Abstract
In this article I am describing a group analytic supervision training in a post-war society that turned out to be a challenge on a personal, theoretical and procedural level. Described is not only the political context of the training, but also difficulties and conflicts that arose in the training group, mirroring unconscious cultural defences and anxieties. Focusing on the group’s disturbing transgression of boundaries it was finally possible to understand these acts as manifestations of a hidden psychosocial trauma in the group. On the basis of this slowly growing process of understanding, the group managed to open up for new theoretical perspectives and unknown methodological approaches. Participants of the training finally dared to apply their newly acquired knowledge and capacities as supervisors in one of the most sensitive political institutions of the country, and as the evaluation showed, did so most successfully.
Introduction
As a keynote speaker of the 15th symposium of Group Analysis in London (2011), I had the chance to share some of my Guatemalan experiences with colleagues from around the world demonstrating the potential of group analysis as a powerful tool of transformation for individuals, groups and organizations. Additionally, I wanted to show how group analysis can be applied successfully in non-clinical fields of work and in a post-conflict society that still suffered in the aftermath of a traumatizing civil war.
The following article is based on my keynote of 2011 and touches some of the same issues discussed in a paper published in Group Analysis in 2009: Farewell to a Dead Horse: Group-Analytic Supervision Training in Guatemala (2009). Whereas I was concerned in 2009 with the description and the analysis of early stages of the training, I am now able to look at the whole process of the training and include a first evaluation of the supervisory performance of the trainees 1 . Therefore perspectives have changed, as well as understanding and comprehension as well.
The supervision training I am going to talk about was part of a German government effort to support a difficult process of peace and reconciliation in Guatemala. Working as a consultant for a German government agency, I had not the faintest idea what it would mean to get involved in a post-war society and in a failing process of peace and reconciliation. But I never had any doubts that group analysis could be of great benefit in this endeavour to reconstruct a society, whose social tissue had been severely damaged. The only question was how to introduce and how to apply group analysis in a society that suffered in the aftermath ‘of one of the most brutal conflicts in the hemisphere’ (Wilkinson, 2004 p. 4).
My belief that group analysis could help in Guatemala was not only the result of mere idealization. It was also the result of years of group analytic engagement in social, educational, political and organizational fields of work. These experiences would be helpful in Guatemala, no doubt. But even more helpful was the idea linking the post-conflict situation in Guatemala to the genesis of group analysis in Britain.
It is well known that the birthplace of group analysis was a military hospital, where Foulkes (amongst others) treated traumatized British soldiers during the Second World War (Foulkes,1948 [1983]). Foulkes did this in a group setting and this was indeed, as Lorentzen (2010 p. 456) put it, ‘a cost-effective approach’, but nonetheless a creative attempt to attend to the needs of the soldiers in a more efficient way. Group analysis—one could say—was therefore born amidst trauma.
I had been wondering how the experience of working with traumatized soldiers in groups influenced the development of group analysis. Foulkes arrived in the UK, after his forced emigration from Germany, with new theoretical ideas concerning the psychoanalytic concept of the individual. But these ideas were not much more than a rough draft, a preliminary result of discussions with Goldstein, Elias and other colleagues from the Frankfurt School. Maybe the experiences in the military hospital simply reconfirmed some of the theoretical ideas of group analysis, such as the perception of the individual as a primarily social being and the awareness of the communicative and curative potential of the group
It is surprising, however, to acknowledge that Foulkes did not become a trauma specialist, but instead the founder of group analytic theory and practice. Perhaps, one could assume, the elaboration of this new method was his own creative response to being a refugee. Campbell (2010) and Pines (2010) have recently pointed out that Foulkes never left any doubt that group analysis is closely and intimately concerned with democracy and individual freedom. Jane Campbell (2010) even called it a ‘philosophy of freedom’.
I think, therefore, the specific traumatic circumstances, which gave birth to group analysis, continue to live on in a heritage that is always concerned with suffering and creativity. This is an essential part of the group analytic foundation matrix. And it was this context that supported me in thinking that group analysis would be effective in Guatemala as well, in a post-conflict society, burdened with trauma, painful memories, and never-ending sorrow.
