The Large Group as a Sewer and other Emergent Metaphors

Reflections arising from Group-Analytic Large Groups on two University-based Creative Arts Therapy Trainings[1]

The principal objective of this paper is to develop some thoughts about the possible functions of a group analytic large group within two training organizations, using understandings emerging out of a number of metaphors (barometer, sewer, slum, body) that arose out of the experience of conducting large groups within two trainings, one in art therapy (AT), the other in dance movement therapy (DMT)[2].

“The grandeur that was Rome
—Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We mustn’t be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative.

He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs, pausing:

—What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.”
James Joyce, Ulysses

Introduction

In this paper I make use of a number of metaphors emerging out of the employment of a group analytic large group, within two university based creative arts therapy (art therapy & dance movement therapy) training contexts. I explore and apply thought to these metaphors as creative and playful sources of meaning that carry the potential to tell us something about the functions such a large group performs for these academic training organisations as: a sewer/container for unwanted bodily and emotional experiences; a barometer providing periodic readings of the emotional climate among trainees on the course; a slum; and a transitional space, a “primordial soup of opposites” in which the group evolves from primitive idealization and splitting, through dialogue towards more complex forms of engagement. Through learning to value its shit, through experiencing silence, shame, frustration, existential uncertainty and anger, and through a self-protective splitting into more easily digestible functional subgroups or microcultures, the evolving group capacity to dialogue helps the group to shift from a fragmented wasteland slum towards a more fertile and integrated community (the group-as-a-whole). Amongst other things, the exploration of various emergent metaphors suggests that at the core of the large group’s capacity to civilize the individual and the group culture (Wilke, 2003) and humanize the group (De Maré, 1985), is its function as a container in which our shit is both contained and reprocessed.

Why a ‘verbal’ large group at all?

“But you may ask, why a large group at all?” (De Maré, 1985)

The following questions are frequently asked by first-year students: Why a ‘verbal’ large group? Why no art? Why no movement? My answers to the above questions usually revolve around the importance for the trainee therapist involved in learning to acknowledge and stay with the often extreme and uncomfortable feelings that large groups tend to produce, which, it is hoped, in the group will be experienced, felt, expressed, not acted-out, named, understood and integrated. I often think of David H. Malan’s (1989) “goal” for each and every moment of psychotherapy: to put the person in contact with as much of their true feelings as they can bare.

Rather prosaically, the principal reasons for the initial inclusion of a group-analytic large group in both trainings, resides in the shared Goldsmiths / University of London roots of the founders and directors of both trainings with the author of this paper, both of whom had had a significant group-analytic experience in their respective trainings.

Over the years there’s been a sometimes tense and uncomfortable, but ultimately generative dialogue (between GA and art therapy and GA and DMT) that has gradually evolved and tentatively produced hybrid ways of working across the borders of both therapeutic modalities. Elsewhere (Zelaskowski & Ramos, 2014) I have explored one of the approaches that emerged out of the combining of psychodynamic art therapeutic culture and group analytic large group culture. Additionally, we have experimented with what a DMT large movement group might look and feel like. We (Panhofer, Zelaskowski & Bräuninger, 2016) have also engaged in a phenomenographic study of interculturality in a single session of the large group on the DMT programme.

The large group as a sewer

This metaphor for the one-session per block weekend large group emerged early-on in the life of the experience in an art therapy masters level training context. The image was first used in a particularly uncomfortable session which was later discussed in a team supervision meeting, for whom it appeared to have a particularly strong resonance. Subsequently, from time to time it would be used by the team to describe difficult group experiences. At first, I didn’t recognize the term ‘la cloaca’, Spanish for sewer – the waste/shit container.  I think I resisted hearing that students, and colleagues, were referring to the group in terms that felt so derogatory and debased. However, the image stuck around, gradually acquiring meaning, until some time later its more “luminous detail” (Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, 1909 – 1965) began to be revealed. Slowly this unlikely metaphor began to emerge as a kind of organic fertilizer with the potential within the staff team, at least, for enabling and enriching our discussions of the large group.

