First encounters of a Spanish Group Kind.

'To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness'.

Lady Bracknell from Oscar Wilde´s The Importance of being Ernest:

PREAMBLE

These are personal reflections on my experience (now some time ago) of attending in Sitges, a beautiful and seductive seaside town south of Barcelona, the 3er Congreso Nacional de la Asociacion de Psicoterapia Analitica Grupal (APAG). I approached the conference in a state of anxious anticipation, excited by the possibilities, hopeful that I might begin to make contact with Spanish colleagues, interested to meet keynote speaker Morris Nitsun - his anti-group having been profoundly important in my development as a group psychotherapist. The sun shone - more like summer than anything I could associate with late autumn - and added a strange air of unreality that I carried through the Congress.

FLOATING ON THE MEDITERRANEAN

The congress started with that great buzz that can go with such gatherings. This despite, as it did each day, starting between 45 minutes to an hour later than scheduled. These questions kept circulating in my mind: Is it important that therapy starts on time? Is it important that a gathering of therapists starts on time? Should we apply the same analytic rigor to ourselves as we do to our clients/patients? I decided I needed to keep an open mind about such things. Morris Nitsun, talked (through simultaneous translation) about the anti-group, and J. Garcia Badaracco, talked about the multi-family group. This provided fascinating and contrasting ideas and styles for the conference to work with. Being already familiar and strongly influenced by the anti-group gave me a solid base on which to think and feel my way into this large group of strangers.

Starting the psychotherapy session on time is something I’ve always taken for granted and something I'd always considered to be the front line of boundary management in the sense that to have a clear beginning is one vital element in the construction of a secure enough frame within which the created space potentiates therapy. My experience until coming to Spain was for this element to be essential to any analytic group, whether it involve patients or colleagues. Suddenly, here my need for temporal clarity has, during the course of two conferences attended, momentarily felt like a fussy, anal obsession. "Relax, this is the Mediterranean!"

THE SMALL GROUP

In my experience of organising conferences there has invariably been the logistical problem of finding a venue with a sufficient quantity of rooms to house the small group element. So I was not surprised nor disappointed to discover that all the small groups were to take place in one large room. Nearly 20 small circles evenly spread around the room. For me this has always felt like an interesting yet strange hybrid of the small and large group. Consequently with the inevitable noise of 20 groups side by side it was extremely difficult to hear what others were saying in my small group. But this was not the problem with the structure of the small groups - I think small groups in close proximity and inevitably intruding on one and other has significant symbolic meaning. We were faced with additional problems in my group, the most evident of which was for my part a fascinating spread of 4 languages struggling to communicate and as a result setting an awkward tone and somewhat disjointed pace - nonetheless this was what I wanted to work at - however, I remember my dismay to learn from our leader that the group had a task which was to take notes of our discussion in order to report back to the large group. Suddenly in one stroke the possibility of free floating and open dialogue in both large and small groups had been critically undermined. Task setting of this kind sets in motion a defensive process that detracts from the experience - the task becomes the hiding place from the conflict, intimacy or otherwise, potentiated by the group having been formed. The diminution in value of the small group as a useful object for conference members was confirmed for me by the subsequent cancellation of the second small group session - the manifest reasons provided were to do with catching up from time lost at the beginning of the day. To my surprise people seemed unruffled by this cancellation, causing me to wonder whether the congress had taken flight from surely the key element in any group conference - being together face to face in a circle.

THE LARGE GROUP

The large group suffered most from the task. Laborious, tedious feedback from the small groups dominated nearly half of the first session. According to Pat de Maré the large group is “an enormous opportunity for dialogue”. However, dialogue only accrues once the hate engendered by the large group setting is transformed into “endopsychic energy”, which in turn mobilizes dialogue.

“The individual member placed in a mutually frustrating structure either stays and hates or panics and runs away.” GROUP, Vol. 13, nos 3 & 4, 1989, p175, The History of Large Group Phenomena in Relation to Group Analytic Psychotherapy: The Story of the Median Group

Free-floating discussion was being sacrificed in the cause of a task of limited worth. An opportunity for a large group was being squandered. I say this because, large groups happen so rarely, being so notoriously difficult to set up. Here was a classic form of resistance to the large group and all that it might engender. My mounting frustration seemed to have no outlet until the subsequent open phase provided time for freer association. An additional impediment throughout the weekend was that all contributions were made with use of a microphone transported around the room by a number of conference assistants. I understand that one of the logistical problems endemic to the large group format is the problem of speakers being heard. To an extent the use of a microphone eradicates this frustration - promoting an illusory sense that nobody is far away and everybody is near - to the detriment, in my view, of the overall experience. Generally speaking in this phase people behaved in an orderly manner, always waiting their turn for the microphone to enter their hands and never speaking over others - quite unlike any informal gathering of Spaniards I have attended. It seemed to me that the microphone acted as a kind of restraint on potential spontaneity such that contributions tended to be well formed, people having had time to temper and rework their immediate here and now feelings. De Mare's idea was, contrary to Lacan for whom the unconscious is structured like a language, that the unconscious intrapsychic world is structured like a group.

Then, after the fascinating keynote address delivered by J. Garcia Badaracco on the multi-family group, a proposal was put to the conference that the upcoming large group session be cancelled so that Dr Badaracco could present his video films of his work with clients. This charismatic figure had left the crowd wanting more. So, instead of sitting face to face in the large group, we sat in the dark watching videos. I sat in stunned disbelief - thoughts about Spain’s on-going dependency on powerful leadership passed through my head. The conference seemingly haven taken flight from the human drama.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

It is now over three years since I moved to Spain, and I am still not sure whether it is going to be possible to work here as a psychotherapist in any shape or form. The portents certainly seemed favorable at the time I was moving, when I discovered that I was arriving just at the right moment to make contact with Spanish group psychotherapy – two big conferences in the space of 6 months! (I'd been at the European Federation for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Conference -Group Section- in May, and as if by way of preparation, had left feeling confused and concerned about what I’d experienced.) I am struck by the considerably different approach here, i.e., not what I would call analytic, certainly not in the Foulkesian mould, perhaps more akin to psychoanalysis in groups, or what Sheila Thompson defines as group counselling.

Although it may not sound so, I enjoyed both Congresses and certainly felt warmly welcomed. Despite this, I still felt quite an outsider to the often strange and surprising cancellations that kept leaving me on the defensive. Interestingly though, while on the one hand the APAG congress seemed to need a charismatic idealised leader figure, on the other, the time-tabled schedule was rebelled against and dismissed, rather like a hated form of authority overimposing on the people’s need for freedom. Time, in the guise of it’s senior administrator, the time-table, was molten there, waxy ... like a Dali clock. Stereotypically, I left feeling like an anal, rigid, overly controlled and angry northern European - the result I guess of the intense projective process that congress became for me. I needed the congress to be more reliable and familiar, after all, here was where I was committing myself. Of course, somebody had to FEEL the anger that goes with this kind of chaos and I suspect I probably wasn’t alone in feeling it. A final thought: in Barcelona trains run on time in a way they never could in London.

Peter Zelaskowski