The Armed Conflict and Trauma Today
I started to get engaged in Guatemala in 2000, only four years after the end of a 36 year long, extremely brutal war (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, REMHI 1998, Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, CEH 1999). Even though a formal peace agreement ended military confrontation in 1996, violence continued. The war had not solved any of the problems that had caused it: Extreme poverty, racism and century-long exploitation by the coffee plantation owners and the denial of all human, social and political rights were reason enough for an indigenous rebellion. As the rebellion turned into a guerilla movement, every indigenous man, woman and child was considered an enemy of the state, and the army fought them fiercely.
Two Truth Commissions (REMHI 1998, CEH 1999) left no doubt that genocide took place. More than 200,000 people died, 45,000 disappeared without any trace, one million fled to Mexico and more than 600 massacres took place. But still today and as the trial against Rios Montt, ex-general and dictator shows, the suffering and the despair, the sorrow and the grief of large parts of the population are blatantly denied. Society seems to be oblivious to the pain of the victims of the war who are, in the majority, of Mayan descent. As Volkan (2001) points out, under these circumstances, it is not possible to mourn the losses and to overcome trauma. Working in Guatemala, therefore, means that one cannot avoid confrontation with trauma, which permeates all aspects of daily life as well as all professional and organizational contexts.
During my first visit to Guatemala in 2000, I met trauma in an Indian community. I was part of a group of international consultants who were evaluating possible ways to support the peace and reconciliation process in the country. We visited an organization of victims in Rabinal, a city known for some of the most horrifying massacres that had taken place during the war.
We were taken to a cemetery where one of our guides showed us the grave of his wife and his two small daughters who had been slaughtered by the army during a massacre in the village. He had painted flowers on the gravestone and built a monument, depicting in terrifying detail the tragedy, which few of the villagers survived. He spoke to us unemotionally while we could not control our tears.
Just a week later, we analysed our experiences in a workshop together with Guatemalan experts. Present was also a 72-year-old Catholic nun, Barbara Ford, who had worked in a remote town in Guatemala throughout the armed conflict. When she left our workshop in the evening, she was assassinated on the way to her car. Despite the ceaseless efforts of her congregation, the police never found the assassins.
These experiences, which I could not even name at that time as an expression of trauma, were the beginning of my emotional and professional engagement in Guatemala.
The Idea and the Concept of the Training
At the beginning of our consultations, we had considered the possibility of organizing psychotherapeutic support. But we soon realized that this would have been an impossible task: There were not enough psychologists to offer trauma-therapy in 22 different Mayan languages to the indigenous population on the large scale needed. We therefore thought about alternatives.
Throughout our different visits to the country, we had met many professionals who were in desperate need of psychosocial support: Psychologists, social workers, medical doctors, psychiatrists and nurses had told us about their work: supporting Indian communities and families, who were awaiting exhumations of mass graves; counselling lawyers who defended torture victims and prisoners accused of man-slaughter; organizing meetings of indigenous widows who had experienced gang rape; offering advice to indigenous communities that were trying to bring a case of genocide to court and counselling refugees, who were returning from Mexico.
These professionals were left alone with their experience of injustice, poverty, sorrow, mourning and pain; they had an overwhelming feeling of never doing enough. No doubt, they were in serious danger of ‘secondary traumatization’ (Figley, 1995).
In a series of workshops we finally developed the idea of a sort of ‘capacity building’ among these human rights professionals. By training these professionals in group supervision, we hoped to provide them with supervisory skills and the ability to provide training to others in the field. Over time, we thought, there would be exponential growth in group supervision, creating a network of people who could offer supervision to colleagues, groups, teams, and organizations as they strove for democracy, peace and reconciliation.
It took five years before we could initiate the first phase of our project in 2005. With the help of a very dedicated Guatemalan psychologist, Dr. Vilma Duque, we started the training with 22 participants, mostly Guatemalan with a few foreign nationals. We planned six workshops in the course of two to three years, to be held in block-form, each workshop lasting five days.
The structure of the workshop was designed to include theory and learning exercises in the morning and supervision every afternoon. The theoretical inputs of the workshops focused on the historical roots, functions and aims of supervision, on the historical development of group theory and therapy, on the essentials of psychoanalysis and group analysis, on forms of intervention, on methods of conflict resolution and on organizational dynamics. The afternoon sessions were dedicated to the supervisory exploration of cases brought in for discussion by the participants (Rohr 2012). Throughout the supervisory discussion of the cases, psychological mechanisms and techniques were explained on a theoretical level.
