Thinking about the care of those who care

I am going to convey an expression that arose in a group. While discussing in the group, members began to “interpret”, attributing to the other intentionality and a single reason for the discussion.

– What happens is that you (reproach) …
– What’s wrong, did you buy a dog?

I asked and they explained that “to buy a dog” is to trigger a series of interpretations, that like a dog attacks the other.

Buying a dog automatically interrupts any question to the other, assuming that the other is identical to my representation.

In another meeting where a heated discussion broke out, a member of the group, whom they claim was not fulfilling his role in the group, stands up and move his arms, as if he was shooing something away. He says: ” Get out dog, get out”.

The laughter generated a moment of relaxation, and the group was able to continue with the discussion, without the (involuntary) desire for exclusion and violence engendered by the reproaches.

***

From June 2009, I was selected, for the tasks of supervision, support and training the teams that organize a network of protection and care for girls, boys and adolescents living on the streets in situations of distress.

The Network of Care … is the attempt to respond to the loss of minimal conditions for citizenship, including the violation of rights, of children who live on the street, without social support (school, family, etc.), and that these children constitute a way of life.

The Network congregated State organizations (Ministry of Social Development and Institute for Children and Adolescents of Uruguay), with the support of several Civil Society organizations (Life and Education, United Gurises, Anglican Church and CIPFE). The network comprises three care homes (Piri, Rescatate and Posada de Belén) that host the children and those who search for support divided into two “training units” called “Farol y Revuelos”. These teams are constituted by educators, who work with children in the street.

I must say that this task had an emotional impact on the meeting with the educators who work in the Network. Instead of working or proposing different theories, I decided to listen to educators (either from the households or from the training group) to understand  first hand, their reports about the task and its obstacles.

To cope with the challenge, I held three-hours of group meetings, with different attendance, with participants from the homes, or from the training project. The idea that circulated in these meetings was that we were going to take care of the caretakers. The initial feeling that arose in me was the admiration for these educators, who use their own bodies to create bonds, in unimaginable situations, sometimes involving violence.

The approach to the meetings points out that it is possible to produce in the group affections that might generate power for carrying out the task with the educators involved in the training project as well as in the different settings where the project takes place. This implies circulating in the group which is the best way of being in touch the educators and their colleagues about the child’s care and, on the other hand, to understand how they are affected (body and feelings) by the task and think about the answers that may arise, and the resources they will handle.

The fact that the teams that take care of the space are coordinators and technicians who come from outside of the institution stakeholders enables discretion and freedom of speech, for at the same time that it diminishes the ideas that the work is framed by a restrictive control.

The work with this kind of child population is presented to the educators as a challenge while addressing the logic of doing / thinking that opposes everyday life. That is, in addition to the loss of rights and citizenship obligations, another subjectivity is generated out of the symbolic order, which generates another logic, based on the logic of “thinking” to survive. Therefore, it is not possible to approach these children without having an emotional shock. Some of the educators would look at these kids as the “butt of the world” – an expression that tries to describe the distance from symbolic codes that are dealt with in some of these meetings between educators and children /adolescents living in extreme distress on the street.

***

Freud, in 1921, wrote “Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego”. In the text he details group formation, the mass, formed through a psychic operation: identification. The subjects who participate in the mass, belong to the mass, sharing an ideal. This ideal is a set of representations invested by the superego and the participants share the illusion of being equal. The ideal, makes the participants equal, leaving the feeling of what is shared as the same, as an equal. For example, a rock concert or a soccer game, where the participants “are one” with the rock group or the soccer team.

Identification makes group membership the same. Now:

“I believe that this form of grouping (the mass) places subjects, with each other, allowing circulation between them, but it does not confront them with the otherness of the other”, in the sense that Levinas[1] thinks. He warns about the forms of grouping, where the group, makes it possible for persons to be with the others but does not make room for the encounter with the otherness of the other. Levinas differentiates being WITH the other from being IN FRONT of the other. In this sense, experiences the “face” (the face of the other) as extraordinary.

