Abstract
I am writing from my perspective as a white woman and a mother, who specialises in working with group-analytic larger groups. It was written in the UK, in May 2020, five months after the virus, COVID-19, first spread to Europe and threatened to destroy life as we had known it. My experience of working with and participating in larger groups online is described. I also make some observations about the possibility of emerging into, what many express hope for; a more equitable ‘new normal’ worldwide.
Context
Group analysis was formulated by SH Foulkes (1948), a refugee psychoanalyst who took the risk of inviting his individual patients into a group in the years before the Second World War. During the war he honed these theories by turning the military hospital at Northfield into one of the first therapeutic communities in Britain. He was joined there by PB de Maré, amongst others. de Maré was impressed by the way Foulkes managed to change the atmosphere of the entire hospital by converting all the groups into working groups and holding them and the whole institution in mind. But de Maré always puzzled about why Foulkes had never taken what he thought was the next obvious step; by inviting everybody together into a large group. So, after the war and, as soon as it was possible, de Maré (1972) did just that and began to develop his theory. My work and approach to larger groups is based on this theory.
By encouraging large groups to meet, de Maré took Foulkes’ (1965: 24) idea that ‘the individual is preconditioned to the core by his community even before he is born, and is imprinted vitally by the group which brings him up’ on to a much larger palate by including the social context more directly. In contrast to Foulkes, de Maré did not see the group as a place where the norms of society were replicated as fixtures of reality but instead as a place where these norms could be challenged and rethought in the presence of others in an ‘as if’ societal setting. As de Maré (1991: 77) suggested, ‘It is not the individual who is unconscious but the culture that does not allow the thought to be voiced’. This is a significant idea since it links our thinking to the prevailing mores of the socio-political context. Every individual is encouraged to make sense of that social context and to see that it too can be influenced to change. de Maré saw the larger group as a place where participants have the opportunity to gather their capacity to think together about how to humanize themselves and in turn, society.
I began this article in the UK, in May 2020, five months after the virus COVID-19 first spread to Europe and threatened to destroy life as we had known it. COVID-19 is not only extremely contagious but also terrifying as it makes its ‘sneaky’ passage through the body of our society to threaten our personal physical bodies. To prevent its spread, governments implemented various strategies including what was described as, ‘Lockdown’. In Britain the strapline was, ‘Stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives’.
Since then, along with most of my colleagues, all my teaching and conducting of groups has been on-line. It feels like an impoverished form of communication, but it does have the advantage of enabling me to continue working with people living all over the world without leaving my study.
Screen images instead of physical people in the room
Staring at a screen displaying a series of videos in boxes each showing the head and shoulders of an individual has replaced sitting in a circle facing each other in a room. For most people, apart from those with a very powerful computer, this also means that one can only see at most 25 people at a time. To see more than that one has to repeatedly scroll through multiple screens. Although the box of the person speaking appears on the front screen with a yellow highlight around it, being able to see the reactions of those listening is more complicated and takes some discipline. This is very different to sitting in a large space surrounded by one, two, three, or more, circles of chairs.
I remember, conducting my first larger group session on-line, how intensely I missed the circle in the room. This was repeated every time I subsequently found myself in this position. I like feeling the atmosphere of the group around me in the room. I feel it in my body. I miss no longer being able to take in micro-sounds, micro-movements and smell. Looking at the screen, I no longer have a chair next to me, empty or occupied, noting who it is, who is opposite me, who is sitting together. I have learnt that how people sit and how they come into the room are often early signals of what might be happening or about to happen in the group.
With Zoom, there are other things to notice. I use a waiting room. There I can observe who is early, and who is late, who is having trouble connecting, who is trying to connect using a smart phone, who cannot get their video or sound running. Once they are in the Zoom Room, I look at who is sitting with enough light on their face, who is close enough to the screen, who is sitting in darkness or so far away from the screen that I can hardly see their faces. These are different clues and many of them require technical support from me or other members of the group.
