Context of my Group Analysis
We would like to introduce a new book corner called the “Context of my Group Analysis”; this is for you to share three of the books that have shaped your growth as a person and resonate with your GA practice and thinking.
In the past and in present times, the desire to know and learn, of being curious and inquisitive, has meant punishment or even death. Books, have been banned and burned up to this very day.
Like the people who write and read them, books shape our identities as persons, provide solace, empower and transform us.
Books show us what we have in common, surrounding us with a community we did not know we needed.
The author Haruki Murakami, in his book “ Norwegian Wood”, writes : “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
So, off the beaten track, let’s share with each other, the ordinary books that in everyday life make you understand, the world, yourself and other human beings better.
In my quest for understanding the human condition, fuelled by group analytic spirit, I would like to share one book that helped me to understand context of my group analysis : Octavia E.Butler’s novel , “Kindred” .
The book is the first of a trilogy, including, “Parable of the Sawer” and “Parable of the Talents”, through which Octavia E. Butler, takes us to the past and back to a future, dystopian society.
Despite being a fiction novel, Kindred, punched me in the face, almost making me feel on my skin, the terror and ferocity of slavery, the terrifying normality of slavery, the dread of arbitrary annihilation, the certainty that death will come.
Although, I am not a time traveller and I will never know how slavery really feels on my skin, this novel gave me the opportunity to try and to keep trying to understand.
Dana, the protagonist of the novel, travels in time from modern USA to the 19th Century. With no warnings or clear explanations, she is catapulted into the same plantation where her ancestors had been enslaved and soon discovers that the reason she is called back into the past is to save the life of her slaver ancestor: if Rufus dies , she won’t be born. To survive, Dana is forced into a pact of dark solidarity with her slave ancestor, with her oppressor. Dana is willing to engage with the past, and this, saves her from that same past and also gives her a future. Dana decides, not without struggle and re-thinking, to entertain an unholy solidarity with the evils of slavery.
In groups, we create spaces to confront and seat with our oppressors, we facilitate conflict to be brought into the room and made sense of.
Genocide, Slavery, Holocaust and War, are manifestation of collective evil involving the complicity of many people, including ourselves. They have in common the abolition of “humanity” .
GA recognises humans as political creatures and human condition as plural ; embedded with it, is the potential beginning of something new and different.
In groups, we communicate and show ourselves to one another in our differences, and struggle against the pressure of ideologies aiming at simplifying the world and flattening out the complexity of being human, with their potential of being initiator of political action.
Are we, as a GA community, willing to tolerate and entertain radical and unholy solidarities with what is evil in ourselves and others? are we willing to work together to really understand the complex ideological infrastructure that made us, and that continue to afflict us today?
What are political acts in Group Analysis? and what politics do Group Analyst serve?
How do we survive to the past evil that are still with us today? How do we sit in the same room and save our own oppressors, our on ancestors, on whose shoulders we stand tall?
Octavia E. Butler, describes the experience of slavery as ultimately, not “other” nor impossible to understand; it is us too.
We – I, need to keep struggling to understand and make sense of it.
I believe that our very nature as political actors, a powerful legacy of group analytic thinking, offers opportunities to “commute” from our inbuilt oppressive walls of ideologies, to new worlds and new beginning.
For change to be implemented, we need, like Dana, to be willing to sit and work closely with our evils and never give up the struggle against oppression.
I experience group analytic groups, as spaces of “commute” in between Others and this commute is a political act, as we humans are political beings.
As Group Analyst, I ask you and myself, are we willing to sit with Others, to make sense of atrocities such as slavery, genocide, the holocaust and war ?
This challenge, has a space in my group analysis and informs my practice in everyday life.
Best Wishes to you all and good reading!! And sharing!
Francesca Mineo