The Spanish word for sewer ‘cloaca’ derives from Cloacina, an Etruscan deity, the patron goddess of Rome’s Cloaca Maxima (the main drain of the City) as well as the city’s overall sewer system, built in the late 500’s BCE by Etruscan workers.  A shrine in honor of Cloacina was built above the main entrance to the sewer in the Roman Forum. Coins minted around 42 BC contain a clear image of the shrine, which more or less correspond to what currently remains in the Forum.

In the lexicon of Dance Movement Therapists (DMTs) I have noticed, over the many years I have been working with them, a tendency towards a simplistic split between ‘verbal’ (considered dualistic, intellectual, highly defended, etc.) and body and movement based therapy (considered pre-verbal, authentic, integrated, etc.). In this climate, one of the more prevalent fantasies which has tended to emerge in the ‘verbal’ large group is that feeding and nurturing takes place elsewhere in the training (in the movement experiential groups which also tend to be somewhere between small and median in size, thus exacerbating the split) and that the large group functions only as a place to evacuate waste. A theme that often surfaces among a subgroup in the early sessions of the large group with movement trainees is that of the group as “a waste of time” from which “we get nothing”. Actually, in one sense this is hardly surprising, given where the large group is situated in the time-table: lunch time. First year students enter the group having just had their lunch and second year students enter the group yet to have their lunch.  This has tended to amplify the particularity of the subgroup splitting which has been a feature of the DMT large group.  According to Agazarian (1987), the formation of subgroups is functional, as it is a necessary condition in the group’s growth, through enabling the encounter with diversity and conflict. First year students come to the group fed, satiated and more inclined to either drowse or evacuate. Second years enter more inclined to feed. Through the optic of Nitsun’s (1996) anti-group framework, the group begins to divide along the lines of those who experience the group as a bad object and those who experience it as a nurturing “good breast”. Without the latter subgroup, an anti-group process could be set in motion. What happens instead is that the tension and energy present in the dialogue that ensues between first and second years becomes a significant developmental force within the group.

Containment

The large group is a symbolic container for all of society’s feelings and experiences. (Schneider, 2003)

A further implication of the large group as sewer is that of civilization/decivilization (Wilke, 2003). The sewer is one of the invisible and necessary preconditions upon (literally) which modern social, political, civil and cultural structures are built. Without sewers, the streets would be awash with sewage, disease would be rife and public space avoided. Modern sewage systems also treat the waste in order to then make use of it.

One of the key functions of the large groups in both trainings has been that it provides a containing function, particularly for students in their early development, for frightening and denied bodily and affective material. Unwanted restrictions and bodily sensations, concomitant frustrations, disappointment and anger, that do not cohere with early idealizing fantasies of the course as a perfectly attuned and actively adapted DMT or AT mother, are projected into the large group, in this case, one that happens to be conducted by a man, which in turn helps preserve and prolong the relationship with the attuned, holding and containing mother DMT/AT course.

Bion (1962) situated the concept of the container (and what it contained) at the heart of the psychoanalytic as well as group relational field. Rosenbaum and Garfield (2001) conclude, the container concept and the metaphor of containment are deeply rooted in notions of body and language. Bodies and words contain meaning and affect. They serve as the facilitating vehicles for self and relational experience. DMT is evolving a language that seeks to translate, contain and integrate bodily based movement experience within space and through time, in relation to how we conceive of ourselves and our relationships.  DMT points to mainstream therapy’s excessive dependence on words, thought and brain and begins to question traditional concepts of mind and self, arguing that it is the body which is the primary container of early emotional experience.