We also discover that each Zoom box is a snippet into a person’s life. It shows a name but not always the name of the person sitting in front of the screen, which can be very disorienting. It is a strange experience, sitting in my study, talking to people in other parts of the world, also sitting in their homes or offices, and sometimes in personal spaces such as their bedrooms. To prepare participants, I prefer not to send out click-on invitations but instead provide detailed instructions describing how to get on-line using Zoom with my Room Number. This approach is one way of replicating the usual experience of entering a space I have provided for them, but it also requires participants to take responsibility for making the connection and getting to the group on time. Although not always possible, it alerts them to the idea that we need to engage in a partnership with the aim of protecting that space by preparing it and refraining from bringing food or drink into the session. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to provide a safe-enough space in a person’s own home. I have been told about clients needing to find alternatives such as sitting in their car pretending to talk on the phone to a friend or needing to find a quiet place outside the home.
Many people find themselves having to make a huge leap in their technical proficiency, which involves a special shame of its own that brings up many earlier learning difficulties particularly amongst those of us who are older and did not grow up with smart phones and computers. Interestingly my first experience of teaching online was with a group of young professionals who had few difficulties connecting. It was not until I found myself working with a more mixed age group that I discovered the fear of technology. Having good-enough technology, and sufficient knowledge, not to mention sufficiently good internet provision, also mirrors class and wealth in our society and across the world. Who of us can be included? Who not?
Contagion and fear
In the Oxford English dictionary contagion is described as, ‘a disease that can be spread by people touching each other’ or ‘as something bad that spreads quickly by being passed from person to person’. One example is political extremism, often generated in an atmosphere of fear to counteract the fear. The word comes from the Latin, contagio(n-), con meaning ‘together’ added to tangere meaning ‘to touch’ (Oxford English Dictionary). So, it also refers to the spread of contagious thoughts that often arise in an atmosphere of fear, usually destructive, as well as physical illness. The current pandemic involves both.
Arundhathi Roy (2020), the Indian author and activist, writing in the Financial Times recently describes the fear engendered.
Who can use the term ‘gone viral’ now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything more—a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables—without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? (Roy, 2020)
COVID-19 is never far away. In one seminar I conducted on the origins of creativity in the larger group, the reality of COVID-19 began to break through as I engaged the participants in an exercise on ‘working with emptiness’. To start they were given a blank sheet of paper and asked to reach into their handbag or pockets, take out the contents and place them beside the paper. They are then instructed to stare at the blank sheet and to imagine creating a form they would like to see on the paper and then to make use of the objects to hand to create that. One person discovered with a shock that she had a personal, portable anti-virus kit in her bag. It included a little pack of tissues, a small drinking cup, a small bottle of water, a tube of hand cream and a small bottle of hand sanitiser. Another person created a rainbow by arranging all her shopping and credit cards in a semicircle. This is the symbol for the National Health Service in the UK, people put rainbows in their windows, and they are everywhere!
In mid-May, I woke up from a dream that I had just arrived at Arlanda airport in Stockholm, a place where I go at least four times a year to conduct an ongoing median group, and realized, as I came out after it was too late to go back, that I had not picked up my checked-in suitcase from the belt. I had two other carry-on bags with me. It is unusual for me to check in a bag when I go to Stockholm, so I kept wondering why I had done that this time. After all the suitcase was not very full. I also had not packed my little bag of Swedish crowns or my mobile phone. I was stuck with no phone and no money. And, I did not know how to collect my bag.
I was then with a friend who accompanied me to go back to the airport to collect my bag. There was another person with us in the bus or train or in the car and I suddenly realized that we were not keeping a two-metre distance and woke up very concerned.
I was terrified that my usual vigilance had left me. After some reflection I began to notice a pattern. After working with or taking part in larger groups during COVID, I felt overwhelmed by a fear of contagion despite the fact I was not leaving the confines of my house. I felt deep terror and this dream came after several full days of groups. I noticed that I felt especially disoriented after working ‘in countries’ where a completely different set of rules and understanding seemed to exist particularly in ‘Scandinavia’, where this dream was set. When I was last there virtually, I discovered that some people were still working face-to-face with clients, while others were staying in their summer houses. They thought my concern was completely ‘over the top’. I was faced with a completely different reality from that which existed in the UK and it was difficult to evaluate. In other groups, with a membership based mainly on colleagues living in the UK, I have noticed the tendency to focus on clients’ fears rather than their own. It surprised me. Even though the fear usually emerges in one way or another, the words feel disconnected in a kind of riff or litany of how terrible it all is but also how this could be an opportunity for change. The feelings are there in the subtext yet are often difficult to stay with and go beyond. COVID engenders so much fear, verging on terror, but that is not easy to think about or talk about.
