Abstract
Both of these articles (Doron, 2018) and (Warhaftig-Aran, 2018) report and discuss the specific event and its consequences, when two group members in an on-going analytical group develop and maintain for a certain time an exclusive relationship with each other, from which all other group members are excluded. Doron laments her own and her co-therapist’s inexperience when the romance between two group members and their finally unsuccessful intimate relationship eventually led to the group’s disintegration. Aran carefully analyses the vicissitudes of a man ‘falling in love’ with another group member and the resulting difficulties for her as the conductor.
Both articles refer gratefully to Nitsun’s publication of The group as an object of desire. Exploring sexuality in group therapy (2006) and Moeller’s Foulkes Lecture Love in the Group (2002). But they also plainly state the unsatisfactory lack of theoretical material and writing in group analysis in this area and reiterate Moeller’s ‘no literature exists on love in the group’ (2002: 484).
This is what makes these articles so valuable. Both are trying to expand the discourse on love and desire in group analysis, in sharing their effort to understand the meaning of events and complications that affected their respective groups, when Eros announced its arrival and began to play in the group. They are refreshingly open about how intensely Eros’ power affected also them as conductors, in that it compelled Aran to seek additional supervision and motivated Doron to formally train in group analysis. Love changes everything—and everyone, including the conductor.
Perhaps it really is time that we as group analysts acknowledge—and this might well apply also to individual analysts—what an outstandingly important role love plays in our work and in the relationships with our patients. It seems to me that we tend to deny this. I have heard colleagues declare in slightly self-derogatory ways that they themselves need the work for their emotional balance in order not to become depressed, instead of considering how much they may love their work and their groups and how painful it would be to give it up and separate. I remember that I found it slightly embarrassing, when my supervision group pointed out, that my intense engagement with ‘my’ group indicated how much I loved them. Feeling love is complicated, because it arouses strong feelings, the potential and wish for pleasure, but also anxiety and fear. Love is difficult, because it touches us personally, connects us with our sexuality, and arouses defences and resistances as well as desires and longings.
Therefore, Moeller’s statement that ‘One is better off if one is aware that one is in love (2002: 492)’ deserves our attention. Transgressions abound in the history of psychoanalysis due to the lack of this awareness. Some analysts may have married their patients and some of them may well have lived happily ever after, but the examples of unhappy outcomes of these unconscious boundary violations—for analysts as well as patients—are numberless.
As Doron points out, love in the group may be understood as a trans-personal group symptom, a relations disorder or as a matrix event (Moeller, 2002), but I agree with her conclusion that love in the group—also when it manifests in the formation of a couple—must be seen as a group event, not an individual one, and needs to be understood on a group level. Only then can the multipersonal matrix of the group reveal its capacity as a fitting environment to promote the various ways for growth and maturation, including the capacity for love and loving.
Doron (2018) describes the dissolution of her group as a professional and personal trauma and tells us that she wrote her article also in order ‘. . . to get some closure and to understand . . . how one can cope with a romance in the group without losing the participants or the group as a whole.’
I want to interpret her experience of her group’s disintegration and loss further, as representing a traumatic event for her, comparable to the loss of a loved object. The writing and the publication of her article can thus be understood as constituting part of a decade long process of coping with the separation from and mourning for her lost group. I see her need to understand the dynamics also as a labour of love. In faithful Freudian fashion, she has been able to use sublimation of her libido in making space for thinking and reflection about romance in the group, and can now present the group analytic community with her thoughts on the issue. On a theoretical level, she analyses romance in the group as a particular phenomenon of a sub-group and the defensive dynamics that may accompany this, like inclusion, exclusion, acting out and secrecy, and adds Bion’s basic assumption of pairing and the concomitant underlying fears of annihilation and psychosis as another reference. The events in her group reveal that the sub-grouping and the focus on the couple/pair were both harmful influences for the functioning of the group. But, she concludes quite rightly, these concepts do not sufficiently describe the impact of romance—and I want to add: love—on the group. While romance in the group may harm the group’s functioning and jeopardize group members’ ability to use the group, she says that romance also has positive aspects, under two conditions: if it is shared and worked through in the group, and secondly if the goals of the couple and the group are the same. These, I believe, are the crux of the matter, because the second condition is a precondition of the first. Only if both, the group and the couple, agree that impulses, thoughts and feelings are not acted upon, but kept on a symbolic level, is the therapeutic environment of the group kept intact. If these conditions are met, Doron says in quoting Moeller, then ‘love, in brief, is group-creating (2002: 487)’.
