The GASi Online Large Group Experience

A potentially therapeutic, highly irritating and challenging experience

The pandemic spreading of the Corona-virus left me with feelings of insecurity and uncertainty. The seemingly uncontrollable spreading of the virus produced a sensation of shock, disbelief and paralysis.  What to believe and where to get reliable information? How to protect oneself and the loved ones? For some time, especially in the beginning of the pandemic, the feeling of being left alone, not knowing how to deal with this situation was frightening and confusing. To realize that the German government did a good job in these pandemic times and to recognize that our Health System worked and functioned well, was a huge relief and contained some of my fears. Still, this alone was not enough to cope emotionally with the pandemic.

The chance to participate in a Large Group (LG) offered by the Group Analytic Society international (GASi) appeared at that moment like an emergency first aid in a threatening catastrophic situation: It seemed like a solace, restoring self-confidence and sharing worries and anxieties with other co-human beings, living under similar conditions of uncertainty and shock. The possibility to participate in a weekly LG and see people that have become friends over so many years was moving, soothing and incredibly relieving. I had not been aware that I had unconsciously been worried about people I know from the Group Analytic Society, that are very dear and important for me: Would they participate and appear in the LG? I must confess I was happy to see the faces of so many of them. I felt that it was a great and comforting feeling, to experience to belong to this international community: To connect with people from Japan, as well with people from South Africa, with people from Spain and Italy, Brazil, Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Ireland, Israel, Denmark, Germany, Russia and of course from Great Britain and many other places. GASi has been my professional home for almost 40 years, I feel very connected, and therefore I feel very sad that the Barcelona symposium cannot take place. However, the LG experience reinforced the sensation to feel connected and to belong to this community and this helped to bear the threats of the Corona crisis. Thus inspired, I went ahead and offered twice-weekly online meetings with our ex-trainees in Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador and with members of the Heidelberg Institute.

However, even though this comforting feeling stayed throughout the LG experience, in time, more irritating and annoying feelings started to develop. This had largely to do with the increasing use of the chat during the LG. Towards the end, there were more than 100 chat comments in a 90-minute session and this means, that a small group of people send a message just about every minute of the meeting.

I personally felt it to be an increasingly aggravating and splitting process, abusive in the sense of using the LG to satisfy individual needs and desires, producing a lot of aggressiveness and even malignant sensations, behind the “back” of the LG, avoiding the challenge to bring the aggressiveness out into the open of the verbal communication of the LG. It felt, as if a splitting, under-cover subgroup had developed, commenting just about everything arbitrarily with vicious remarks like; “GASi is a fascist organization”. It was not possible to explore this attack on GASi, so it is still there, in the memory of everybody of this LG.  Why this under-cover small group, partially hiding in the obscurity and the secrecy of the chat, did not dare to participate openly in the LG? I still do not know. But it eventually developed into something very annoying and everybody, who dared to criticize or comment on this situation, was immediately attacked (“you are arrogant”), in an attempt to silence any opposing voice. To write excessively in the chat meant for me to trespass boundaries. In my opinion, this is a form of acting out in the strict sense of the word. I felt that this was disrespectful and abusive towards all of the participants of the LG. It seemed, as if anything that was going on in the LG, was at best, the stooge for the next comment in the chat.

I personally felt not only disappointed, but also deceived to see group analysts, whom I liked and whose thoughts and ideas I appreciated for a long time, to be aggressive, attacking, malignant towards anybody, who criticised the chat. This was a very painful disenchantment – a reality, I had not expected and that I still have difficulties to accept.

To look at it from a theoretical point of view, the chat was undermining the therapeutic efficiency and potential effects of the LG, opening up a second channel, thus avoiding the challenges offered by the LG. The main and primary challenge of the LG is – according to Bardé (1994) – to bear and to psychologically deal with the loss of the primary object. This challenge encompasses the difficulty to cope with the task of perceiving and establishing a clearly defined, holistic psychic object. Foulkes (1977, p. 47) pointed out that, structurally speaking, the LG exercises an enormous pressure on the individual to adopt primitive egocentric forms of communication. These egocentric forms of communication make it impossible to achieve a symbolization of own perceptions and desires and simultaneously, to take into account the perspective of the other. The messages of the speaker to the listener are then only externalizations of “privately” encoded intentions and impulses. In the strict sense of the word, the speaker is involved in “collective monologues” (Piaget 1975, p. 29), thus ignoring systematically the identity and the desires of the other.

Bardé (1994) points out that according to Hopper & Weymann (1977, S. 178) the LG produces a systematically and continuously reproduced paradox: The more people participate, the less time is there to connect, this creates a  considerable amount of chronic frustration, producing aggressiveness and the desire to attack and project the inner frustrating turmoil onto others. The dynamic of the LG produces thus an archaic situation of fear and anxieties and the loss of the primary object, which then is searched for in a state of traumatised helplessness and dependency and with increasing desperation (Freud 1926d, S. 178, 186, 199, 1921, S. 132). This seems to be the main transference proposal of the LG.