Silence as waste

The relationship with silence reveals more about the large group as a containing sewer. Typically, a particular tension forms around silence which emanates from the academic / experiential divide within a university-based therapy training. It concerns the relationship between speaking and silence. In the academic context communication through words is disproportionately valued, consequently students experience their silence as disproportionately problematic. There is greater pressure to speak to gain attention, to speak to make an impression. This sets up a tension with a core idea of De Maré’s conception of the large group process and situation:

Essentially it is an a-programmatic situation; the object is not simply talking (i.e. ‘talk for talk’s sake’) but talk as an exchange, “on the level”. (De Maré, 1989)

Many students withdraw into an angry resentful silence. Silence is often described as a waste of time or a wasted opportunity. I have occasionally made variations on the following intervention quite early in the life of the large group, ‘it is easy to feel that silence has no value in this group, but perhaps it is important to recognize that silence, listening and attentiveness are the ground upon which any form of conversation or dialogue depends. Silence is the precondition, the invisible necessary labour, that makes the group possible’. Silence contains much of what psychotherapy is about: the unspoken, the listening, the repressed, the excluded other, etc.

As always, shame plays a powerful part. Students feel shame in the silence, shame at their inability to speak, shame at having their ordinary interpersonal defences and coping strategies disabled, all amplified by the academic context in which they feel pressure to speak and in which feelings such as shame, hate and fear are experienced as not belonging.  Students feel themselves being exposed to possible negative evaluations by the conductors, whom they also identify as teachers who will at some point, because this is a university, evaluate them. The more retentive students are further driven into defensive and self-protective silence. Bracha Hadar (2008) discusses shame as an interpersonal and essentially group-based phenomenon.  Through her discussion of shame in the group, a shame that emanates from being seen or witnessed, i.e., as a person with a body in the presence of others, she questions Foulkes’ (1964) core group analytic concept of the matrix:

the common shared ground which ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events and upon which all communications and interpretations, verbal and non-verbal, rest (p. 292).

The matrix for Foulkes is the basis of mind. As such he situates mind as emerging from the relational space inside and between people. For Hadar this fails to take into account the bodily and social origins of emotions such as shame. She therefore proposes matrix as the group ‘body-mind’. Interestingly the Spanish translation (as with the Hebrew) of matrix (which in English has a powerful mathematical connotation as its principal meaning) is matriz, also meaning womb.

Large group as a barometer

The implication of this metaphor is of the group as a pressure gauge which measures the current ‘emotional’ climate on the training.  That the atmosphere or the mood of the large group provides those running a therapy training with a useful reading is beyond question.  I have often noticed in team meetings and staff intervision sessions an urgent pressing need for immediate feedback about the group. Current issues – usually concerned with change, teacher absence, student withdrawals, tensions within or particular characteristics of the staff group or matters with a broader institutional implication – usually find some form of expression within the large group. Indeed, if we apply systems theory,

The isomorphic principle requires that operational definitions of the structure and function of any one system in a hierarchy can be applied to other systems in the same hierarchy. When system structures and functions are described comparably at different system levels, then what is learned about the dynamics of any one system can contribute to understanding the dynamics of all other systems in the same hierarchy. (Agazarian, 1987)

One of the features of the particular academic context in which the training takes place is the split occurring between a small group of practitioner teachers, largely DMTs, who constitute the ‘core team’ and the larger group of university academics who deliver a good proportion of the didactic curriculum but play little or no role in the organization and administration of the training. This is mirrored in the large group by the struggle to let go of the role of teacher. (Panhofer, Garcia and Zelaskowski, 2014) Many students start off in the group with pen and paper in hand awaiting instruction. That none is forthcoming (although second year students often assume some of the functions of the teacher role and attempt to explain my failure to assume the teacher role) becomes a source of confusion and anxiety and later disappointment and anger. Nonetheless, the presence of a member of staff who, because this is a university, must be evaluating our participation serves only to intensify these feelings. With the communication through movement channel apparently closed the verbal channel feels fraught with uncertainty, fear and doubt. “What can I say here?”, “Who is listening?” and “What can or should we talk about?” are typical expressions of the frustration felt at the beginning in relation to the absence of any clear definition, structure and task.  Experiential learning and academic learning collide at this point! I am often asked direct questions. Some students propose activities: introductions, taking turns, moving, drawing… These attempts to recover some kind of leadership, at times experienced as a challenge to authority, often mark a transformative turning point in the group’s development, a “barometric event” (Bennis and Shephard, 1956).

