Some additional thoughts on hope, boundaries and containment

It was my  pleasure to prepare and participate in the  panel, “Imagination and Hope in Relational and Group Analytic Perspectives” together  with Dr. Earl Hopper and Ms. Smadar Ashuach within the framework of  the annual conference of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), “Imagining with Eyes Wide Open: Relational Journeys” in Tel Aviv June 2019.

The themes of trauma and Imagination appeared central in many of the papers and in the lectures presented by participants from all over the world. These themes also connected with the concept of ‘hope’ as presented in our work. I believe that our papers emphasize the importance of the concept of ‘hope’ in Group Analysis.

In what follows, I will share some additional thoughts about the concept of hope after re-reading the papers and the discussion with the audience. These thoughts of mine are related to the clinical and cultural aspects of boundaries, containment and identity.

It is the engagement with social boundaries as well as changes in them that lead one to question his personal identity and shape it accordingly. One may decide to cross a boundary and move to another country (as Earl Hopper tells us he did in order to be trained as a psychoanalyst) or engage in a struggle to attain new possibilities within the existing boundaries. Either way, it seems that the emergence of hope involves recognizing limits and finding ways to transcend them.

In both vignettes, the boundaries and their permeability played a central role. In Smadar Ashuach’s paper it was the acceptance of two new members into the group, which stirred up hate, envy and revengeful phantasies within the group. In my paper it was the hospital’s fence, built in a way that enabled an exchange with “normal”, non-hospitalized people. It stimulated feelings of rejection, excitation and shame. These emotional states were enacted and explored in both groups. These enactments involved dissociated early developmental trauma, as seen is Smadar Ashuach’s example of ‘sibling trauma’. They also involved dissociated current traumata as well as aspects of vitality and creativity, as seen in the vignette in my paper. It is suggested that the permeability of the boundaries provoked these processes, while at the same time being firm enough to contain the storm.

In his response, Earl Hopper presented Radcliffe-Brown’s and Malinowsky’s ideas concerning the functions of rituals in society: stimulating ‘fire’ and containing it. In order for hope to emerge in a group, there is a need for both: letting emotional fire rise in the group and then processing it. The ‘fire’ includes both the expression of pain and excitation. As Earl Hopper suggests, ‘hope always involves the desire to narrate what have been truly terrible life experiences’. The narration of the powerful emotions that were present in both groups enabled their members to imagine and try new ways of being with others. They enabled hope to emerge.

Hope concerns the future. Future as a dimension of temporality that needs to be attended to and explored in therapy has recently been presented by several relational writers (as shown in my lecture). I believe its importance is relevant, and actually inherent, to Group Analysis. It was Foulkes who wrote about “the ‘autistic symptom’ that ‘mumbles’ to itself secretly, hoping to be overheard”.  I hope that our contributions will add to this line of thought.

Ido Peleg