The Times They Are A-Changing: Evolving Group Analytic Identity

Abstract

The transmission of group-analytic ideas and practices can be a breeding ground for creative growth or rigidification. This article will explore how our theoretical base and practice traditions have adapted to challenges from within-group analysis and from the wider socio-political field. Radical social change, shaped by revolutionary developments in communications technology, presents our theory and practice with further challenges to adapt. Some suggestions will be made as to the way forward.

Keywords

social change evolving group-analytic identity power dynamics communications revolution from clinical to psychosocial social unconscious cyberspace the online self sensory and relational belonging

Introduction

It is a great honour to be here tonight. Thank you Robi and Sue and the GASi committee for inviting me. I owe a large debt to those who have been part of my journey (too many to list): my therapists, supervisors and teachers, colleagues and co-workers, and former students and patients – my group-analytic identity owes much to all of you.

Evolving group-analytic identity, the subtitle of my topic, emerged last year when my sense of identity was seriously challenged by Brexit. Britain joined the European community three years after I arrived in the United Kingdom as an immigrant from South Africa and so the United Kingdom as part of Europe has, since then, always been where I belonged. I associated my adopted home with democratic and liberal values and in particular with being a relatively tolerant society that embraced difference and promoted inclusion. Brexit represents a threat to these values and for me harks back towards the values and norms of my former country.

My conflicted social identity stands in contrast to my professional identity which, as a clinician strongly identified with group analysis (which I came into contact with in 1972 at about the same time as Britain joined the European Union (EU)) has been relatively conflict-free!

The Times They Are A-Changing (1964) as all will know, comes from a Bob Dylan protest song written in the 1960s, in the same year, 1964, as the publication of Foulkes’ Therapeutic Group Analysis (1964). In a chapter on ‘Psychotherapy in the sixties’, Foulkes describes that decade as a ‘period of rapid and unprecedented change’ (Foulkes, 1964: 154). This describes my experience, not only of the 1960s but of the 21st-Century as a period of accelerating and unprecedented change.

For me, there are echoes of the 1960s in current times. On the political front, current mass migrations and the accompanying rise of right-wing movements, the re-assertion of nationalist sentiments and attempts to re-draw national boundaries echo the 1950s and 1960s post-colonial opening up of borders and migrations of people, alongside the rise of anti-immigrant movements in the United Kingdom, intolerance of difference and racial hatred.

On the socio-cultural level, the dramatic increase in the new millennium of the flexibility and fluidity of ways that we construct and present ourselves, including our gendered self, in new acceptable forms of partnerships and family constellations, in changed modes of communicating, relating and grouping – all parallel the dramatic changes in the 1960s as contraception uncoupled sex from marriage and childbearing, and with the possibilities of delayed childbearing facilitating change in gendered power relations. Sexual liberation movements of the 1960s are paralleled by current escalation in cyberspace of sexual interaction and experimentation (by contrast to the 1960s, without actual physical contact).

In the mental health field, we saw in the 1950s and 1960s the established order challenged – psychiatry had its anti-psychiatry movement, group work and therapeutic communities were in the ascendant, psychotherapy (analytic and other) was growing, diversifying and extending its reach. Now growth in attention to mental health has created a heavy demand for services. And, in the new millennium, in contrast to earlier decades, brief interventions that promise quick and easy solutions have replaced high quality and more expensive psychotherapies, while increasingly, technology is used to satisfy these demands at low cost.

What does it mean to be a group analyst or group-analytic psychotherapist now, in this time? Has group-analytic identity transformed – and if so, how?

I intend today to consider how our practice traditions and our theoretical base have adapted to challenges from within the group-analytic field and challenges from without – to look back over the decades and forward to challenges ahead.

Being involved in group-analytic training for three decades, questions of group-analytic identity have always been there for me, both in the background and foreground. Training involves transmission of group-analytic ideas and practices and can be a breeding ground for creative growth or for rigidification. Foulkes’ organic model of man as an open system in dynamic equilibrium, creatively adapting to a changing environment provides us with a template to view how group analysis has evolved and whether it has creatively adapted to our changing environment or not.

My view is inevitably subjective and based on experience of group analysis in the United Kingdom. I hope that our Study Day will bring different stories and perspectives on the evolution of group-analytic identity in different countries and contexts.

As some of you are aware, I have been particularly preoccupied by the impact of the digital revolution on all aspects of our lives and have spoken about this at different points in recent years (Hutchinson, 2012; 2016).