That is the group on the other side of the screen. On my side, as a woman in her 70s, I am considered to be at special risk, vulnerable if I contract the disease so advised to stay locked down in my house. As several colleagues have told me, until this pandemic, they had never thought of themselves as old or especially vulnerable. Being advised to self-isolate was a shock. I was filled with terror as the stories of how terrible this disease is and how terrible the treatment, if you need to go into intensive care, can be. I am also told that few people of my age recover. Although I have my own reasons to be afraid, when a group is unable to engage with these same or similar fears, I am often infected by an increased ‘viral’ load. Afterwards I suffer the fear of contagion as well as the contagion of fear through unconscious transmission as in my dream. My family history makes me very susceptible to picking up such feelings that are being avoided. As the daughter of a father who was not only a refugee from Nazi Germany but also interned as an enemy alien by the British, I grew up learning what it feels like when powerful experiences are not talked about. Silence was maintained despite an atmosphere of intense sadness and volatility surrounding my father.
Hope and despair in the larger group
To help us deal with the situation brought upon us by COVID-19, my professional members’ society decided to host a new initiative, a weekly large group for all its members on Zoom. These groups attract between 110 and 140 participants from about 26 countries. It has proved so popular that membership of the society has been swelled as people who live on the other side of the world have recognized, they could join in without having to travel. They could become active members of the community. Each meeting has two different co-convenors, or co-conductors. Initially they were both members of the Management Committee (MC) but by the fifth meeting a member of the society was invited to work in partnership with a member of the MC. The first time this change was made, I was asked to co-convene with Kurt Husemann of Berlin. Another member of the MC, Alice Mulasso, joined us to deal with the technical aspects of the meeting.
It is important to accept that the large group is not just a large small group. It has specific dynamics that directly arise due to its size. The socio-political context beyond the family is introduced so what happens in the group is understood differently. Socio-political trauma takes the foreground rather than family trauma. As the numbers increase so does the frustration, often exponentially, as there is never enough space or time for everybody to speak. The task then for everyone is finding a way of working with that frustration by thinking about the experience and speaking one’s thoughts with the aim of developing a creative dialogue. This process is not natural but takes learning and perseverance. It then ‘offers a structure or medium for linking inner world with cultural context and is able to establish a unique dimension, that of a microculture’ (de Maré, 1991: 3). Gathering people together ‘just to talk to each other’ in a larger group can be both personally and socially emancipating as it enables hidden power structures that predicate our socio-political environment to be revealed and interrogating them with others, can change our position in relation to the social world. With the possibility of recognizing in real time how personal experiences relate to what happens at a socio-political level, we can begin to understand how that context has been shaped, and in turn, how it has shaped us. With more people in the room than in a conventional small group, the wealth of experience and thinking capacity available make it a unique place for such an endeavour.
To begin with and many times over the weeks, people continue to express their pleasure at seeing the faces of members in our community. That is the initial reaction but as with any agenda-free group larger than a small group, it can be very difficult, even terrifying, especially for newcomers. It is daunting in its unfamiliarity. As a result, it is not unusual to hear desperate calls for someone, anyone, usually the conductors, to deal with the inevitable frustration and to make it more comfortable by setting rules. In the as-if socio-political setting of the large group, this demand is akin to asking for a dictator rather than sweating through the hard work of building a democracy where the citizens negotiate the laws. As if that was not difficult enough, the larger group also tends to arouse long-forgotten terrors from early life, for example, insufficient care leading to poor identity formation, as well as residues of transmitted social traumas that have been largely forgotten. It is working with these often oscillating and potentially powerful reactions that give the conductor, or conducting team, their role in establishing an environment that is facilitating enough for the sharing of thoughts and experiences in a social setting. The current COVID context with all its accompanying terrors and insecurity about the future makes the larger group almost too much to bear but it is also a rich seedbed for such fears to emerge. It can provide a unique space for individuals to link personal memory with wider socio-political events and to have current and historical traumatic social experiences witnessed often for the first time.