After the first block of the training, participants were expected to start with supervisory processes of their own. Soon supervision started in a women’s shelter organization, a child-caring centre and in the National Programme of Compensation. Planned were also self-organized supervision groups in between the workshops. However this never worked, because controlled autonomous learning is not familiar in Guatemala. Feedback was also offered by email. This worked occasionally, but was not used as frequently as had been hoped for.
Group Dynamics in the Training
My first impression at the beginning of the training was that the participants were eager to learn and work with me. But invariably, unexpected difficulties disturbed our daily working routine:
The majority of the participants would arrive late in the morning—not just a few minutes, but sometimes half an hour, one hour or two hours. Some would not show up at all, or arrive the second or third day, or would leave in between, without announcing their absence. But then they would return and act as if nothing had happened.
Of course, I knew about ‘la hora latina’—and was prepared to accept time flexibility. But this was far beyond any accepted cultural pattern of behaviour. At first none of my interventions made any difference.
With time, however, I started to understand what was happening. The structure of the workshop was continually disrupted, mirroring the damages of a post-war society that had for decades known only fragmentation, annihilation, mistrust and the loss of all reliability. It seemed as if echoes of these destructive forces had reached our workshop, and were re-enacted in the here and now of the training. There was a lot of confusion linked to the missing coherence and the fragile boundaries of the training. I always felt worried and finally realized that anxiety was an indication of counter-transference and a mirror of the group’s basic matrix. My attempts to offer a protected space must have seemed like an illusion, maybe even a threat or betrayal. There simply was no trust anymore, the war had destroyed all boundaries people ever knew and had believed in.
But added to the difficulties of maintaining the boundaries and ground rules of our group, were strong cultural and social defences: During break time, participants would joke that the training was just another way to colonize them, just another imperialist method to subjugate their hearts and minds. As a facilitator, I seemed to fit the image of a rich powerful white woman from Europe, somehow linked to the German Government, maybe a spy?
I listened to these allegations, encouraging them to voice their doubts in the workshop. Still, it was not easy to address the group’s inhibitions, hostility and anxieties since I could rely only on reduced experimental ways to interpret their fantasies. It was training for group supervision, not therapy.
Then, one day, a young and very softly spoken man attacked me rather aggressively: Were there no Latin American authors to study? Why did they have to learn about Freud (1921), Lewin (1947), Schindler (1957), Balint (1957), Bion (1961), Foulkes (1948 [1983];) and Cohen (1975) he asked? Did these authors not adhere to quite individualistic and even bourgeois theories?
Well, I agreed, maybe it seemed like that. I could see that they felt uncomfortable and uneasy, somehow overwhelmed by so many new theoretical approaches. Then, out of mere intuition, I explained that these authors (with the exception of Bion) were refugees from Germany, Hungary, and Austria, having fled after the rise of the Nazis. The group was startled. They wondered if the refugee experience of these psychoanalysts was reflected in their theoretical explorations. We scrutinized Freud’s Mass and I-Analysis and Lewin’s theoretical ideas about authoritarian, democratic and laissez-faire-rule. We asked what type of leadership was accepted in Guatemala. Could Freud help to explain why so many Guatemalan war victims gave their vote to a man who was known to be responsible for the worst human rights violations during the armed conflict? How about Schindler’s categories? Who filled Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Omega roles in their teams? What did they think of Cohen’s thesis: Everybody is his or her own chairperson? And could they think of examples highlighting Foulkes perspective, that an individual in the group always mirrors an aspect of the whole group and that conflicts of one person tell us something about the hidden conflict in the whole group?
It seemed as if I had finally found a key to the group and a key to introducing group theories. The participants began to open up for new approaches and eagerly picked up new ideas. They learned a lot and I learned as well.
Still, the boundaries kept on being an irritating issue. One day I realized that I always addressed the missing boundaries in a reproachful manner. Things started to change when I asked them what had happened that they could not come on time and why they had to leave in between the sessions of the workshop. They now started to tell me about robberies on the way to the workshop, gangs entering the bus in the morning, manipulated car accidents, superiors not allowing them to leave the office, imminent lynching in Indian communities that kept them on the phone for hours. Slowly tensions vanished and a more relaxed atmosphere started to develop.
Eventually participants began to announce their planned absence ahead of time or to explain what had occasioned the unplanned absences. One of the participants even said one day with great emphasis that everybody was important in the group and that she wanted everybody to be present at all times. There was really progress now and coherence could grow.