He says: “the ideal of the social will be sought in an ideal of fusion. In its relationship with the other, the subject tends to identify with him, in a collective representation, in a common ideal”. The question I would like to discuss is: does the mass, or this idea of the group; give room to the difference as an element that produces the group?

I think that Freud’s brilliant description can leave us theoretically locked down on the assumption that what is found in groups is the similar. Similar to an unconscious phantom, circulating in the group, processed by condensation and displacement. The notion of ghost goes in the same sense as describing a scene in where a childhood experience is repeated[2]. Here what is repeated, the similar, leaves the illusion that it is the only operating engine. Hence, groupwork, where psychoanalytic “readings”, looked for the common as a synonym for the repetition of the similar.

What I question is that this position leads us to think ONLY of the group from the similar. I mean that this posture leaves out, the effect of other as an alien[3], as an excess. An excess that comes from the other. What comes from the other, would not be given by its similarity with what one has (in terms of representations), but the excess is produced by the characteristics of the other: their alienation, their difference, their face (as Levinas calls it).

The excess that comes from the other does not produce a repetition, but rather it gives the possibility of housing, hosting, or not, this excess. Presents itself and may or may not generate an event, that is, something that counts that the present is different from any previous. What characterizes the group would not be given, exclusively, by the processes (phantoms) that make repetition the characteristic principal.

What place, in our theorizations and our practice, the difference, the non-similar, the singular, has as a forming element of the group? Is the group the same or different? What is common in a group? What is repeated or what is different?[4]

The similar is an important source of unconscious production in the group, but it is not the only thing. It drives involuntarily to think of the group as a homogenising process and the participating subjects as similar, not singular.

***

In groupwork, I assign a fundamental role, the surveillance of the group’s emotional climate. It is “the environment, a set of conditions that characterize the situation or circumstance around a person”[5] (or group).

I am aware of the term, since Drs. Janine Puget and Isidoro Berenstein[6], in an attempt to open spaces to think about group phenomena (a couple in this situation)[7], describe the

emotional climate, as: “the set of emotions and feelings acting as a support for certain interactions that are difficult to translate into words”.

Like the atmospheric climate, it is not created by one, it comes “from the outside” and, at the same time, the emotional response we give to it plays a part in the creation of a certain climate. So, we can talk about beautiful days or pleasant days, depending on the type of response.

The emotional climate of the group, as I try to describe it, is what allows affections and words to circulate (or not). It is a phenomenon, to which each subject has to respond, and this response, in turn, shapes the emotional climate. I want to emphasize that in the group (vinculo/link) phenomena, the origin dissolves, as long as what matters is the group production. The production of affections, which does not have a precise origin but will be the result of different responses. In this sense, Levinas remarks that the relationship with the other is anarchic. I think that to think about group phenomena, we have to subtract from visual logic, where the origin gives an (illusion of) consistency. In the emotional climate, you cannot determine an individual origin. It is produced by what happens in the group.

I find it very useful to take from psychoanalysis one of the basic rules:  free association. Asking educators, to tell us what they do in their work, they describe it without judgment or opinion, at least in the beginning. I have observed that when a person speaks from a value-judgement, what follows is the justification of the judgment, leaving outside the report, and the situations that may be important to locate an obstacle for the work. The previous judgment, like the ideal, determines that the report should be consistent without considering the incongruencies or inconsistencies. In the group, it is all about formulating a situation that can describe, and insofar as it is describable, it can be transformed, or thought. Thinking putting the emphasis on the inconsistencies, which the experience throws up. Thinking about inconsistencies gives the possibility to change.[8] With affect and different ways of anticipating experience circulating in different ways, makes things rigid, solid and inoperative.

***

I think it is quite an issue as to how to describe situations without falling into dichotomous forms, which makes one suppose a whole. A whole separated into two, which fosters the illusion (ideal) that when reinforcing an option, the other is excluded.

Sometimes group discussions become sterile, as the ones who participate, quickly make a judgment, confirming an “identity” or “truth”, which ends up creating a bulwark/bastion that works as an obstacle to approaching the conflictive situation in another way.

I have already mentioned that when a situation is told, it should not start as a judgment on behalf of describing the situation, as close as possible to what has happened, avoiding judgments that end up replacing concrete actions.