In this group, still in progress, we have had a unique opportunity to think together about the pandemic and its effect on each of us personally and in our home countries. I learnt many new things, that I might have been able to read about, but to hear the voices, the accents and different languages describe their experiences told me so much more. Arriving from all over the world into the shared on-line space is a unique experience revealing similarities and differences in each of our national consciousnesses. It can be inspiring and sobering, providing insights way beyond what we learn from the media. One person living in Australia thought her country was becoming like a police state. She told us that neighbours were encouraged to report on neighbours for ‘not obeying’ the rules. A person from Slovenia was feeling bullied by his government because he was being told what he could and could not do. Scandinavians are expected to take responsibility for each other. There the numbers of dead have remained low. In New Zealand the PM offers a capacity for holding that is rare in politicians. Instead of statistics, she talks about people and how they are faring. They too now have almost no new cases. The language used in New Zealand is in extreme contrast to that of the British PM who prefers to talk about numbers and percentages, which tend to be meaningless. He acted out his disdain by not taking the COVID threat seriously, boasting about not washing his hands or keeping his distance. Inevitably he ended up in intensive care fighting for his life. On the morning of his return from hospital, he gave a rousing speech as if we were going to war. In fact, at one point he made a slip, forgetting he was talking about a frightening disease, not a war! But just like war, the reality of the deaths is sanitized in Britain, first by lying about the actual numbers and then by avoiding the truth.
Comparing the weekly clapping for the heroic NHS staff and other key workers in Britain with the persistently painful images of grey, army lorries in convoy at night through the streets of Bergamo carrying the dead for cremation lingers on in my mind. We heard that in India, where there is not enough food, people who had come to the cities to work were being sent back to their villages, but having no money, they were having to walk there and many die from exhaustion and hunger along the way. In South Africa, the townships, that are no more than a collection of corrugated iron shanty towns, are being dismantled and people are moved out on the pretext of creating more acceptable sanitary conditions. And then of course there is Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel and Trump in the US, each with their version of imagined magical powers to accompany their fierce denial of the COVID threat, while they focus on their economy at the expense of human health. The detail, the hell of all this, is then masked by reporting league tables of statistics between countries, who is doing better?
In the group, people oscillated between taking conversation seriously and being flippant. In one session it suddenly dropped to a more significant level. An English speaker asked for translation of someone’s broken English. There ensued a long discussion about whether this was a racist comment, othering the person with a strong accent. Marianne Faithful’s (1979) song Broken English was then invoked. Looking at the words, brought another dimension—the futility of fighting and war.
Could have come through anytime Cold lonely, your return What are you fighting for? It’s not my security It’s just an old war Not even a cold war Don’t say it in Russian Don’t say it in German Say it in broken English Say it in broken English Lose your father, your husband Your mother, your children What are you dying for? It’s not my reality It’s just an old war Not even a cold war Don’t say it in Russian Don’t say it in German Say it in broken English Say it in broken English What are you fighting for? What are you fighting for? What are you fighting for? What are you fighting for? What are you fighting for? What are you fighting for?
And then, almost without a gap, Leonard Cohen’s (2008), There’s a Crack in Everything, was invoked to remind us that it isn’t all darkness and hopeless. Nothing is perfect and perhaps the lack of perfection brings something new.
The birds they sang At the break of day Start again I heard them say Don’t dwell on what Has passed away Or what is yet to be Yeah the wars they will Be fought again The holy dove She will be caught again Bought and sold And bought again The dove is never free Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in We asked for signs The signs were sent The birth betrayed The marriage spent Yeah the widowhood Of every government Signs for all to see I can’t run no more With that lawless crowd While the killers in high places Say their prayers out loud But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up A thundercloud And they’re going to hear from me Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in You can add up the parts You won’t have the sum You can strike up the march There is no drum Every heart, every heart to love will come But like a refugee Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in Ring the bells that still can ring (ring the bells that still can ring) Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in That’s how the light gets in That’s how the light gets in
Valuable or vulnerable?