Vignette, 7^th/8^th session of ten:

The LG is arranged in two concentric circles fully occupying the space, in a room with no natural light. In one dark corner of the group over a period of sessions, the group convenor had noticed much whispering and nobody from this part of the group openly speaking. With the intention of encouraging participation, the convenor eventually decided to draw attention to this corner of the group/room, referring in his comment to the “silent quarter” (barrio callado) of the group. Those in this part of the group responded with silence. However, during the following session, much reference was made to this intervention directed at that part of the group, however that part of the group was now only referred to as the “barrio bajo” – the slum. The convenor noticed that many of the members of the slum were now students from Latin American countries.

The transformation, in this vignette, of the “silent quarter” to the “slum” marked a moment of engagement with the large group experience, an expression of the group’s acknowledgement and perhaps shared concern for the propensity to exclude and create forms of impoverishment and marginality. Large groups, by their very nature, easily lend themselves to the metaphors of urban, socio-cultural and socio-economic divisions, in particular, to how these divisions are manifest in how cities and towns form and are populated. The centre and periphery of the group constantly draws attention to matters of inclusion and exclusion as well as issues relating to power, inequality and oppression. The difficulty of constructing a large group space which does not reproduce or reduces the here and now significance of such macrocultural divisions and which provides the kind of equality of opportunity to speak “on the level” (De Mare, 1989) is a persistent challenge in large group composition. Whether through the relationship with the language of the group – Spanish was the vehicular language of both trainings, despite the fact we were geographically located in Catalonia – or through where one is situated within the various geographical spaces of the group.

Dialogue, the primordial soup of opposites and the group body

De Maré et al (1991) centre the large group process on the development of a hierarchy free dialogue. Later De Maré and Schöllberger (2003) situate the idea of dialogue in a dualistic, as opposed to monistic, frame, within which there is a constant dialogue between two entities. The core is the Hegelian dialectical concept of change and evolution within which thesis and antithesis interact over time to produce an emergent synthesis. Within the DMT large group a few such dualities have been: moving and speaking; speaking and listening; body and mind; I and we; private self and social self; individual and group; first year and second year; and so on. Louis Zinkin (1989) writing about the search for wholeness describes as so fundamental to groups the capacity to be able to hold chaos and confusion. For Zinkin, as a Jungian as well as a group analyst, this meant immersion in ‘the primordial soup of opposites’ (ibid, p. 255). In this constant dialectical process, which is moving towards a sense of the group as a whole integrated body, students begin to recognise the primary importance of conflict and difference in bringing about growth and development, i.e., that their shit belongs and actually matters. The following vignette illustrates the theme of the large group as a nascent democratic body with internal dialectical tensions:

Vignette, 4th session of ten:

The coldness of the room and the lack of natural light (there are no windows) is an ongoing theme. However, today is a mild day, yet the heating has been on all morning and the room feels oppressively hot. The facilitator switches the heating off just before the session begins. Ten minutes into the meeting and a first-year student stands up and walks to the door, which she opens. A second-year student expresses her discomfort at this individual course of action, taken without consulting the group. The group splits along the lines of a first-year subgroup supporting the action of their colleague and a second year subgroup arguing for action based on group decisions. Frustration is expressed that the group is wasting time on this theme, while others argue that the issue goes to the heart of what the group is about. The issues of safety and boundaries emerge – that with the door open we are exposed and vulnerable. The facilitator points out that nation states spend much time debating the management of external frontiers and that here we are also exploring internal differences and boundaries. Ten minutes before the end of the session a member of the university staff appears at the open door asking why we are there. The facilitator responds to his colleague that her class is scheduled to start after the group. This happening relieves the group of much tension, there is much laughter and shaking of heads at the relevance of this event to the theme of the group. By the end of the session it feels as if something has changed, that the group has recognized that it has borders, i.e., a body, and that what happens inside these borders is of relevance to all.

