Group Analysis

This paper concerns what I call ‘the Invisible Refugee’ and the exploration of this in the domains of both the external world and the internal world. I borrow the term ‘refugee’ from the external world, and consider its metaphorical aspects with regard to the internal world. I will illustrate my ideas with clinical data from one of my slow-open groups, and then offer a further theoretical comment.

In this keynote lecture given at the 17th GASI Symposium in Berlin, the main ideas informing the clinical work with foreign families and refugees conducted at an ethnopsychiatry clinic in France are outlined. The treatment methodology is described and case examples are presented to illustrate the way in which all healing practices are given serious consideration as valid therapeutic resources within the clinical setting and the importance of putting aside one’s assumptions and knowledge as therapists and caseworkers in order to access the knowledge and practices of people’s ‘natural’ groups in order to negotiate new and creative solutions to previously unknown problems.

I feel very honoured and am enormously pleased to have been invited to speak here at the 17th Symposium of the Group Analytic Society International in Berlin. It means a lot to me, to be able to speak here today, because Berlin is a very special place for me. It is here, in this town, that my Jewish grandfather met my Christian grandmother almost 100 years ago. They fell in love and about a year later my mother was born. 20 years later my Jewish grandfather was forced to leave Germany, together with his new family. Therefore, I never had a chance to get to know him. When I was 20, I myself left Germany to live in New Orleans, USA. I stayed there for five years and then returned to Germany. It cannot be denied, migration and refuge have always been an issue in my family and in my personal life, that is why I cannot talk about migration and refugees without emotions and without being moved. This can be sensed and felt also in the following explorations and thoughts about the emotional impact of mass migration.

In this article I will begin by thinking about how schools of psychotherapy come to be created, and argue that this is a political process rather than a ‘scientific’, technical or rational one. I describe ways in which practice can at times be unhelpfully rigidified into techniques which are used to build borders between schools. I follow this by a description of how Eliasian gossip is used to reinforce methodological silos.

Finally I consider group analysis’ relationship to psychoanalysis, science and the medical model in order to try to shed light on the question ‘one group analysis or many?’.

Responding to Farhad Dalal’s question ‘one group analysis or many?’ the author looks at contextual factors of working with groups, claiming that group therapists are different in different groups and adjusting to setting variables. He describes aspects of the ‘Goettingen Model of Group Psychotherapy’. This model offers variability in conducting groups within one theoretical concept. Different scientific approaches are integrated in order to adjust to different patients and settings. Many aspects (e.g. a marked intersubjective approach and working with an ‘responsive’ mode (‘antwortender modus’) are close to Dalal’s thinking. In contrast to Dalal, however, empirical evidence and evidence based therapies are seen as valuable parts of group psychotherapies and group analysis. Within this conceptual frame, working in and with groups is both—one group analysis and many.

On 27 August, 2015 two vessels with 550 migrants on board sank off the Libyan coast, and more than 400 persons were estimated to have drowned. Some credit this event as having coined the phrase ‘European refugee crisis’ that is still used to describe the present refugee situation in Europe. On 13 November 2015 a series of coordinated terrorist attacks took place in Paris and a northern suburb of the city. When a Syrian passport that belonged to an asylum seeker was found near the body of one of the gunmen, fear of Islamic State militants disguised as asylum seekers or refugees spread. This event, linked to similar tragedies that have occurred in many other countries before and since, evolved as a major symbol linking newcomers, and refugees in general, to terrorism and extreme forms of Islam.

When observing newcomers and local people in different host countries, in addition to accompanying societal reactions to multiple traumas, medical problems, legal, political, financial and other practical issues and security concerns, there is always an increased investment in large-group identity by both refugees and persons in the host countries. This article does not explore the psychology of asylum seekers, immigrants or refugees. It describes what large-group identity is, how it develops and why a population’s preoccupation with physical borders increases. Its aim is to examine shared psychological processes in European countries and the United States that manifest when perception of newcomers as the dangerous Other takes place.

This response is focused on the following question: What may be the specific group analytic point of view on phenomena as the resurgence of nationalism in the western world, the so-called refugee crisis and the confrontation with Islamism and Islamist terror? The guideline of this response will be the idea of the ‘group of individuals’, which Norbert Elias characterized as his main contribution to group analytic theory. The response will emphasize the significance of the Other for the formation of personal and collective identities. It will argue that we face the Other, not only outside our own group, but also inside, and that xenophobia goes hand in hand with the denial of real differences and conflicts inside one’s own group. Finally, the history of the German nation-state is discussed as an exemplary case.

This article presents the writings of Gregory van der Kleij, group analyst and Catholic priest, whose experiences of the holocaust during the Second World War shaped his thinking, not only as a therapist but also as a campaigner against the nuclear arms race. The author re-visits two significant articles on the group matrix published in this journal in the 1980s and introduces the reader to a little-known monograph addressed to the Catholic community which examines the moral dilemma faced by Christians during the Cold War. The monograph contains an exhortation to rise up in protest against what Gregory considers to be ‘the madness’ of high-level thinking on the morality of the nuclear deterrent.