With a very large face-to-face group of over 100 people, it is rarely possible to arrange the chairs in a single circle or in tiers. This means that it is not possible for everyone to see each other’s mouths and eyes, to be able to hear. Depending on how the chairs are arranged this often means that a small group is formed in the centre, which then becomes a place where those who are there talk to each other as if the rest of the group behind them and out of immediate sight are not present. It becomes a place of privilege and as everyone realizes that, competition for a place in the inner circle emerges. People start leaving their bags on seats to reserve their position. This arrangement is often seen as representing the ‘inner circle’ in society, the government, the upper class, the establishment, those who set the agenda for the rest of us. In an online group, those who speak appear on the viewer’s front screen establishing a similar hegemony. The rest are out of sight and out of mind on multiple screens. In this multinational large group, this dynamic can be seen to reflect the imbalance in wealth and resources now and historically through colonization and its after effects.
As COVID-19 is never far away, it forces upon us a consciousness that even though we imagine we live in nation states and can control our boundaries, actually the virus pays no attention to that. It is frightening to realize that although we are locked down and isolated not only in our houses but in our countries also, the contagion crosses all boundaries and we are all connected. Some people in the group try to comfort us by telling us that we are all facing the same COVID-19. Unfortunately, the resources available to protect us are very different. It is difficult to face this imbalance both within each country and across the world as it is largely dependent on the political system and the economic resources made available. If you are homeless or part of a multi-generational family living in just one room, or in a country where the available resources are concentrated on a wealthy few, it is almost impossible to self-isolate and impossible to get treatment. As Arundhati Roy (2020) points out, ‘in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health’.
A significant dream was told at the beginning of the fourth meeting that brought the history of colonialism into focus. The dreamer was in a shop trying to decide whether to buy some Dove or Imperial Leather soap. It was pointed out that Dove soap is white and the symbol of peace while Imperial Leather is brown and brings in a resonance with imperialism.
In the larger group, it is noticeable how much those of us from the privileged northern hemisphere, mostly based in Europe, cannot stop ourselves colonizing the space by constantly speaking. Experienced people ever so subtly taking control! Those with English as a first language tending to dominate most of all by establishing a European perspective and culture that ‘others’ the rest of the world. As one British born black man pointed out, once a person or group has been ‘othered’ it is easy for them to be erased, to make them not exist, their needs and perspectives no longer taken into account. This is not new as anyone from the former colonies can tell you. Colonialism dies hard. The political overtones in many of our societies in the current context are obvious.
It was difficult to allow silence and there was little curiosity about what is going on elsewhere outside of Europe. We had unconsciously ‘othered’ the young members from India, Singapore, South Africa and Turkey. We could not help ourselves despite consciously inviting them to tell their different stories, to speak. But, with a history of being colonized, from their point of view, it is so difficult to feel they have the right to take space to talk and for us to allow it. We were told a story by a young woman from India as an allegory of her experience of trying to speak in the group. ‘Have any of you been to Mumbai?’ she asked. No one had. ‘If you want to catch a local train and if you want to get a seat, you have to rush into the moving train before it stops. Some days I don’t have the energy, so I just stand by the door to breath in fresh air.’ In this story we are also given not only a picture of what it means to cope with participating fully in a large group when you are not part of the prevailing culture but also what it means to live in a country drained of its resources and governed by a silencing government verging on dictatorship. People give up seeking to find their own voice and instead rely on stronger voices often becoming dependent on strong charismatic leaders.
The group is not entirely blind to its own process but finds it difficult to take it seriously and to think about how it can be changed. It is only a marginal improvement on the establishment in Britain with its blindness to its own racism and colonial past (Jones, 2015). I suspect it is no different in other European countries that also built their wealth on the abundant resources of their colonies. While the group attempted to struggle with it, our need as Europeans to stay in control took precedence. It seems it is built into the DNA of our social unconscious 2 . As black equality consultant and trainee group analyst, Guilaine Kinouani, has pointed out othering is situated within the painful historical ‘context of some of the greatest atrocities known to humankind, including the decimation and murder of millions of African and indigenous people and, the enslavement, displacement and exploitation of millions of others’ (Kinouani: 2020: 61).