Case Work
This progress showed especially in the cases offered for supervision in the afternoon. A young man, who had shown a lot of suspicion, summoned all his courage and talked about difficulties he encountered in his job. He said he felt ashamed to talk about his problems and to explore the reasons why he was not able to manage his project well. He had hired friends to run the project together with him, but it was always he who ended up doing the reports. He hesitated to say that he felt abused, but undoubtedly he felt disappointed and his sadness could be felt.
The group showed a lot of concern. This conflict was quite familiar to many of them. We struggled to unravel the situation, and he began to understand that it was his aversion to authoritarian rule that kept him from assuming the role of the manager. Having previously learned about democratic rule, the group asked him if he would consider following its precepts in his work place. He was astonished at first, but then very relieved. There were new perspectives to think about. He appreciated the richness of the ideas that had been offered to him and was very grateful. During the break, we talked a bit, and I could see that he still was quite moved. Later on, I noticed that he had left the training and stayed away for two days.
There had been understanding and compassion in the group, even a feeling of intimacy and trust. And then he left. He seemed like a refugee, leaving whenever a dangerous situation threatened his autonomy. During the war, departure was a life-saving strategy. Now it was like a reflex, an unconscious reaction, of which he was not even aware.
Now I began to understand more of the difficulties in the training group: Trauma, I realized, was an issue in the group. There was an extreme fear of closeness and attachment because this experience reproduced memories of the war. Family members, friends and neighbours had disappeared and never came back and nobody ever knew why or what had happened. It was better and safer not to get attached, not to feel dependent. Feeling close to other people was just too painful, reminding one of all the losses endured in the past.
Boundaries and reliability, anxieties and attachment were strong issues in this group. They were connected to the experience of trauma, which was re-enacted and reproduced in the group training. But even though trauma could not be dealt with on a psychotherapeutical level, there was quite an impressive transformation taking place in the group, a transformation that also influenced the existing trauma in the training.
How can this be explained?
Supervision as a Transitional Space
Relying on Winnicott’s (1971) concept of a transitional space, ‘where play can take place and be used to re-establish what is objectively perceived and what is subjectively conceived of’ (Segun, 2001: 66), I would like to suggest that supervision is such a transitional space. Participants of group supervision are encouraged to explore social and institutional realities and their intrinsic influence on their professional activities. For example, a conflict is described and the group is asked to take up the images and ‘play’ with them mentally and symbolically, using free-floating associations. An exciting verbal play might develop, deliberately crossing mental boundaries, exploring new thoughts, creating new perspectives. The original perception of the conflict slowly changes. Fixations are dissolved and a separation from the old and maybe antiquated perception allows a new vision to develop. The separation and integration processes are creative activities of the group, stimulating members to join the game and to play. This happens with restricted regression because there are peers and colleagues who play and it is the facilitator’s responsibility to remind them that there is always a task that has to be accomplished.
In our training group, the participants rejected at first the idea of playing and getting acquainted with new theoretical approaches. They kept on hiding behind cultural defences and transferences, suspicious of this unknown, but supposedly safe and protected space, attacking boundaries and the concept of the training as well as my role as facilitator. When I introduced the refugee psychotherapists, an intermediate space opened, bridging anxieties, so that they could leave their persecutory fantasies and open up for something new and unknown. This space included a more trustful relationship with the group and with me. After all, they realized that I had come from a country that represented one of the worst tragedies of mankind and I had brought the theories of Jewish refugees to them, obviously cherishing their ideas. A different and quite warmhearted relationship began to grow and, with it, reliability and trust. As a consequence, the need to disrupt boundaries diminished, and attachment tendencies and containment could be experienced.
However the real challenge—that is, switching from the role of trainee to that of supervisor—was still to come.
Practice of Supervision in a Traumatized Institution
Towards the end of the training one of the politically most vulnerable organizations of the country asked for supervision.
The central building of this organization was discovered about five years ago by chance. It contains millions of secret documents about the so-called counter-insurgency operations of the national police over the past 80 years. It is an archive of the abysses of Guatemalan history, describing in detail and with meticulous handwriting the cruellest torture practices, naming and showing photos of thousands of people who were killed because of suspicion of collaborating with the guerrilla.
