‘The selection of papers suits my eclectic mind perfectly, and the quality and clarity of the synopses is uniformly excellent.’ Professor Guy Claxton, University of Bristol

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Letter from the Editor Terry Birchmore Letter from the Chair Ho Law Looking ahead at future plans for CPD Steve Heigham Obituary: David Smail: Exponent of a social-materialist psychology and clinical psychology's Voltaire The Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle Changing the Self: The affective plot in literary narratives David Smail The fictional nature of introspection Simon King-Spooner Siblings: An exploration Short reviews of a Psychotherapy Section Workshop Terry Birchmore, Erica Brostoff, Zara Rahemtulla & Steve Heigham Listen to the Group! Group music therapy – a part of the music therapy students’ training at Aalborg University Charlotte Lindvang Negative capability: A phenomenological study of lived experiences at the edge of certitude and incertitude Anil Behal The language of resistance in a counselling group: Dynamics of authority and power Phey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong, Vilma D’Rozario & Rhodas Myra Bacsal Individual transformations in groups: The role of focal person in periods of archetypal paradoxes Anil Behal Citations and abstracts from other journals Terry Birchmore Books available for review Terry Birchmore Current Committee Membership, 2015

St Andrews House, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester LE1 7DR, UK Tel 0116 254 9568 Fax 0116 227 1314 E-mail [email protected] www.bps.org.uk © The British Psychological Society 2015 Incorporated by Royal Charter Registered Charity No 229642