Recently it was reported with some shock that three quarters of the deaths of people working in the NHS in Britain are people from black and ethnic minority groups (BAME). Even this acronym is a racist designation that has replaced the United Nations’ definition (UN Economic and Social Affairs, 2016) of social exclusion to describe people who not only
suffer material deprivation but also lack of agency or control over important decisions as well as feelings of alienation and inferiority . . . Lack of participation in political processes, in civic life or in the labour market are construed as aspects of overall social exclusion. (UN Economic and Social Affairs, 2016:18,14)
The initial response was that the deaths were either due to poverty and/or underlying health problems such as high blood pressure and Type Two diabetes, or possibly genetics, but as time has gone by it is beginning to emerge that something more subtle and structurally racist is operating. It turns out that almost all of these people originate in the former colonies, many of whom are members of families, who were invited to Britain from the Caribbean after the Second World War, to provide much needed labour in the NHS and public transport system. More often than not it is these same people who are asked to do the most dangerous work on the front line often without adequate coronavirus protection. It is a terrible irony that they are dying while ensuring the NHS does not collapse and yet are expected to pay £400 a year for their health care. Talking about this in the group gave me a new thought; it is important to document all deaths, not just those directly from the virus but also those as a result of all the fallout through increased rates of domestic abuse and the postponement of regular treatments and operations for other life-threatening diseases such as cancer as well.
Change to a new normal?
In a Zoom larger group, in addition to the overt conversation on video, there is the duplicate possibility of engaging in ‘Chat’ by sending text messages to either particular individuals within the group or to the whole group. It enables people to contribute without speaking. In a way it can be seen to replicate ‘whispering to the person sitting next to you’ in a face-to-face large group but when a ‘Chat’ is sent to everyone, it has the advantage of allowing everyone to see what everyone else is whispering. I have noted that while conducting several other larger groups, smaller than this large group, the Chat function is hardly used. At first sight, it appears to be a response to size and frustration. ‘My audio is so bad “Chat” helps me to communicate.’ And, ‘I don’t know why it’s so much easier here.’ ‘It’s one at a time.’ On closer examination it appears to have a more vital function, not least because of the increasing consternation it generated.
In this group, ‘Chat’ was used by an active sub-group. Many found it unbearable wanting the conductors to ban it. ‘Please conductor take control and remove the chat. I can’t cope with looking at two strands at once.’ ‘Why do we allow it?’ ‘It’s too much to pay attention to all at once, it’s splitting etc.’ ‘Can’t someone organize it?’ ‘What does it mean?’ Others thought the ‘Chat’ was an example of the psychological mechanism of splitting. I was wondering what was being split and not being held together? Thinking on, I thought, isn’t our world split into those who are privileged and those who not? And, aren’t these sections in our society separated by invisible walls, called class, that are difficult to acknowledge, face and take into account? It seemed to me that ‘Chat’ was giving expression to how it feels to be outside the mainstream—part of the underclass. It enabled expression of what cannot be easily said or heard, just as riots, demonstrations placards and graffiti do. It reminded me of my time as an architect working in social housing where I learnt that when I engaged residents in conversations about improvements to their estate, the writing and drawing on newly painted walls stopped.
Increasingly within this large group, ‘Chat’ was seen as a subversive activity by some and counter cultural by others. Some even thought it violent and dangerous, inviting repressive responses similar to those that exist in mainstream society. It was difficult just to stay with what was and to make sense of it. The ‘Chat’ messages were uncomfortable, yet they often held the seeds of change. As someone who struggled for many years to speak coherently in the larger group, it seems a perfectly legitimate response to the difficulty of finding a way in. I did not use ‘Chat’, although I read it as I went along and spoke my thoughts but noticed that most things I said got lost in the invisible wall that seems to absorb most things that are difficult to understand or take in. As one message on Chat suggested, ‘Chat’ provides a voice of the unheard and the ignored. In the main group contribution can be erased and negated. ‘“Chat” will not be silenced. But some people will try very hard to silence it’. In the context of this article, it is interesting to note this message on ‘Chat’, ‘the underlying anxiety about death was brought up but ignored’.
