A Leaderless Group in Frankfurt: A Coda to the GASI Symposium, Belgrade, August 2023
28th August 2023, Monday
The Symposium had ended, and a number of delegates were onboard a flight from Belgrade to Frankfurt, from where we’d each fly home. Disembarking, though, we learned that all onward flights to the UK were cancelled. We entered Frankfurt airport to find it absent of staff or any information and wandered back and forth, directionless and leaderless. The border was our only option: we entered Germany, and found our way to the back of a vast queue to the Help Desk. We learned that there were no flights, no available trains, and hotels rooms were vanishing with each moment. After several hours and glacial progress in the queue an airline representative materialised to tell us we were wasting our time: “We have nothing to offer you. You have to leave.”
Phone calls became more frantic, a chorus of bewildered tongues each imparting the same message and receiving the same one back: there was no way home, the soonest available Eurostar tickets being for Wednesday. We heard we could be here for at least five days. At one point I believed I had lost my passport, and quickly suspected a man who had joined the queue apparently for the experience alone, appearing at different places in the queue to merrily remark that everything seemed to be going well: paranoia pushed at the edge of my perceptions.
Some GASI delegates had received airline vouchers for hotels and set off for the innards of Frankfurt; others just seemed to vanish until the queue melted away, leaving only the polished floor of the airport and the night-shift staff, increasing the sense of isolation. I found myself, along with two other GASI colleagues, taken by an idea offered by a stranger, Ray: we would hire a car and drive home; between us the eight-hour drive would be quite manageable. This solution seemed elegant, appealing in its omnipotence — efficient, autonomous, decisive. Ray needed to get to Glasgow for an appointment with a lawyer and, it emerged while we glossed over the details, would only have access to cash — but not to worry, he said, he had plenty of it. He used to be the manager of a casino in New York — where the real money is, he explained — and, he assured me, now lived a pleasant life in Arizona. He. I didn’t ask any more and instead, we each sketched out our driving experience — minimal — none of us acknowledging the fact we were tacitly agreeing that Ray would do all the driving: an untenable plan we seemed happy to collude with. One of our group remarked on how pleased she was to have two men among us — how she recognised in herself a rising sense of relief and confidence, as if she was in good hands with both myself and Ray. I felt galvanised by this, pleased to step into the role of a Man; but also glad of Ray as the rescuing stranger, the hero who would lead the way home. His appearance had ignited in us a collective phantasy of the heroic, omnipotent Father: Ray had become our leader.
Another dimension of our small group matrix was that the two women, G and E, happened to belong to the same therapy group in England. Now thrust together in a bizarre situation, the complexity of our experience was further complicated by the fact that E had had her wallet and reading glasses stolen in Belgrade, meaning she had no access to her own money, and struggled to read all the information the phone would yield: hotel prices, train times, all manner of instructions. This meant that E found herself dependent on myself and G, both financially and for information, and various financial transactions had to be maintained over the course of the next three days, every decision interwoven with a fiscal negotiation.
This motley constellation, then, became my group. We assigned ourselves tasks: the two women would try to negotiate, against the odds, to have our baggage back; and the two men would arrange the hire car. Suitably gendered, we set off to fulfil our missions
Frankfurt, it turns out, is a vast airport. Ray and I walked for a long time, until we reached a car park full of pristine cars for hire, but with no desk from which we could hire any. We surveyed the scene in vain, impotent before the locked steel boxes. When we did finally find the hire company’s office, we were told that fee would be 2500 Euros. We weighed up the costs of hotels for two nights and trains home, trying to make the maths work, but we couldn’t: driving was off the table and with it, our hope. Ray, suddenly, slumped with exhaustion and sat breathless and despairing at a table. Our leader had fallen.
A taxi, I thought, would surely be cheaper. Leaving Ray at his seat in the basement, a taxi driver outside the airport responded enthusiastically, except to say that he’d never driven to Britain and wouldn’t know how to cross the channel with a car. I didn’t either, I realised. I phoned a friend who often drives to France but somehow, inexplicably, he didn’t either. Britain became an island so near and yet so far, cut off by an unbridgeable sliver of ocean.
