Brexit and Belonging

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less … (John Donne)

Brexit has preoccupied Britain since the referendum in 2016. ‘We’ voted to leave. Or, more accurately, a little over half of those who voted, voted to leave. And the other half of those who voted wanted to remain.[1] About half of voters wanted ‘our country back’ and ‘to be in control of our own borders’, our own boundaries. The other half wanted to continue to belong, to continue to be part of Europe and connected to the other EU nations. And now, at the time of writing three years later, we are still not sure if we are remaining or leaving. The country seems to be paralysed by a national ambivalence which has split its people and its parliament.

Following the process, at least as it is portrayed in the national media, has been like watching a patient trying to decide whether or not to stay in a psychotherapy group of which they have been an ambivalent or inconsistent member. At times they attend regularly and participate constructively; at other times they sit silently in group sessions, withdrawing or contributing only resentfully or antagonistically. They repeatedly question the value of the group, the conductor’s style or manner and whether they are benefitting in any way from continued membership of this – or perhaps any other – group.

G was one of those patients. She had been referred to a psychotherapy group in a NHS mental health service with problems of anger management, alcohol misuse and depression, and joined the group as an enthusiastic and committed participant. After a few months, she began to express her dissatisfaction with the way other group members were – or were not – contributing to the group and the conductor’s role in facilitating their doing so. She continued to attend the group regularly and reliably, but with increasing frequency she expressed her intention to leave the group. She acknowledged that the group could be helpful to some people, but asserted that she was not getting anything from it. Each time the group discussed her decision to leave, she would conclude the discussion by agreeing to stay for a further limited period.  She finally left the group after 15 months, following a carefully negotiated termination period. In the preceding months, she had significantly reduced her use of alcohol, had not been involved in any aggressive altercations with others in the group or in public settings, and had re-established contact with members of her family from whom she had long been estranged. However, she continued to assert, both In group sessions and in an individual review meeting some weeks after ending, as well as in a routine evaluation questionnaire, that she had benefitted little, if at all,  from the group.

How do we understand this ambivalence – the wish to belong to a group and the simultaneous wish to withdraw from it in order to maintain one’s own isolated identity; to contribute to and objectively benefit from group membership while at the same time denigrating its functioning and denying any subjective sense of being helped by it? Perhaps finding herself again part of a family ‘group-of-belonging’ (Rouchy, 1995) reduced G’s need for the therapeutic group-of-belonging. Or perhaps simply finding that she could belong, and had begun to belong to the group analytic ‘stranger’ group was too challenging to her need to maintain her view of herself as self-sufficient and independent. ‘This continuous search for, and avoidance of, the group container, is a struggle of being in or out of the group, not only as part of life and society but also in the context of being group members in a therapeutic group.’ (Papanastassiou, 2019, p.37).

I have written previously (Bledin, 2006) of the ambivalence expressed in group members’ erratic group attendance; of the anxiety they may feel when they experience a sense of ‘fullness’ in a therapeutic group which is at odds with their more familiar sense of ‘being empty of themselves’ (Balint, 1993). Perhaps Britain, similarly, felt ‘full of itself’ when it had its empire, but with the loss of empire, began to feel ‘empty of itself’. Like the empty of herself patient, the country sought to find a new group-of-belonging to fill its internal emptiness: the EEC in the 1970s, the ‘special relationship’ with the United States in the 1980s … However, like the empty of herself patient, it seems that the empty of itself country found that belonging became too challenging; that being connected too closely to others posed a threat to the national sense of boundaried integrity.[2] The country tried to convince itself it was sufficiently full, but turned out to be simply full of nostalgia (O’Toole, 2019).

So Britain voted to leave its EU group-of-belonging and convinced itself that when it left, it would be ‘entire unto itself’, a ‘figure’ with no need for a ‘ground’ other than its own history. Like patient G, Britain announced its intention to leave, set itself dates by which to do so … but then found that it was not so easy to do. And now, like patient G in the final months of her group membership, the country finds itself preparing to leave the EU, but uncertain and ambivalent about when or how to do so, neither ‘in’ nor ‘out’ of the group.

If, as John Donne told us, no man is an island entire of itself, we may be finding that no island is an island either, self-contradictory as this may sound. We may all need to belong, to be ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main’, difficult and challenging as that may sometimes be.

Postscript: A few months after leaving the psychotherapy group, G was re-referred to the same NHS mental health service. 

Notes

[1] Ezquerro (2019) recently provided a more detailed summary of the numbers involved.

[2] See Ezquerro (2019) for further discussion of factors which might have contributed to Britain’s vote to ‘leave’ in the 2016 referendum.

References

Balint, E. (1993) On Being empty of oneself. In E. Balint, Before I Was I: Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, pp.39-55. London: Free Association Books.

Bledin, K. (2006) Empty spaces in group analytic psychotherapy groups. Group Analysis 39(2) 203-213.

Ezquerro, A. (2019) Report: BREXIT – who is afraid of group attachment? Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 81 (March),

O’Toole, F. (2019) Today Britain discovers it cannot escape history. The Irish Times, Tuesday January 15.

Papanastassiou, M. (2019) The Pygmalion concept in group analysis: the conductor’s anti-group and the search for the group as a container. Group Analysis 52(1) 36-50.

Rouchy, J.C. (1995) Identification and groups of belonging. Group Analysis, 28(2): 129-141.

Dr Kenneth Bledin
Group Analyst, Clinical Psychologist (retired) and Registered Psychotherapeutic Supervisor.
kdbccp@aol.com