‘Times they are a changing’ for me is directly linked to the communications revolution. Mobile technology has become part of our environment and poses an evolutionary challenge – to adapt.

We are now an incredibly complex networked global society – able to connect instantly across continents and time zones – a far cry from the ‘nodes in a network’ of Foulkes’ time. The relatively wide global access to and use of (increasing as we speak) online communicating and the Internet is profoundly changing the way we communicate and group together and I believe that we are engaged in a shift, a paradigmatic shift, at the level of the foundation matrix – one that strikes at our heart, communication and relational networks. I believe that increasing use of online and Internet communication will slowly change the way we are wired. The extraordinary plasticity of the brain is now well established – and Hebbs’ Law: ‘cells that fire together wire together’ confirmed (Hebb, 1949).

There are now very few areas of our lives that are not facilitated and influenced by the Internet. I wish to continue the conversation initiated in last year’s Foulkes lecture and response (Weinberg, 2016) and to consider some of the implications for group analysis of these changed modes and patterns of communicating, socializing and grouping together.

But first I wish to look back – and to track evolving group-analytic identity.

The Group-Analytic Matrix: Identity and Group Membership

Identity has been a popular theme in recent years – and is defined in many different ways – in different discourses. The dynamic, ever-changing nature of identity is best described by Erik Erikson in his prologue to Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968):

… nor can we separate … the identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development because the two help to define each other and are truly relative to each other. In fact the whole interplay between the psychological and the social, the developmental and the historical, for which identity formation is of prototypical significance, could be conceptualized only as a kind of psychosocial relativity. (Erikson, 1968: 23)

When referring to group-analytic collective identity, I am considering our essential core similarities, what we hold in common, and how we define ourselves as different to other analytic group and psychotherapy approaches. Alongside our conceptual framework, our group norms, values and traditions, our collective identity is forged in the ongoing evolving interrelationships among us and the emotional investment that accompanies it (Mellucci; 1995).

It is in the groups we belong to that identities are continually constructed and reconstructed.

The birth of the group-analytic ‘we’ identity coincided with the establishment of the Group Analytic Society (GAS London) in 1952, the first organization specifically designated as group analytic. Since that time different kinds of group-analytic organizations have been established which vary in how they define their membership boundaries, their inclusion/exclusion criteria.

GASi, constituted as a scientific body of interested persons, is characterized by an inclusive, relatively open membership. It continues to thrive as the main and now international, slow-open, group-analytic matrix with its journal and newsletter and its ritual annual workshops, lectures, and triennial symposia bringing together an international meeting of group-analytic minds.

Group-analytic training institutions, first set up in London in 1971 and then extending to many parts of Europe and beyond, saw the spread of a different kind of group-analytic organization. The Training Institution places greater emphasis on transmission of ideas and practices, on standards of practice and on assessment, assessing who is suitable for training and who has adequately internalized a ‘group-analytic approach’. The criteria for membership inclusion are more elaborate and selective and highly regulated both from within the institution (fulfilling requirements for successful completion of training) and from the wider psychotherapy context with its guidelines, codes of good practice and accrediting function. I think this takes group-analytic identity deeper into the political arena, and subject to the power dynamics, the rivalries over status and influence, both within the group-analytic field and in the wider professional fields.

There are two further group-analytic organizations: the European Association for Transcultural Group Analysis (EATGA), set up in 1982 to study the effects of cultures on the construction of the self (Brown, 1987b). Kurt Huseman, our speaker for the Study Day was a founder member of EATGA and I am hoping we might hear more about this from him tomorrow.

And then in the late 1980s early 1990s, EGATIN was established as a specialist group-analytic network of training bodies with delegates engaged in dialogue and exchange about training. This was set up in the context of changing political boundaries, the dissolution of the Berlin wall and the Soviet empire, and a move towards greater internationalism and globalization. EGATIN, initially set up to challenge the dominance of London and establish more egalitarian relationships between training institutes, has resisted entering the power-political accrediting mode and retained an identity as an arena for the establishment of standards and for the exchange of ideas and resources and changing interdependencies.

These group-analytic organizations, sometimes in conflict with one another, sometimes in collaborative mode, provide a space where we exchange ideas, resources, where we rival and conflict with each other and articulate our differences – these provide the crucibles for the ongoing forging of our professional identities.