Humour, sometimes, allows you to get closer to the different views on conflicts. Hence the importance of a cordial and hospitable climate, to accommodate differences, without connecting them to affections like honour, humiliation, principles, etc. I always try to describe affects that confirm the identity of a person not giving rise to the other as different /alien. Quickly the other becomes the enemy that should be “eliminated” or excluded to confirm the unique value of a certain identity.

In the vignette that I presented at the beginning of the work, we can see how humour dissolves the other’s implication, in a place of paralysis, enabling the creation of a new space for the group’s differences, thanks to humour. There is no discussion between two or more in the group without creating a common field. However, it is an issue to achieve a climate that does not ratify the exclusion of the other, with binary logic and affects that confirm that the other is an enemy.

According to the emotional climate of the group, it might be possible to discuss, without falling into a logic of opposition, of exclusion, which as in a tennis match, confirms each subject, as long as they oppose and face the other.

Therefore, a hospitable climate allows harmony between the singularities within the group, given by a “rhythm”. A rhythm that allows the creation of affective singularities and harmonizes sharing. I repeat, sharing, which does not depend on what is homogeneous, but on what is singular. The hospitable climate generates a group of different people, sharing a task.

The coordination of groups has several effects: assuring that each member of the group has a place of reference where he/she can speak, think with others, establishing a climate of trust and solidarity between the members; improving ways of doing as well as the tasks through exchanges between the members of each group; creating closeness between members to achieve fluency in group exchanges.

***

It seems to me that the political[9] sense should be highlighted, as a way of saying that this project serves and tends to establish ties of humanity, that is, linking that makes the human possible and this happens through the creation of affects (subjectivity) of empathy and non-exclusion, affects of “solidarity” and “responsibility” towards the other and more, if it’s an unknown.

Care for the other is a fundamental and foundational aspect. The notion of a network is like tying knots, making links (the word link etymologically is to tie). It is solidarity with the care for the other, caring for the ones who care is another notion to evaluate. The care of the ones who care is converted into a tool. Mandatory and essential for this kind of work.

An aspect that I would highlight and is important to convey: the quest for spreading joy. Work involves moving affects, to produce affects (and effects) in children that the Network is destined for as well as for the educators. The expansion of joy, through the emotional climate, creates groups with the possibility of work and performance.

In that sense, the work that is done tends towards that: expanding the joy. Generating a community of difference, a community of singulars, where inclusion becomes a tool for creating bonds of humanity.

Nelson Gottlieb
Montevideo, Uruguay June 2010
Professor and former president of AUPCY (Asociacion Uruguya  de Psicoanálises de las Configuraciones Vinculares – Uruguayan Association of Psychoanalysis of Bonding Configurations). He is a former member of the Laboratory of Family and Couple Therapy in the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association.
nelsongott@gmail.com

[1]  Emmanuel Levinas. El tiempo y el otro. Paidos 1993

[2]  I lean on Jean Laplanche. “La prioridad del otro en psicoanálisis”. Amorrortu Ed. Laplanche criticizes Freud, who from letter 69 to Fliess (9/21/1897) “He doesn’t believe in my neurosis anymore.” Making of the other, only a ghost.

[3] Definition from Isidoro Berenstein. “Devenir otro con otro(s) Ajenidad, presencia,interferencia”. Paidós 2004

[4] Gottlieb, N. “Lo común en los vínculos”. Paper presented at the II Congreso de Psicoanálisis de las configuraciones vinculares. Perspectivas vinculares en Psicoanálisis. Las prácticas y sus problemáticas. Mayo/ 2008. Buenos Aires

[5] http://www.wordreference.com/definition/weater

[6] Puget, J and Berenstein, I. “Psicoanálisis de la pareja matrimonial”. Paidos 1988

[7] It is curious how the description of the climate, by the authors, ascribing it to the game transference / countertransference, leaves out, as a determinant, what happens in the clinic, what the analyst generates with his interventions. I also rescue the value of the term.

[8] Moreno, J. Ser humano. La inconsistencia, los vínculos, la crianza. Zorzal 2002

[9]  Political, comes from polis, that is, an action in a group is political.