As the lockdown wears on, the anxiety in all of us increases. There is agitation to break out of the constraints on our movement, to see our loved ones and there is hunger for physical touch. For many it becomes so unbearable that it propels many into addictions such as gambling, drink, food and drugs, a state of mind develops in society that demands decisions, even when none can be made, and action taken to release us all out of the painful situation before it is time. It is very similar to the demands in the large group to deal with the confusion and frustration. Politically it is a state of mind that promotes dictators, with the hope that they will take control and make it all better.
When anxiety is high in a large group there is an unconscious tendency to try to simplify the complexity into something more recognizable or familiar, by attempting to turn the multi-person dialogue into an as-if conversation between two people. One version to this dynamic is through polarizing contributions into opposites such as right and wrong, political right and left, rich and poor, old and young, and men and women. There are infinite possibilities! COVID-19 being the disease that most affects the old is ready-made for acting out this polarization as is the idea that there are ‘good countries’, with low death rates and the ‘bad countries’ with high death rates. When the British government thought it was doing well, it published league tables showing its success but as time went by it turned out the statistics advertised were false, only seeding more anxiety. One week into the large group a German colleague expressed her concern for those of us who were British. Significantly what she said was heard as an attack.
Imagining how we might emerge into another, better world is what is so difficult. Being part of the dynamic in the large group helped me to realize how deeply embedded racist thinking and colonialism is in the social unconscious of our European culture. Our thinking is framed by centuries of actively draining the riches of the southern hemisphere into the northern hemisphere without us really being aware of it. So much of our wealth was acquired through colonial domination that supports our economic system and underpins capitalism too. Our assumptions and our behaviour are both deeply rooted and framed by these inequitable unethical foundations. So what hope is there for a new future, for the ‘new normal’ that people talk about?
As Roy (2020) puts it so graphically,
Unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit and . . . reversed the direction of flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics . . . in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to fix it, or look for a better engine. Whatever it is, coronavirus had made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.
COVID-19 brought us a glimpse of a new arcadia with fewer cars, aeroplanes, clean skies and tweeting birds. As we witnessed in the group, we can invite it, but something deeper needs to occur. Perhaps those of us who are used to speaking can try to remain quiet, allow some silence to persist, to trust that something new will emerge. We don’t know if it will. In the group there is a realization that either nothing will change or that everything will change but it might not be what we hope for. Just as we do not know the future of the pandemic, we do not know what the future will bring economically. This level of insecurity is difficult to live with especially when we recognize that any restorative economic action tends to lie at the door of the poorest in society. History tells us that the need for some clarity about what cannot be predicted often leads to extreme and terrifying political consequences. The rise of neoliberalism with its attendant austerity, the extreme right and dictatorship as happened after the financial crash of 2008, is often referred to, not forgetting the shadow of the Third Reich that haunts many of us. Alongside that is hope that something fundamental could be changed to maintain the clean atmosphere and bird song.
Unfortunately, from observing our attempts to deal with our own colonial bias in our large group I am pessimistic about the possibilities of creative change. Limitations in our thinking seem to be built into who we are. Even though we ask the young newcomers from the colonies to speak up, we are unable to facilitate that possibility. We are stuck. Asking them to speak up or telling them that they have to fight to make their voices heard feel patronizing. The structure does not change. Everything continues as it is.
To find a new normal will demand an emotional capacity, that I do not think yet exists, to interrogate the fundamental structures that not only underpin our western societies but our thinking as well. This is where the Chat function is so important. It represents a new normal that many found too difficult to embrace. Sitting alongside the verbal conversation, questions that challenge the accepted norms can be asked as it allows an underground process that points to issues that are being drowned out in the verbal exchange. It will take time as we are discovering in our large group.
In Plunder of the Commons, Guy Standing, a British economist at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) London, describes the war that is being waged against all organizations and mechanisms of society embodying values of social solidarity that have no price. As he says, ‘the war has been conducted most vehemently and incessantly against what historically has been known as the commons’. This ‘refers to all our shared natural resources—including the land, the forests, the moors and parks, the water, the minerals, the air—and all social, civic and cultural institutions that our ancestors have bequeathed to us . . .’ (Standing, 2019: ix).
The question he wonders about confronts us all, ‘How can we foster a more free, equal and ecological society?’ (Standing, 2019: back cover).