When I first read Doron’s article, I felt reminded of the group analytic premise described by Garland (1982) to take the non-problem seriously, because it seemed obvious to me that the real problem for her group was not the problem of romance. The group’s boundary breach through the ‘afterparty’ points to the real challenge the group was setting for their two conductors, who were too inexperienced to confront this issue effectively. This, in combination with the inability to think about the effect of their own intimate relationship on the group, in terms of envy, competition and the oedipal dynamics involved, or to talk about the feelings regarding the combined individual and group therapy that took place for several of the patients in this group, I would consider the real reasons for the ‘serious crisis’ that developed in the group. We are not always aware that our groups know, albeit unconsciously, what goes on and that we may unconsciously convey to the group how much—or how little—we as conductors are able to process and think about. It is a well-known premise that the patient can only go as far as their therapist is able to go, because the unconscious recognizes all unconscious communications. I imagine that the group was somewhat aware, as I said albeit unconsciously, that both their conductors were out of their depth and did not know how to hold the group competently. This then resulted in the formation of a designated couple, which demonstrated the inability to hold things together, visible to all. The romantic couple failed eventually and the conductors were blamed by the rejected part of the couple for her suffering, but I would interpret that this was also said on behalf of the group as a whole. Everyone was suffering. Doron painfully acknowledges that due to the conductors limited capacity owing to their inexperience they could not ‘understand, translate and help the participants digest and contain the unconscious group events’. Thus the group eventually failed and disbanded too.
Aran approaches the topic of love in the group from a slightly different angle. She notices that the more open attitude towards transference love in psychoanalysis is not yet generally shared in group analytic literature, apart from Nitsun (2006). She quotes an example from Anthony and Foulkes (1957), which interestingly leads her to conclude that analytic group therapy may be more conducive to working through issues of love than the individual setting, and uses the events from her own group, which she describes in this article, somewhat as evidence to support this thesis. She tells us that a member of the group asked to meet her privately to reveal he had fallen in love, and following this asks permission to meet privately with his beloved, another group member, outside the group to tell her about it. Here I found myself in a similar place as I did in regard to Doron’s article, because I again remembered Garland’s (1982) suggestion to take the non-problem seriously. While Aran got supervisory advice in regard to the second request, it seems she did not critically consider at the time the appropriateness of the first request. I fully agree with her that ‘love is a generative force’ and needs to be supported, but I wonder why it did not occur to her that the experience of falling in love could be shared in the group and with the group in the first place.
What is so frightening and supposedly dangerous about love and desire that the acknowledgement of it needs to be taken out of the social context, out of the group and dealt with on an individual level? Here attention to the patient’s history might have been in place and might have offered some explanation for the need to split the two spheres. Because in the end, it is our early experiences, nurtured and developed in all the different matrices of the groups we were part of in our lives, where our attitude and our capacity for love, our hopes and fears about it, emerge out of, as Moeller (2002: 497) remarks. Why is love generally seen as belonging to the individual and the couple and not considered a social phenomenon? Why are we so secret, so frightened about it? There are reasons for this in our personal and, perhaps even more importantly, in our families’ history. In addition there are cultural roots for the repression and condemnation of love and sexuality in the religious histories of humanity, not just Christianity, leading to suffering and damage and the abuse of power by the various bodies of faith, which I cannot further go into here.
Love and desire are complex, because they entail the possibility of rejection. Love may not be reciprocated and this is what occurred in Aran’s group when the couple met in private. Inclusion and exclusion dynamics, perhaps also shame about the rejection and anger by the imposed upon party, made it difficult to disclose all this in the group as it had been agreed before. And there would have been envy from the rest of the group about the special out-of-group attention. However, we are told that eventually the whole group made good use of talking about love, and an atmosphere of intimacy developed. Nevertheless, the originator of all this, despite benefiting in the relationship with his wife, left the group feeling ‘let down’. His love had not been reciprocated, and he blamed the group. Anan’s quote of Tennyson, ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all’ (Tennyson, 1974) contains a wisdom, Aran’s patient had not understood, let alone integrated. I agree with Aran that the integration of love is complicated and that the work on this in the group and for the group is essential. Learning to love and to be sexually intimate derives from our experiences in our original family group, but it can also take place in therapy. But love and loss are connected. Learning to love and learning to lose is part of psychological maturation and development, and both require the capacity to deal with separation and to tolerate disappointment and disillusionment.