From Fuchs to Foulkes

A brief look at the identity template provided by our founding father Foulkes: Foulkes did not himself write about his own identity issues. As a German Jewish immigrant to the United Kingdom in 1933, such issues must have been prominent for him. Identities are forged when we come up against difference. Immigration experience will call for a re-construction of the self. Loss of home, roots and familiar connections and the need to adapt to a different culture and language – this will challenge the sense of self and identity. What we do know is that Foulkes chose to change his name from Fuchs to Foulkes (not an unusual practice) and in so doing attempted to put into the background one particular signifier of his German identity and hence to reduce the power of the name to act as a trigger for projections and transference.

Foulkes’ ‘dis-identification’ with the Germany of the 1930s is evident too in his writings, in his anti-authoritarian stance, the emphasis on democratic leadership and principles, the concern about the power relationships (and potential misuse of power) between (group) analyst and (group) member. His positive German identity elements are not directly expressed, but his valuing of German culture and thought is implicit in his writings.

Foulkes’ approach resonated for me. Over 25 years ago, in my first venture into private practice, I took over a group that had been set up and conducted for some years, by a Black Caribbean group analyst, who was returning to the Caribbean. A black therapist with a background of enslavement and being colonized passed the baton to a white therapist identified with racist and oppressive colonial masters. The group managed the transition (no drop outs) – and what I remember was some play in the group with ideas of ‘white and black witches’ without either of us getting fixed in the good versus evil position. What became clear was how different our styles were – and how, for some group members, her style (a powerful presence and ‘no-nonsense’ approach) provided greater safety, whereas for other members, my style (more in the background, analysing boundary transgressions, rather than prescribing rules) provided greater safety. This experience initiated an ongoing, self-conscious exploration of my group-analytic identity particularly in relation to what kind of authority I was/am. Did my ‘dis-identification’ with the abusive authority of the South African apartheid regime, in some way affect my capacity to be authoritative?

We rely on Foulkes’ writings, and on those of some of his early followers, to inform a ‘group-analytic approach’ and a group-analytic identity. Although focussing on Foulkes in this article, I consider the work of some of the early pioneer authors and teachers to be of major significance in establishing a group-analytic approach and identity – to name a few, Malcolm Pines, Robin Skynner, Dennis Brown, Liesel Hearst, Lionel Kreeger, Pat de Maré (for his work on dialogue and median/large groups aiming at humanizing society, ever more urgent in our contemporary society) and next generation authors such as Ralph Stacey and Gerhard Wilke for their development of a group-analytic perspective on organizational functioning.

Returning to Foulkes, 15 years after immigrating to the United Kingdom, his first book appeared (Foulkes, 1948) – and, in both his first and his last book (Foulkes, 1975), he put method into the centre.

Group-analytic method, creating a group-analytic situation, a dynamic matrix, was extensively elaborated in all Foulkes’ writings, a method that both allowed for different views of the group process, for translating unconscious communication, and maximized potential for analytic reflection and the generation of meaning. The role and function of the group-analytic therapist, the ‘conductor’, was also extensively elaborated by Foulkes. It was a method syntonic with his theoretical approach and assumptions – that privileged the social, the group matrix, as both the appropriate object of study and as the primary therapeutic resource. Theory focusses on the dynamics of communicational and relational matrices, the nature of mind as transpersonal processes and psychopathology as arising from social matrices, in their current, evolving and historical aspects.

I think this congruence between theory and method was one of Foulkes’ greatest contributions.

As a consequence of this prioritizing of method, group analysis, unlike psychoanalysis, has, I think, its most significant influence experientially rather than through its literature. My interest in psychoanalysis came through reading Freud and my engagement with group analysis came through experiencing group-analytic therapy groups as a participant observer and as a patient.

Group-analytic theory has not (yet) in my view, through its literature, significantly permeated the wider culture beyond the analytic and psychotherapy field, but rather it is known in its clinical application, as a special form of group therapy rather than a comprehensive approach to human relations. This may be changing with the extension of its theoretical base, with its recent interdisciplinary links with the arts, literature, music and film, and with the move from the consulting room to the community.

Essential Elements of Group-Analytic Identity

What we hold in common, what binds us together in our collective identity, is a model of man as an open system in dynamic equilibrium and a set of basic assumptions or principles. Group analysis provides a frame into which other discourses can be absorbed with varying degrees of dissonance and integration – a frame that marries open systemic and holistic/gestalt approaches with an appreciation of the permeating effects of the social and of the unconscious forces that shape our individual and collective beings. I think it is this frame that defines our ‘core’ identity. And it is in the here and now of our experiential groups led by our therapists, supervisors, teachers and workshop leaders that transmission takes place and we internalize a group-analytic model and way of relating.

