Film Review: ‘Pioneers of Group Analysis’ by Wilhelm Rösing and Marita Barthel-Rösing

“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.” (Rebecca Solnit, ‘The Faraway Nearby’ 2013)

Does group analysis need a story? A story told on film by some of its most senior practitioners, telling their stories, their versions of some bigger story? The ambition of this wonderful, sprawling, independent documentary by Wilhelm Rösing and Marita Barthel-Rösing is to celebrate a group of selected ‘pioneers of group analysis’ whilst explaining the development of group analytic method both theoretically and practically. That means there’s a lot to fit in, so the film lasts 140 minutes, and yet still at the end there’s a sense of voices unheard, of questions unanswered.

We – the authors of this review, one a group analyst, one not – met to watch the film with about a dozen group analysts and other psychotherapists. Then together we spent an hour afterwards talking in a large group, collecting our thoughts, excited and frustrated, enlightened and perplexed. Our conversation could have gone on and on.

The film tells the story of group analysis through interviews with talking heads who never talk to each other directly on camera. Everyone is interviewed separately in their own homes. Liesel Hearst, Malcolm Pines and John Schlapobersky begin by telling stories of Foulkes’s (originally Fuchs) departure from Nazi Germany and his first forays into groupwork in the UK, working with war damaged soldiers, using ideas from psychoanalysis and departing from them. They describe the influence on Foulkes of Norbert Elias, the conductors of the earliest groups and the setting up of the IGA.. Thereafter, the story is picked up and told alternately by Pines and Hearst before a range of later pioneers (in alphabetical order) – Jane Campbell, Vivienne Cohen, Farhad Dalal, Sue Einhorn, Robi Friedman, Earl Hopper, Sylvia Hutchinson, Morris Nitsun, Meg Sharpe, Gerhard Wilke and Hymie Wyse – add their own personal and professional stories. Through the juxtaposition of all these stories, a loose picture of group analytic practice and of the IGA as an institution emerges, along with questions such as “Is there ever a beginning or was there always something that went before? Who and what is a pioneer? How reliable can one witness ever be? How important is any one person or is the idea always more important than the person?” The film is sometimes an elegy, trying to capture the past before it’s forgotten; at other times it’s an exorcism, trying to understand what went before in order to be clearer about the ways forward now. At times it’s a critique of group analysis while at other times it’s an unreliable, complex – but nevertheless fascinating – history.

It isn’t some slick, sharply edited Hollywood production. It doesn’t have a voice-over narrator guiding us from the beginning towards the middle and then on to a climactic end, summarising and simplifying the story for us. And yet the rambling narrative form – perhaps unwittingly – says a lot about the creative tensions of group analysis. As with any group, there are moments of clarity, of connection, of coherence, hope and confusion. As with any group, there’s no one telling a definitive story because there is no definitive story to tell. Instead there are lots of stories and lots of storytellers with the editing effectively serving as group conductor, bringing voices in and phasing them out, juxtaposing ideas and experiences, allowing the participants to have their say. As a result, we watch this group of pioneers, brought together on film, some speaking at length (Pines, Hearst) with others given less time. Still others remain unheard and not seen at all. (It’s never explained how the ‘pioneers’ came to be selected.) Any student of group analysis longing for a simple history lesson will be disappointed. There’s no omniscient narrator: only members of this ‘pioneering’ group of people, describing their lives leading up to their training in group analysis, what attracted them to the method and some of the difficulties they encountered.

In a way, it’s a film about leadership and authority, about illusion and disillusion, idealization and denigration, about the attractions and dangers of charismatic leaders, especially when they turn out to have feet of clay. To their credit, the talking heads all try to demystify themselves, admitting their ordinariness, all clearly intent on resisting the projections coming their way. “I had no training,” admits Pines, disarmingly.

There are interesting tensions at the heart of the film. While there’s much talk of equality and inclusiveness, important areas are neglected. For example, there’s plenty of thinking about outsiders, but no mention of anyone being gay. Is that because Foulkes thought of homosexuality as a perversion? The destructiveness of totalitarian regimes is acknowledged, and yet Nitsun’s idea of the anti-group is accorded little time, so that, at the end of the film, as Malcolm Pines’s story unfolds, there’s a sense of destructiveness that still can’t be thought about, can’t be assimilated into the bigger story. Does it matter if our leaders are flawed? Does it matter if the father (or Crown Prince, as Pines was called after Foulkes’ death) fails the family? Isn’t the message more important than the messenger? How do we understand, respond and relate to the transgressions of others?

The deeply political nature of group analysis emerges gradually. Interestingly, almost all the original pioneers were exiles from Nazi Germany, from apartheid South Africa, from Russia, from India, from Africa: outsiders fleeing from the totalitarianism of a charismatic leader, from a single, omniscient narrator telling a group what to think. In group analysis they find a new home, coalescing around egalitarian ideas, with a conductor rather than a dictator offering minimal guidance to a group, believing that members should be free to live their own lives and discover their own voices while asking important questions: “How does social order develop? How does society hold together? How do we respond to the abusive behaviour of others?” There’s nothing passive about group analysis, argues one of the later pioneers, Jane Campbell. It’s never about “….making people into compliant and grateful members of an unjust society”.  Sylvia Hutchinson notes that, given the changes in communication processes through social media, living in virtual worlds “We’re going to need groups more in the future!”

If the story has a denouement, it’s in the story of Malcolm Pines. It’s a denouement that focuses so many collective anxieties: our ambivalence about wanting and not wanting leaders, wanting them to be fallible and infallible; our difficulties with eroticism; our tendency to exile people whose behaviours we struggle to forgive. It’s a denouement that highlights the forces that emerge in the formation of a professional organisation. For whatever reasons, no one tells the story of what actually happened. Only that perhaps mistakes were made, and that perhaps mistakes matter.

So, after 140 minutes of exposition, did the pioneers of group analysis succeed in their original intentions all those years ago? The film suggests that, well, those intentions were probably never completely clear in the first place and success can never be quantified where human beings are concerned. Life is too complex. There are too many stories to be heard.

However, there are important ‘nuggets’ describing the fundamentals of Group Analysis – for the war damaged soldiers ‘the enemy was their own neurosis’ (Pines): ‘Group Analysis is relational, reflective, reparative’ ( Schlapobersky); ‘the essentials of Group Analysis is dialogue, through connection’ (Einhorn); ‘Group Analysis creates the journey from thinking to being’ (Wyse); Group Analysis is nothing to do with socialisation…or teaching people how to behave. It offers the freedom to choose how to live your life’ (Campbell) to name but a few.  It makes a really, really interesting film, well worth the attention not only of group analysts but also of others interested in institutional dynamics and in the history of group psychotherapy. As we build institutions to contain our best attempts to help our fellow human beings, do we build sanctuaries or prisons?

Gillie Ruscombe-King (Memb IGA) is a Group Analyst and Psychodrama Psychotherapist. She has worked both in private practice and in the NHS, latterly working in a therapeutic community with those with disordered personality. She consults with charities and organisations to find a creative approach to stress and distress and is a founder member, with others, of the Oxford Group Analytic Network.
g.ruscombeking@btinternet.com

Nick Luxmoore is a UKCP registered Psychodrama Psychotherapist. He has worked with young people and with the professionals who support them, mainly in schools, for 40 years and is the author of eleven books, all published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. He currently works as a supervisor and trainer while writing about psychotherapy for various publications. See www.nickluxmoore.com
nickluxmoore@lineone.net