Boredom Be My Friend

Who among us has not experienced a sensation of boredom, whether during a monotonously delivered lecture or a conversation (I use the word hesitantly) with a narcissistic colleague riding his or her particular hobby horse? Furthermore, no group analyst can avoid passage through the Sargasso Sea of boredom during many journeys through the inner and outer worlds of the therapeutic group.

Yet this important concept has, to my knowledge, received scant attention in the group analytic literature. The plaintive cry, ‘I’m bored’, is all too frequently brushed aside as an irritant or decoded into its older, graver sibling, depression. The two concepts are undoubtedly related, but the reductionistic tendency to subsume the one state of mind into the other loses sight of the fact that the two are far from synonymous. Boredom, in fact, has a distinctive genesis associated with frustration at the lack of awareness of change, and it carries a therapeutic potential all of its own.

I am indebted to a former professor of physiology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Joe Gillman, for introducing me to the idea that change is the basis of all experience. He went on to expound the corollary, which is that a state of no change is tantamount to death, at least in the biological sense of the term. From a therapeutic perspective, change is a central concept. It signifies movement, and its absence calls to mind the opposite state, that of stasis, encapsulated in the metaphor of stagnation, a state in which new growth cannot occur. Not for nothing do we speak of being ‘bored to death’ or of a subject being ‘deadly boring’. Victorians, with time on their hands and minds untrained to seek out new information, succumbed to a state of ‘ennui’, which is simply a refined expression for boredom.

While Joe Gillman was instilling fear of stagnation and failure into his undergraduate students, a group of researchers in Palo Alto, California, among whom Paul Watzlawick, Gregory Bateson and Jay Haley were prominent names, were developing a sophisticated model of change and its relevance to family group dynamics. S.H. Foulkes, with his ideas on communication and the group matrix, was singing from the same hymn sheet as the Palo Alto group, although I am not aware of any mutual acknowledgement of each other’s work in this or any other respect. And so it came to pass that group analysis and family therapy traversed divergent trajectories, despite the valiant efforts of Robin Skynner and a few other worthy souls to bring the two schools together under the same roof.

In group analysis, boredom can be inflicted by a group monopoliser. Accordingly, the therapist must call upon techniques for rescuing both the group monopoliser and the group from a fate, if not worse than death, at least equivalent to it. At other times the group can sink into a bored state of mind which cannot easily be attributed to any one member. To understand this better, we need to invoke the concept of repetitiousness, the going over of old ground. The therapist might have to ask what this could be concealing. This could be, for example, a fear of what might happen if something dreadful were to be named. It takes courage on the part of the therapist to speak the unspoken and in so doing break the group out of the deadly grip of boredom.

Prolonged silence can be conducive to communion and reverie, but it can also be a manifestation of boredom. Silence, especially of the desultory sort, lies at the gateway to sleep and there must be few therapists who have escaped the grey mist of drowsiness which occasionally visits the group, sometimes inducing a blissful state of sleep. I am reminded of the quip which tells of the group analyst who dreamt that he was taking a group – and woke up to find out that he was. Point for discussion: why does the same feeling of somnolence not overtake the surgeon performing a ninety minute operation?

Boredom can be both an aid and a hindrance to the group. If it persists, the group members may feel trapped, just as a child in the classroom struggling to concentrate during a poorly delivered lesson or a student when faced with a lecture drained of affect may feel trapped. One way to avoid falling into the trap, I have found, is to introduce an unexpected statement into the group, perhaps in the form of a tangential or mystifying observation. But this cannot be too shocking or too bizarre, otherwise it will only be dismissed as a typical  non-sequitur of the sort favoured by cryptic analysts and therefore unworthy of attention. Consequently the group may settle further into its state of boredom.

To carry out such a coup effectively the therapist should first consult his or her own inner world and privately form a hypothesis connecting the group’s present stupor with what has gone on before and the fear of what might happen in the future, then deliver it as the most colourful metaphor that can be imagined. If that fails, a huge yawn is permissible.

References

Skynner, A.C.R., ‘An Open-Systems Group Analytic Approach to Family Therapy.’ In: A.S. Gurman, D.P. Kniskern (eds) (1981) Handbook of Family Therapy. New York: Bruner/Mazel.

Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J. and Fisch, R. (1974) ‘Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution’. W.W. Norton & Co.

Harold Behr
harold.behr@ntlworld.com