A further assumption, not usually specified in standard descriptions of the group-analytic approach, and for me one of the most essential defining features, is the assumption that human relations, in both their conscious and unconscious process, can be understood by finding meaning in (the social) context, both current and historical. A multi-perspectival view is built into group-analytic method: we are exhorted to view group process from current, part-object, transference and primordial levels. And the possibility of further viewing levels or perspectives is implicit, as societies evolve and change. Weegmann (2014) in a chapter from one of his recent books makes a convincing case for such perspectivism having its philosophical roots in Nietzche’s perspectivism.

The precursor to my own ‘group-analytic identity’ was an early belief in the defining effects of one’s own perceptual and conceptual viewing position or frame. In my brief spell in the 1960s as a junior lecturer in Cape Town University Psychology Department, I was responsible for the first-year experimental psychology course. I designed and introduced an experiment on ‘experimenter effect’, designed to demonstrate that even in the learning of nonsense syllables, experimenter expectations affected the outcome! So, the notion of the ‘objective’ scientist or analyst was always questionable for me. The observer is always part of the field.

Group analysis has often been described as a ‘broad church’ accommodating differences of professional background (many of us belong to more than one professional group and professional organization), differences of psychoanalytic persuasion, differences in how we hold the balance between the individual and the group, the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, the internal and the external, instinct/fantasy versus social context/environment. Group analysis views polarities such as these as in a constant dialectic, co-constructed rather than in a binary either/or conflict. These differences define our individual/unique group-analytic identity and articulate some of the fault lines along which our individual and collective identity can polarize, fracture or fragment under conditions of stress, threat or constraint. Our Study Day provides an opportunity for live exploration of our identities.

Evolving identity grows out of conflict and contradiction. But we have not had the equivalent of the Freud/Klein ‘controversial discussions’ in psychoanalysis (1941–1945) – our ideological identity conflicts have played out in the literature, for example, with Dalal’s overview of the contradictions between the Freudian and Foulkesian paradigms (1998) encapsulated in the notions of an ‘orthodox’ and a ‘radical’ Foulkes and with Nitsun’s challenges regarding aggressive forces and authority relations in groups (1996; 2009).

Identity conflicts have also played out in relation to methodological issues – some examples follow.

Some Challenges to Group-Analytic Identity from Within and Without

Internal Debates

Within the group-analytic field in the United Kingdom, rivalries over who has had the best group-analytic training centred on the diverse views about the adequacy of different training structures, block versus continuous and stranger groups versus personal experience/therapy groups. This debate only really took hold when block training was introduced in the United Kingdom in Manchester, and questions arose about whether different training structures should lead to inclusion as equal members of the London IGA. The fact that the debate did not take place years earlier when the United Kingdom was exporting block training to Europe is telling – clearly in part linked to the absence of competition for jobs and status with our European colleagues, perhaps also an expression of the colonial template.

In my view, the emphasis in the United Kingdom on the ‘slow-open, group-analytic stranger group’ as the ideal, the ‘gold standard’, became rather rigidified in group-analytic training, being simply handed down as THE group-analytic methodology rather than a method that maximizes therapeutic, and particularly analytic potential but could be adapted to meet different aims (therapeutic and other) in different contexts. Methodology lent itself to rigidification as it was much more clearly defined and elaborated by Foulkes than his theoretical writings.

There were other pressures such as the move towards including a second ‘applied’ group-analytic group in training courses and, more recently, debate over whether the inclusion of an intermediate, skills-based group-analytic training (that did not ‘require’ accompanying experience in group-analytic therapy) to diploma level endangered group-analytic identity.

Although driven by political forces, I consider that the above challenges encouraged group analysis in the United Kingdom to think outside the box of the classical ‘stranger’ group. I think one of the key points in the evolution of group-analytic identity has been the challenge to traditional group-analytic training structures to adapt creatively to different frequency/intensity models and different applications and contexts.

External Pressures

Different psychotherapy modalities have always been in potential competition with one another. Such rivalries, for example, over who is qualified to practice what, tend to intensify in recessionary times.

The major challenge to group analysis has emanated from the political arena. Government endorsement of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) as the recommended ‘talk’ therapy, together with the establishment in the United Kingdom of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommending therapies based on evidence-based practice have influenced the status and the extent of provision of (group) analytic therapies. In these latter decades, we see the promotion from the political establishment of short-term treatments, and cognitive behavioural treatments more accessible to quantitative research methods. Of course the main threat coming from short termism and increasingly manualized and formulaic techniques is to the analytic function so at the core of our group-analytic approach. Keeping alive our classical long-term slow-open groups alongside those modified in structure and aim is essential to protect against an erosion of our essence.