According to Geller (2016) the emerging dialogue creates a transitional space which helps the group to explore social issues. Within this space, the mindless becomes mindful and the unthinking meaningful.

Large group body dysmorphia

One of the primary sources of frustration for students initially is the formal structure of the group, i.e., the group body. A kind of group body dysmorphia emerges. “I hate it that I can’t see all the faces…why can’t we move … why don’t we get rid of the chairs and move around … why not hold the group outside where there’s more air and light and space?” When somebody decides to describe their bodily experience to the group, it is a reminder that whatever the constraints of context we nonetheless move and have bodily experiences: “only the dead don’t move”.  The group of 60 or so students meets in two concentric circles. This makes it impossible to see the faces of many and students will often have their back to others. This immediately frustrates hopes that the group will provide the mirroring and attunement that each hopes this new group will provide to satisfy urgent needs and idealized expectations. The group is immediately uncomfortable, intimidating and strange. There’s an inner and an outer circle and the emerging conversation feels disjointed and lacking direction. The group body imposes difficult conditions for both talking and thinking.  For De Maré et al (1991) this anger engendering frustration is a vital source of transformation, driving the group towards dialogue and ultimately impersonal fellowship. At times, as the convenor in such an apparently harsh climate, one needs to hold on to the belief that the generalized atmosphere of negativity, fragmentation and aggression is a necessary part of a developmental process and that the feelings being either expressed or contained within the body of the group are adaptive and coherent.

The large group is the only ongoing space available to the whole body of students on both the trainings. As such the group begins to acquire great significance through (despite as well as because of) the intense feelings of anger and frustration, through the emergence of common causes, shared experiences, ideas of shared parenthood, and so on. Concerns around task and the absence of leadership in the early sessions are replaced by issues of pairing and subgroup formation (i.e., where do I stand / who do I join with on these issues?), identity and belonging. Questions of identity, i.e., is this my group? and, do I belong here? are expressed through debates around boundary issues such as lateness and arriving. Links to a wider world are made: how do I feel about the world in which I live?; what is my position on how things are? For De Maré et al (1991) the large group transposes a context of a wider society within which feelings and attitudes emerge which are the equivalent of a transference relationship with the wider world. On numerous occasions, students have described how participation in the group has helped transform their relationship with some of their social and work groups. Often because of this type of experience, statements regarding the group’s significance and potential are expressed, however, these are often met with equal and opposite statements communicating the absence of any significance or attachment to the group. As if under the influence of Earl Hopper’s (2003) fourth basic assumption, the group swings between ‘massification’ – powerful calls to unity combined with disavowals of diversity: “we are all human” and ‘aggregation’ – expressions of pained isolation, disinterest and separateness. Both positions feel like forms of denial of the emerging complex group identity.

Some concluding thoughts

Whilst in group analysis and the ‘verbal’ sphere of the therapies there’s a marked under representation of the body and its vicissitudes, whereas in a body centred form of therapy like DMT there is often a marked idealisation of the body’s potential for self-healing, authentic communication and wisdom. However, our bodies feel pain, have smells, as well as produce shit and piss and are often the symptomatic vehicle for our suffering, in addition to being the principal reminders of our essential mortality and vulnerability. They are also primary sources of shame and self-loathing. The gradually emerging sense of the complexity of the large group body, arrived at through experiences of frustration, hate, dialogue and the struggle to belong, connotes some form of ownership and engagement with the group, some form of acceptance, some form of responsibility, such that what is contained in the large group body: confusion, chaos, pain, shit and all, begins to belong in part to me, one of the participants, as well as to the training, to the university, to DMT, to us all…a necessary counterweight to the tendency towards idealizing the group body

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Notes

[1] A much shorter version of this paper was presented to the GASi 2018 Autumn Workshop “Large Groups: Contemporary Challenges”.

[2] This paper brings together some content from 2 previously published papers: Panhofer, H., Zelaskowski, P. & Bräuninger, I. (2016) & Panhofer, H., García, M.E. & Zelaskowski, P. (2014)

Peter Zelaskowski
peterzelaskowski@gmail.com