After a search for each other through the airport, our fragmented group finally reconvened, by now sapped of energy. E had described their location as “next to a statue of a naked woman, who is holding her hand against her head.” Initially absurd, this seemed a fitting place to end up, the image expressive of the vulnerability and helplessness of the moment in which we found ourselves; but also of the quiet power of a maternal/ feminine strength. Somehow, G had managed to secure our bags. Nighttime was approachng, and with it the nocturnal residents of Frankfurt airport assembled with their multiplicity of bags, trolleys and incessant monologues. We too sat, surrounded by bags, beside this symbol of fatigue, resilience and vulnerability — no longer omnipotent agents of Western freedom, but nestled precariously among the dispossessed.
E, it turned out, had friends not far from Frankfurt. They were inviting her to stay with them, and the invitation was extended to all of us. E repeatedly told us this — in fact she had mentioned it since we first arrived in Frankfurt: it had been a continual possibility, a quiet promise in the background to the melee. Now E was asking outright and with urgency whether we would accept, but somehow we variously ignored, didn’t hear and ultimately declined. So the friends came off the phone, E somehow electing to stay with us, rather than take up the invitation regardless of our disinterest. We began to book hotels.
Now we had entered a new phase. Ray began to seem quite strange, and certainly no longer heroic: why didn’t he have any money? What was his appointment with a lawyer about? I don’t know whether I’m embarrassed to admit this or not, but I began to urge him to make his way towards England by any means possible, deciding that if we were to stay in Frankfurt, I didn’t want to be with him, and nor did I want to feel responsible for him. I also knew that with my own hotel booked, he could be foisted onto the two women and become their responsibility — the fallen father now a burden or danger even, post-abdication King Lear, exposed and humiliated. After a time, and in the wake of my encouragement, Ray simply wondered off without a word, and we were three. We laughed, lighter in his wake having sacrificed Ray to fasten our bond and boost our morale. I booked myself a hotel and E and G booked another, choosing for convenience the Hotel Domicil near the station. We took a taxi.
On the autobahn into Frankfurt, one of us asked the taxi driver whether the Hotel Domicil was in a good area: “No,” he answered. “It’s the red light district with lots of junkies. But it’s okay,” he reassured us, “There a lot of police around.” We drove along a long road lined with strip clubs and hotels, Love Haus and The Eros Hotel, as if towards the dark heart of Frankfurt: at the end of the road, as promised, was the hotel, outside of which a group of “junkies” had gathered. Their presence brought a feeling of danger, fragility and chaos; but at the same time ownership, as if this was their rightful place. We had reached a new nadir, arriving at the underbelly of Western society. Surveying the scene from the taxi, reluctant to run the gauntlet to the hotel, the driver offered to help book an alternative hotel: for these moments he seemed our leader, the level-headed father who could guide us safely through the city, protecting us from the snapping jaws of the night.
29th August 2023, Tuesday
The following day, I found myself enjoying the freedom of having no purpose and nothing I need do, except to wait for tomorrow. There is a word in Finnish, “skitanja,” which I understand means “wandering around aimlessly.” To “skitanja” around Frankfurt brought with it a sense of levity in being neither home nor away, neither here nor there; and in contrast to the fretful wandering of the trains, it was a relief to be able to take time to talk, walk and eat freely, according to no schedule and no obligation. The group still existed, even if not physically together — messages filtered through from other delegates, some from Frankfurt airport and others who were variously delayed, stranded or had made their way home. In these ways it was as if the group lived on, expanded even, in its divergent yet connected experiences. This was the caesura after the symposium, and before the return to the daily routines of life at home, a new nodal point in the matrix.
30th August 2023, Wednesday
In the morning, already at the station, I received a text from G: “They’ve cancelled the train.”
Many trains besides ours were cancelled and the rest were delayed. With Frankfurt station in disarray and the fantasy of German efficiency shattered, our leaderless small group reconvened. We learned that our journey to Brussels would require several changes and that there would be further delays: we would miss our connection in Brussels.