From Clinical to Psychosocial: from the Consulting Room to the Community

The shift in focus in recent decades from group analysis as a clinical method to group analysis as an approach to the understanding of society and its groupings, from the clinical arena to the psychosocial field, is evident in its increasing application to groups in organizations, institutions and in the community. Examples of such new developments are the setting up of Reflective Citizens Groups (Mojovic, 2016), a proposed large group training, training in reflective practice in organizations set up by the London Director of Training, Peter Wilson, workshops for those working with traumatized groups such as refugees. The language used is that of dialogue and reflection rather than transference analysis, and aims are directed towards facilitating working relationships or encouraging communities to integrate, to tolerate difference and recognize potential for enrichment.

Accompanying these developments is a burst of new thinking in the literature, reminiscent of earlier thrusts in theory development that culminated in the publication of The Psyche and the Social World (Brown and Zinkin, 1994). Contemporary developments include recent attention to social change (Rohr, 2014; Blackwell, 2014; Nitsun, 2015), the publication of comprehensive overviews of the group-analytic field interlinking theory and practice (Schlapobersky, 2016), the development of a group-analytic dictionary, and scholarly research into Foulkes’ background and past influences as well as the ever-deepening roots of group analysis (Nitzgen, 2011; Lavie, 2011; Weegmann, 2011). We see a more confident and coherent location of group analysis in the relational frame (Friedman, 2014; Weegmann, 2014) and an extension of the group-analytic discourse into grappling with the core but ill-defined Foulkesian concepts of the social unconscious and the foundation matrix (Hopper and Weinberg, 2011; 2016; Scholtz, 2014). Significant developments such as Hopper’s (2003) extension of basic assumption theory to include collective defences of massification and aggregation in response to fragmentation and annihilation anxiety in traumatized organizations and other large groups further enrich group-analytic theory.

These shifts, to me, are evidence of group analysis creatively adapting to a changing globalized world.

Group Analysis in the Digital Age

It is the communications revolution, in my view, that presents group analysis with its greatest challenge yet.

It is now a very familiar sight to see people plugged into their smart phones while travelling, while eating together and in most other social and work situations. A more chilling sight is seeing mothers or fathers looking at their phones or iPads while feeding their babies and interacting with their toddlers. The effects of the Internet and social media are regularly reported on in the papers, dramatized in our TV serials – it permeates our social and political systems – it has infiltrated the fabric of our lives at all levels.

Online connectivity and increasing Internet use have been the subject of considerable attention and research in recent years (Carr, 2010; Greenfield, 2014; Weinberg, 2014; 2016; Winter, 2016; Turkle, 1995; 2011; 2015; Aiken, 2016). Research addresses effects on attentional processes, on learning and on memory, and effects of social media on the capacity for empathy, intimacy, relationships and identity. Some of the known effects of online behaviour are, for example, the disinhibiting effect of perceived anonymity, whereby people can be more trusting of others online, bolder, more self-disclosing, achieving a ready intimacy (of a kind), and judgement-impaired in the absence of real-life cues. Mary Aiken (2016) introduces terms such as cyber-socialization to describe how online groups establish their own norms and rules of engagement and cyber-migration to describe how these norms might slowly filter back into real-life social behaviour.

There are many ways in which the Internet enters our therapy groups. It is rare in recent years for a group member not to be carrying a smart phone into the group space, offering another potential source of boundary transgression. On occasions problems of addiction to ‘connecting’ and to gaming are discussed, as are the bewildering dynamics of Internet dating. A member brings into a real-life group his intense negative reaction to racist remarks by a Facebook ‘friend’ (known to him in the real world) – and questions how to deal with this – post a critical comment? To unfriend him, block him? I think this is an example of cyber-migration where social media transactions override real-life interactions.

The advantages that technology brings to our lives are beyond question, and I think it is likely that it will over time expand man’s cognitive and information processing capacities – we may become the superhuman intelligences Harari refers to in his futuristic novel Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016). However, when excessive disembodied relating is not balanced by embodied interaction and relating, especially in the early years, and when sensorimotor experience is reduced to two-dimensional visual and auditory cues, and click and swipe motor activity, we change the foundations of our emotional and cognitive development, potentially reducing the basis for creative and reflective thinking. (Bion regards the processing and ‘containment’ of sensory experience as crucial to our developing capacity to think.) In cyberspace, disembodied interactional networks rely on reduced sensorimotor cues and reduced layers of meaning and hence have a thinner, a less substantial texture, despite the extended reach of such networks and their greatly increased complexity.