Aran herself reflects in retrospect on her decision to grant permission for the meeting of two patients outside of the group in private and interprets it as a partially unconscious enactment on her part. She is aware that she was identified with her patient’s emotional needs, but also recognizes her own agenda in rebelling against her training by trying out something new. She points out that Nitsun (2006) insists that ‘the conductor’s emotional involvement is crucial in sexual matters’, and in acknowledgement of this she later asked the group to explore their reactions to her decision. To take responsibility for her effect on the group in this way I consider as excellent. It led to the possibility for the group to discuss love and different kinds of love, which enabled further integration in that an earlier silent group member could now share their history of loving.
I valued Aran’s article especially for spelling out clearly how important the conductor’s role and participation is in and for the group. It is essential that the effect of the conductor’s counter-transferences and their implications are recognized. While I was surprised when a patient in my group declared that he had fallen in love with me, I was also personally pleased and was able to respond in saying ‘thank you’, but I flushed. Obviously, this led to further exploration in the group. I had been aware of how much I loved working with this group and how much I liked all its members. Analytic group therapy needs this awareness, that we as the conductor are part and parcel of the group. Our contribution is essential. But we are not just contributing consciously, with smart interpretations, theoretical wisdom, professional experience and positive appreciation of our patients, but even more so unconsciously, in that our personal attitudes as well as our personal difficulties are always communicated to the whole of the group, even if we are not aware of it. My group senses when I had a bad day, they know which of them I find most difficult to deal with. They know how I think, what I feel and what I value, because I demonstrate this in each and every session. And they know when something goes wrong and I make a mistake, and these days, as a mature group, they will challenge me.
I want to express my gratitude to both authors for their openness. It is not easy to admit mistakes. But Winnicott (1987a) told us, that our mistakes are a necessary component of the therapy. If we can think about the mistake, it might turn out to be the stumbling stone, thrown into our path by the unconscious, presenting us with the next step for further development. This is why enactments, also by the conductor, may become necessary. It is not by accident that the openness to admit failure becomes possible when love and its vicissitudes are the issue in the group. Love opens up.
These two articles have given me the opportunity to think about love in the group and how essential it is that this experience becomes enriching and not a ‘problem’. My conclusion that the conductor holds a decisive role in that respect, repeats Moeller’s earlier statement ‘. . . within the group, the development of love depends on the group conductor’s living bisexuality and capacity for love (Moeller, 2002: 497)’.
As a Jungian analyst in addition to my role as a group analyst, I want to mention here the work of the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann (1956, 1973, 1994), who has written extensively about Eros as the organizing principle of psychological development. Neumann’s frame of reference encompasses in addition to individual development also the phylogenetic development of psyche and consciousness. He suggests that Eros, our instinct and desire to love and to be loved, plays a decisive role in human development on all levels, for the individual as well as for the group. On the group analytic side, Nitsun (2006) matches that, when he says that eroticism actually is the organizing principle that facilitates the development of the group.
I believe we have in and for our groups the task as conductors to acknowledge the importance—not the problem—of love. We have to take responsibility in that respect. As it is part of the job description of a group analyst to promote open communication in the group, this must include communication about love and sexuality without too much embarrassment, defensiveness or anxiety. If we cannot do it, how can the group? We need to encourage our groups to take their hearts in their hands and confront the thorny issues that are unavoidably encountered in the endeavour to reach the roses, which so often symbolize love, desire and sexuality.
Last but not least I want to draw the attention to the fact that both authors responded to here are women. As am I. This is not a coincidence. Perhaps it is easier to talk about ‘love’ as a woman, because love is often seen as belonging to the domain of the feminine. Love may well be a gender issue, and therefore lacking proper professional currency in male dominated fields or organizations. To consider love as purely ‘romantic’, mystical and not quite real may well be a defence and I would like to challenge that. We know that it is ‘love’ that grows babies, concretely through sexual intercourse and after birth through the mother’s or carer’s hands-on primary maternal preoccupation or love (Winnicott 1987b). It is also the connecting binding force of Eros, relationship or love, which helps our patients to grow and develop. Eros or love, the energy that brings us into being, also manifests in therapy within the group, even if this love and eroticism is seen as symbolic and must not be acted out.
Neumann (1994) points out that it is an essential and unavoidable task for women nowadays to develop a conscious psychological awareness of who they are, which includes both the traditionally considered feminine as well as masculine attributes, in order to remain mentally healthy. Men, he says, can still get away and function sufficiently professionally in our current western societies without becoming conscious of their own more feminine considered qualities. This difference denotes the origins and reasons for the split between love and sexuality, and I believe for the increasing relationship difficulties in western societies. But things are changing. Attitudes to gender, love and sexuality are shifting profoundly. Group analysis has an important contribution to make in that respect.