I don’t recall, now, the details of the journey across Germany. It is a confusion of trains, stations and platforms; and strangers on trains, sharing stories of their own misadventures. We started on the ICE train, “the flagship of the German state railway” according to Wikipedia, but only inched our way across the country. This detoured and doubled back on itself and at one point, stopped in a rural station where many of us disembarked. It reminded me of a journey I had made twenty years ago in Mozambique — a twenty-four-hour bus journey punctuated with periods when everyone would disembark to dig the bus out of a trench, or guide it back onto the road having veered towards a precipice. “This is Africa,” an old man buoyantly remarked, reassuring me that this was normal and therefore all would be well. Now perhaps, “This is Europe.” But at least in Africa our disembarkment had been to help: now, we stood on the platform smoking and wandering aimlessly back and forth, the crew included, in a scene reminiscent of that outside the Hotel Domicil in its existential emptiness.
In the end, the train driver announced we would not be going to Brussels after all, but would terminate somewhere else. We checked the map and we seemed to have been circling somewhere in the region just to the West of Frankfurt, and were barely any closer to home. We pulled into a station and spilled onto the platform.
On a platform in Köln, we found ourselves speaking with an older British woman. She had a calm demeanour and, it transpired, was a retired fertility counsellor, who was making her way home from a solo trip to first Denmark, then Germany. She seemed a good addition to our group and between ourselves we joked that we had found the Mother — her small manoeuvrable suitcase; her capacity to travel alone; her: somehow these details conveyed an undemonstrative authority and with it containment, security, and some affinity with Keats’ notion of “negative capability:” she knew nothing more than any of us about how or when we might get home, but somehow she seemed a suitable figure to contain our confusion. We boarded the next train as a four, now with a different leader — one who had come to power quietly and without promise.
On the train she spoke about her own holiday, which had involved a personal pilgrimage to the site of a little-known World War II atrocity. On arriving there she had found no record of it, no memorial, and had searched the local archives instead, hoping for some acknowledgement of what had happened. She described a process of unglamorous dedication, trawling through historical records, until she found a document which logged the names and occupations of the dead. This was enough, she said — she felt she could go home, satisfied with the administrative record. Hers was a story entirely absent of grandiosity, and somehow containing in its humility. Materially she had achieved little, but had been satisfied: I thought of how different it was to Ray’s account of himself, and how his character excited us and stimulated a manic endeavour. Hers, on the other hand, calmed us. We stopped talking and slept, as if we could at last relax. The journey settled and we made our way to Brussels.
Arriving in Brussels the Counsellor, having made it in time for her train, boarded and was gone. The extent of the train chaos meant, though, that we and many others had missed our connection. This created a situation where those who had a ticket for the next departing train could board, and the rest of us would wait to see whether our names would be called, seats allocated by lottery. Somehow though, E and G managed to talk their way onto the train, using the robbery E had suffered in Belgrade as leverage. I don’t know how this worked, but it meant that E and G slipped through passport control and were gone.
The unexpected loss of the group brought with it a sudden feeling of isolation and anonymity which up until now, in spite of the chaos of our journey, I hadn’t felt. The exit of E and G signified the death of the group, which until now had existed even while it scattered. The impact of this was profound: I admired their determination to get onto the train against such odds, as well as their wit in doing so. I realised there comes a time when we each must choose for ourselves how we will act. The group had got us this far; now we went our separate ways, and each in our own way.
I joined the waiting throng, another face in the crowd. My name wasn’t called. There would be one last train to London that evening, and if my name wasn’t called again I’d be in Brussels for the night. It was as though the initial omnipotent impulse had come full circle, by now exposed in its more impotent reality. Somehow, a ticket for the train became available: I cut my losses and bought it, preferring that to the prospect of being marooned in another strange city, not only leaderless but groupless. Money proved the individual’s trump card survival tool, offering salvation.
Once past customs, I found other delegates from the Symposium who had made their way circuitously and slowly north, looking for souvenirs and gifts to take home. We each bought rakija in the duty-free, a brandy widely served in Belgrade. Symposium, I later learned, means “drinking party,”or a “convivial gathering of the educated” — hopes of further symposia once home; or a final preservation, a bottling, of this one.
Analysis
Our group’s struggle seemed, at times, to have been one between the allure of a masculine/paternal form of power — personified by Ray, characterised by action and symbolised in the cars and the driving fantasy; and the feminine/maternal, personified in the figure of the Counsellor, characterised by patience and humility, and symbolised by the statue in the airport. That is, a struggle between action and containment, dual impulses which we struggled to synthesise.