So, why is this therapeutic and what does this have to do with our online LG experience?

I think, the fact, that the LG was an online experience, aggravated this traumatising transference process and additionally exacerbated and condensed the experience of the loss of the primary object in a space, where you could not feel the other anymore. The resonance always palpable in a group cannot develop or develops only partially in an online meeting. The traumatising effects were thus intensified. In this sense, the chat then might serve to alleviate these traumatising effects and the aligned associations of frustration and anxiety, producing counter-convenors, in order to establish clearly defined objects to adhere to. The chat thus functions as a defence, not to “drown” in the LG and to avoid frustration, anxiety and traumatising feelings. Therefore, the benefit of these counter-convenors could be that they answered immediately and offered connection and individual support, establishing a small group behind the scenes of the LG. There was no need any more to deal with and to explore feelings of abandonment, because frustration, anxieties and aggression were simply swept away by the chat. The chat, like a second channel, allowed secret individual connections and by that undermining the therapeutic effect of the LG.

One example: A person felt attacked in the LG and somebody from the chat offered support and understanding. The person felt understood and cared for by receiving support and recognition. Without any doubt, this is understandable, because it obviously was important that somebody recognized the attack, reacted to it and transmitted to the person the feeling not to be left alone.[1] However – this experience was lost for the LG, because it happened in the chat, thus enabling a maybe individual “therapeutic” effect, but this therapeutic effect was lost for the whole of the LG. This support, offered in the LG and not in the chat, could have been a strong and effective intervention and maybe could have initiated an exploration of the aggression and attack that had happened. However, this could not happen and was lost for the sake of a personal vindictive experience, which is significant and personally beneficial in such a situation.  Nevertheless, this could have been a beneficial experience for the whole of the group, but this was lost, by individualising the support and hiding it in the chat.

So, what is the main therapeutic effect of the LG? As far as I have understood LG experiences, it consists primarily in experiencing how to bear and how to deal with the loss of the primary object. A defence mechanism in this situation would be, to split and to project, thus minimizing the fear of loss and trauma. Participating in a LG means to bear, to experience and to explore how it feels, not to be heard, not to be seen, not to receive any answers and how to deal with aggression and malignant projections. The dynamics of a LG inevitably force us to experience almost psychotic states of the mind. It is an experience of how to survive under these conditions and how to deal with these irritating feelings, without returning the attack or react with aggressiveness, resort to projections and splitting. LGs are therefore an extremely helpful experience, whenever we have to deal with large groups, be it at the university, in schools, in clinics or in organizations.

The online LG in times of the Corona pandemic offered a cohesive experience “and a caring relationship with a larger group mother” (Rosie & Azim 1990, S. 318) and maybe has to be understood as an emergency strategy offering comfort, consolation and possibilities to psychologically deal with a complex and collective traumatising event like the Pandemic.

However, for me this effect of the LG was partially destroyed by the chat. In the role of a participant as well as in the role of a convenor, I felt disrespected by the chat. The chat distracted from the challenging experience to feel and explore the confusing, irritating and uncomfortable feelings of a LG, because it focused the attention on to the chat and withdraw considerable energy from the dynamics and verbal communications of the LG.

The chat felt like an attempt to disempower the convenors and the LG as a whole. Since it was not possible to turn off the chat, thus re-establishing boundaries, it was not possible to explore, why the chat had turned into a malignant phenomenon, trespassing boundaries, trying to destroy this unique experience. Constantly changing convenors contributed to the feeling of uncertainty, not feeling contained and not feeling safe and protected. This might have been an additional reason, why some participants took refuge to the chat, trying to establish a small group and trying to connect, thus avoiding the disconcerting effects of the LG. However, this meant to leave everybody else alone in their endeavours to explore how it feels to bear one’s own silence, not to find any words that seem adequate, not to dare to make one’s own voice heard in a foreign language and to break through the wall of English language barriers.

[1] S.S.: Thanks for allowing me to use this example.

Bibliography

Bardé, Benjamin: Großgruppe. In: Haubl, R., Lamott, F. (1994). Handbuch Gruppenanalyse. Berlin, München: Quintessenz-Verlag.

Foulkes, S.H. (1977). Probleme der großen Gruppe vom gruppenanalytischen Standpunkt aus. In L. Kreeger (Hg.). Die Großgruppe (S. 27-49). Stuttgart: Klett.

Freud, S. (1921). Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, GW XIII, 1-69.

Freud, S. (1926d). Hemmung, Symptom und Angst. GW XIV, 111-205

Hopper, E. & Weyman (1977). Große Gruppen aus soziologischer Sicht. In L. Kreeger (Hg.). Die Großgruppe (S. 154-183. Stuttgart. Klett.

Piaget, J. (1975). Die Elaboration des Weltbildes. In ders., Der Aufbau der Wirklichkeit beim Kinde. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 2 (S. 337-371). Stuttgart: Klett.

Rosie, J.S., Azim, H.F.A. (1990). Large-group psychotherapy. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 17, 266-277.

Elisabeth Rohr
erohr@mailer.uni-marburg.de