After the discovery of the archive, the Human Rights Procurator made sure that an organization was established to evaluate the documents. Two hundred people, mostly young and inexperienced, were hired to work in the archive. They were eager to get this job because most of them were the children of mothers and fathers who had disappeared during the war. After years of silence, lies and betrayals, they hoped to discover what had happened to their parents. This strong, but nonetheless unusual personal motivation for this job gave them enough credibility and reliability to entrust them with highly explosive material.
However, the political pressure placed on the organization was enormous, and its right to existence was continuously questioned. Never-ending political attacks, even threats, and an extremely heavy workload as well as miserable working conditions and the daily confrontation with the horror in these documents, created a difficult, if not unbearable working situation.
Within the first few months, about 40 employees were dismissed or decided to leave. This was reason enough for the director to look for help from our supervisory support group.
Everyone in the organization was required to participate—from the cleaning women and the guards to the top level of the management. Once a month, on a Friday afternoon, buses would arrive and take 163 workers to a school or a monastery, where 13 supervisors were waiting for them. 13 teams were formed, working for three hours, 12 times a year.
At the end of this process, a written evaluation of the workers and interviews with the director and two of the workers complemented the findings of a two-day supervision workshop with the supervisors. The evaluation, as well as the interviews with the director and the workers indicated that many things had changed for the better in the organization:
Working conditions had improved, there were no longer mice, rats or bugs in the offices, fungi had been eradicated from the documents, protective clothing was available, security trainings had taken place, technical equipment had improved, fluctuation of workers had diminished, there were fewer conflicts and communication and cooperation in the teams had improved.
The workers said they now felt like a family and organized parties on Friday evenings. There was less need for strikes now, even though conflicts still existed, but there were now different ways to express and solve them. The cleaning women stated that the workers had stopped throwing as much paper on the floors and that their job had become easier.
Whereas the overall view of the experience was quite positive, there were also some critical comments: Communication and cooperation between workers and their superiors were still considered to be difficult. Transparency of decisions and a more egalitarian structure in the organization were still missing. Even supervision could not ‘heal’ all organizational ailments. There was simply no guarantee of continuous progression; there was always the risk of regression, especially in times, when political pressure became almost unbearable.
The supervisors described one situation that had been particularly difficult to handle, but that had finally generated change. The workers were complaining for months about the lack of toilet paper, the vermin infestations, mould between the rotten documents, clouds of dust, and the failure to provide protective clothing. They had the feeling that nobody cared and felt left alone, miserable, and unprotected. The supervisors felt a lot of empathy and solidarity with these young people, who seemed so vulnerable, struggling with the demands of their job, but the supervisors were also weary of listening to these unending complaints. Was that really supervision? They started to have serious doubts.
Finally, the workers came up with the idea that the supervisors should write letters to their superiors, explaining the complaints and requesting that something be done. The supervisors felt caught in a trap. They really wanted to help and recognized that the complaints were valid. In this situation, they remembered that I most certainly would insist on keeping to the rule of abstinence and maintaining the boundaries, even if this meant having to bear doubts about one’s political solidarity. But were abstinence and boundaries as I understood them, and as I had taught them really valid in Guatemala? After all, they wanted to be loyal to the working class! They struggled until they found a solution: They would talk about the letters in supervision, but the workers themselves would have to write them.
This strategy worked well: Letters were written, weekly meetings established and a new communicative culture was created in the organization. Within a year’s time, the divisions between the workers and the superiors diminished without vanishing altogether, and trust was partially restored.
There was recognition in the supervision groups of the fact that workers had gained autonomy and that the atmosphere in the organization had changed—even though there were drawbacks at times. Whenever the political pressure increased, established communicative structures in the organization broke down again and regressive behaviour would re-emerge once again, sweeping away, at least temporarily, mature ways of handling difficult working relationships and conflicts. It was still a fragile attempt to introduce a less authoritarian style of rule, backed by a strong desire for more democracy within the organization.
A transformation from conflict to creativity had taken place, because supervision had provided a transitional space that was safe enough to explore new creative ways to handle conflict. Instead of organizing strikes in the courtyard, the workers wrote letters, talked to management in open meetings, and organized parties. A huge step from action to reflection had taken place, and beyond the terror that surrounded them daily, there could be dancing and laughing as well.
This process was not without pain, not without ambivalence and not without regressive fallbacks, but at the end there was hope and change and a glimpse of a different, more democratic and communicative world, a world, which they hoped would prevail one day throughout all of Guatemala.