This dilemma was exacerbated by the way in which maternal forces within the group were hamstrung by an ambivalent dependency, which positioned Ray as the single father without a stabilising partner to help contain the group. Perhaps Ray represented the Oedipal father who helps the mother and daughter negotiate the space between them — while helpful on one level, this also allowed the three of us to form a siblingship, a peer group constellated in relation to the father which in time, plots against him.
The red-light district hotel and, at the centre of this, the addicts and homeless people who grouped there, seemed to be symbolic of the collapse of civilisation and human cooperation: a hellish scene to which we had willingly headed, turning away from the simple kindness and security of the friends’ house. There was a kamikaze quality to this experience, perhaps akin to the manic drive towards autonomy which fueled Brexit, and has galvanised other nationalistic movements worldwide.
Such themes had been alive in the conference, too. The Large Group was, in part, characterised by a clamour for leadership — protests about the conductors’ silence, experienced variously as witholding, weak or absent; demands for autocratic management of the GASI forum; complaints about the ineffectiveness of the current president. At one point someone put herself forward for President: I don’t know if this was taken up, but it seemed at some level expressive of the way in which generosity can be overlooked, ignored in the clamour and rancour, as the offer from E’s friend had been by us. In turn, this seemed to highlight the difficulty in coming together: a true form of collaboration where people are able to both offer and receive help, whilst retaining the capacity to act as agents of their own free will. Ray had been cut off in a moment of paranoid-schizoid functioning, falling from hero to scapegoat to banishment, his sacrifice permitting the remaining three of us to bond more closely now that the failure, and danger, had been pushed “out there”. Similarly, it had felt that at some points as though the Large Group wanted a new leader so that there would be someone new to “target,” as someone said in the group. Perhaps leaders are chosen in order to be sacrificed.
This certainly seems to have been the case in Britain where recent political leaders have, one after the other, come to abrupt and humiliating ends, having been “elected” into the impossible job of leading a fragmenting nation. Further, the death of the Queen in September 2022 has, I think, precipitated a deeper loss of a fundamental sense of order and cohesion: already precarious, the death of this symbolic figurehead created a void in authority and containment: perhaps our Counsellor provided the kind of wordless containment offered by this kind of leadership, which has since been turned against in favour of a more braggadocious, manic kind.
Lastly, our group’s collective decline of the invitation to stay with friends was, in hindsight, striking. We preferred to hold on to the belief we could find something by ourselves, entirely of our conjuring, and remained in the grip of a narcissistic need to hold fast to a fantasy of self-sufficiency. Furthermore, in being unable to accept the invitation for herself alone, it was as if the group had entered a state of massification (Hopper, 2003), in which we were tied to each other, insistent on homogeneity and, perversely, wedded to our helplessness. Hopper describes massificaiton as “a manifestation of the fear of annihilation and its vicissitudes,” a defensive manoeuvre arising in response to a failure to mourn. Perhaps in “sticking together” we were refusing to mourn the end of the symposium and all it had meant, our group fusing in order to shore itself against a sense of loss: just as Britain fails to mourn the loss of its empire, and defends against the consequences of this.
Coda
The train from Brussels, predictably by now, was delayed. Once finally on board a tray arrived, delivering a quiche and a small bottle of wine. I and the others ate contentedly as if taking our rightful place at the table of civilisation. Heavily armed police materialised while we ate, moving swiftly and silently up and down the aisle, scouring the seats and luggage with intent. After an hour’s further delay and some ripples of anxiety, masked with humour and the sense of immunity afforded by the trappings of first-class travel, the tannoy reassured us the train was safe and finally, we went home. This felt like a scene of the end of empire — at once content, well-fed, well-off, cosseted; and only moments from bloodshed and horror, sitting blithely on the line between order and chaos.
I realised as the train moved through the blackness of the channel tunnel that I no longer knew whether I was going home or away from home: the journey across Europe, with its fissures, disruptions and about-turns, had induced a sense of disorientation; and the Symposium itself had seemed to express a new possibility of home, but one defined by temporality.
I arrived at my home station at 10:00pm. From our house you can hear the train doors opening and as the train pulled in, my wife phoned: “Are you home?” she asked. I tried to explain everything, but couldn’t.
Nick Jones is a psychotherapist practising in the Essex, England. He has a private practice with individual patients and supervisees; and conducts psychotherapy groups within a London university.