Spending excessive time in cyberspace, playing in the virtual world, with self-created avatars or with others, free from interference from authority and real-life cues and boundary constraints, is likely to reinforce Freud’s primary process thinking (that knows no time and space constraints) characteristic of unconscious process or more recently, what Batemen and Fonagey (2006) describe as pre-reflective modes of thinking, ‘psychic equivalence mode’ (you think as I think, difficulties separating my mental state from your mental state) and ‘pretend mode’ (a detachment from reality). Reflective thinking is at the heart of group-analytic relational approaches. As group conductor/analyst, we oscillate between intersubjective immersion and standing back and reflecting – the essence of the group-analytic attitude. Although reflection can certainly take place in Internet forums and discussion groups, the addictive pull towards continuous online connectivity may well, in future decades, compromise our reflective capacities. We need to counter this possible development by reinforcing a reflective mode in real-life groups. Turkle (2015) highlights the difference between connection and relationship between interacting subjects. She regards continual connection as undermining the capacity for solitude, self-reflection and intimacy.

We can only speculate at this stage about the long-term effects on developing attachment bonds but surely when eye contact and face-to-face interaction in early years are reduced, when a distracting machine comes between mother and baby, and the reflective gaze in the mother’s mirroring eye is turned away, the capacity to be sociable and to form deep and lasting attachments will inevitably be affected.

The sense of belonging is different to mere connection. We ‘belong’ in a different culture in cyberspace. We lose the possibility of a sensory belonging and our relational belonging is impoverished.

Aiken argues that the cyberself is a ‘literally detached self’, that the culture of taking selfies is proof of this objectification:

By posting a selfie, you are required to experience yourself as an object that is presentable or not. You judge your selfie from a detached distance, even if it is posted impulsively … this self-objectification, and the sense of detachment from true self could explain many of the negative behaviours seen online … It feeds dissociation. (Aiken, 2016: 186)

Constructing profiles and posting on Facebook are further examples of this self-objectification process. Could our social media ‘hall of mirrors’ be the endless repetition of the self-reflexive objectified self, in contrast to the differentiated reflections from real-life others to our real-life self? I think such developments may well promote narcissistic and dissociative elements in the structuring of personalities.

My primary concern is that all the above may facilitate an easy objectification and dehumanizing of the other – that we may become more machine-like and find it easier to destroy each other. The problem is not technology, but how it is used and what it is used for.

So how does group analysis respond to this challenge, this paradigmatic shift in our way of being in the world?

Meeting the Challenge of the Digital Age: Concluding Remarks

I suggest three areas of creative development whereby we can retain our core assumptions and frame, our core identity, but adapt to the changing world around us.

In our clinical work, we need to extend our multi-perspectival view of the person, the group, the matrix, to include the ‘online self’ and the dynamics of relating in cyberspace – introducing a fifth viewing level alongside the current, projective, transference and primordial levels, a cyberspace level or domain. As online life is not directly visible, it needs decoding from reported experience and needs to be considered alongside contemporary and past relational experience.

In addition, I suggest that for group analysis to creatively adapt to our digital age and our globalized networked world we should enter into the field of public health offering face-to-face groups (particularly for teenagers) as a prophylactic and counter to increasing time spent in cyberspace.

And in our theory building, our gestalt/systemic frame calls for further development. How do figure/ground phenomena play out in cyberspace? We need to consider how boundaries that differ in qualitative texture (that may be elastic or brittle, porous or opaque, dissolving or fixed, that allow movement in one direction or both, that allow osmosis or leakage), how such boundaries operate in different mediums and cultures and how to enhance the functions that they serve. What sort of boundaries best serve the therapeutic group in today’s world? Or a host community absorbing immigrant groups?

I leave you with such questions and let Shakespeare have the final say:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures. (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4 Scene 3)

Footnotes

Sylvia Hutchinson is a Psychologist, Training Group Analyst and Consultant working in private practice as a member of GAN (the Group Analytic Network), London. She has previously worked in the National Health Service (NHS) and Student Health Services and has been actively involved in clinical practice and in group-analytic training on the London IGA and Turvey courses. She is a past Chair of EGATIN (the European Group Analytic Training Institutions Network), and past Co-director of the Turvey Institute of Group Analytic Psychotherapy. Address: 2 St Gabriels Road, London NW2 4RY, UK. Email: Sylviahut@aol.com

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