Tracing memory, testimony and the imaginal: A collective narrative of being in Group Analysis in South Africa
[…] “This is a teaching of growing things;
If you crowd me I’ll retreat from you,
If you still crowd me I’ll think about it,
Not about crowding you but about your right to crowd me;
If you still crowd me, I will not, but I will be thinking
About crowding you.
If my thoughts and hands reach out
To prune the twigs and sweep the leaves,
There was a growth of thought here,
Then words, then action.
So if I say prune instead of cut,
I’m teaching about the growing of things.
- Mongane Wally Serote (The Growing)
The task of tracing the development of Group Analysis in South Africa is no easy feat. Tracing requires a form of remembering and in a land in which memory holds a deeply symbolic meaning. It is no coincidence that a certain amount of anxiety presents itself as remembering and speaking into this memory is entangled in a foundational matrix of colonial domination and apartheid separation and oppression which has its fingerprints in all conscious and unconscious interactions. Memory, in this context “can be an unreliable mirror. It shifts and shifts.” Serote (1973. p257).
As the authors, we acknowledge the identities we each hold to this unique form of remembering and speaking. The Group Areas Act of 1950 was a physical manifestation of a deeply political and psychic act of othering; cities and towns were divided into segregated residential and business areas. These divisions continue to live in us, through us, and in the way we work; careful attention to its impact cannot be discounted from the conversation. We recognise that our meeting to write this would not have been allowed, our coming together would have been criminal.
Our methodology in writing this article has a specific intent. We intend to flex the frame to an extent, to acknowledge that wisdom can and does lay in dialogue as much as they do in the volumes of text we are bestowed. Instead of an anthropological approach to uncovering the development of Group Analysis in SA we instead attempt to centre the discussion on how we encountered Group Analysis, how we have worked with it and how we attempt to further its development in our context. In doing so we hope it provides a more nuanced view of the relationship of Group Analysis in our context through a collective sharing, a form of embracing the concept of “Ubuntu” even in the way we write (Ubuntu – a Nguni term or principle relating to a way of living of embracing a sense of humanity recognising “I am because we are”).
The text is based on a dialogue between us conducted via Zoom. Hopefully, you the reader get a view of how these separate(d) voices engage dialogically with a new form of knowledge creation based on our lived experiences. It may display our “ubuntu” and at the same time point to our different worlds of belonging imparted by our unique identities. We then ‘reconvene’ and offer a collective reflection of what we have observed from our own conversation.
This approach we feel, is important as it further acknowledges that there is a conversation between what is ’classical group analysis’ and ‘working with and in group’ which has been part of an existing praxis. We do not see these as competing but rather as equal learnings. In this approach we are both subject and object, we are active narrators, holding the pen so to speak in this process.
Arrival
The journey into Group Analysis as a modality of thinking and doing is of particular importance as it provides the ‘meeting space’ for our collective experience and the tracing of our memory within the training organisation which we entered at different nodal points. As trainees, our biographies form a statement toward history which could get lost as importance is based on power dynamics that dictate which voices hold legitimacy. Here we lay our stories which may serve as a gateway to the unconscious positioning of Group Analysis in South Africa.
We acknowledge that text cannot adequately capture that full intonations found in spoken word. The spoken word is a long held oral tradition of convening and passing of wisdom. As much as possible we have attempted to preserve the integrity of this oral tradition and have italicised words that hold meaning/emphasis.
Excerpt 1:
Patricia: Interestingly, when I did the working with groups course, I had two referrals to working with groups. We were talking about groups, and how I really feel that groups would be much more effective in our South African context. By then I found that the current modalities that I’m working with, had just that something missing. That it doesn’t always get to the underlying stuff, as most of it was directive with a stated outcome. It was mostly attached to some kind of psychosocial learning or intervention, you know? And this was thought of in terms of specific interventions; what’s going to be the ultimate outcome of this, you know, who are the recipients, who are the beneficiaries, those kinds of things.
Something really felt missing. So, this person suggested working with groups and things came together in a way, the NGO I was volunteering at was going through a very difficult period and working with groups offered them a weekend taster on working with groups and all the facilitators were invited. It was a very interesting weekend. So, I signed up to do the course after that. So that’s how I got to working with groups. And it was very interesting for the organization because all the underlying, unconscious stuff could bubble up that weekend. It was interesting in how things emerged without working very hard, all the unconscious stuff in the organization surfaced. You know in terms of leadership orientation and, in the present, it just bubbled up. So, it really made me look at this, how these things could just come up. It seemed to flow almost effortlessly. I think for most people, that weekend was a very disturbing one. They encountered themselves in different ways. So that is what made me decide to do the course basically.
Yahya: It’s quite interesting hearing you speak where you mention, something was missing. I’ll speak from my experience that maybe there’s a resonance with this sense of something missing. That’s also something perhaps in our larger social unconscious in South Africa, we always feel something’s missing. Because something’s been taken, particularly from People of Colour. But I think for me, I was in position of being a group supervisor for lots of different stuff. What I started realizing quite a lot was (in the school of my teaching) not a lot of precedence was placed on the unconscious dynamics that come around the power positions that get played out. But even more than that, I started noticing that there wasn’t a lot of diversity in thought, in racial dynamics, in gender dynamics. And a lot of racial stuff was coming out in the supervision space. But I didn’t feel I had the language to speak into it, something was missing. I was part of faculties of different institutions and something felt missing.
What I felt was really lacking was a what can be termed a “huge economics”, that comes to my mind. I am sort of surrounded by a system of mental health that individualizes a lot. In South Africa, that’s just not possible economically, that people who have needs for their mental health and I’ll expand it further, because I think these are interlinked to spiritual well-being as well, to be done on a one-to-one basis with the psychologist sitting in the room across from them. I thought how is that economically viable in any wayor practically viable? And I think groups have a special place. So, I became intensely curious on how do you do work in a group in a different way that didn’t feel so individualistic? And that felt missing for me.
At the same time, I felt I was missing something of not being in a group. I felt very isolated. That I didn’t feel belonging in a community that could feel like we were. I felt misplaced or displaced in a sense. So, my own sense of what it means to be in group felt very heightened at a time of my life. So, I suppose there was a wish or fantasy that working with groups or group analysis would help me, not just in the way I do things but in my own sense of identity and placement and belonging, I suppose. I don’t know if it got realized but that’s another issue.
Patricia: Ja… How did you find out about group analysis or working with groups?
Yahya: I actually cannot recall to be quite honest. And it frustrates me that I can’t recall that. But I think that says something. To me, it says something that I can’t remember the bridge to group analysis. And I think that’s why when you said something’s missing, something feels missing in my memory of the exact location, person, time, and place that kind of called me into it. And maybe there’s something around my disconnect of what’s happening in group analysis at the moment that’s making me forget, or erase that memory in some way […]
Yahya: Safiya, did you get into it because you were in Ububele? Because you did your internship first. Was that a natural progression. I know a lot of people get into through the internship, I suppose.
Safiya: Yeah. I think that, that is how I got introduced to group analysis, through the working with groups initial training, and then it sort of just took off from there. So, the idea was that ideally, all the interns should do this course. And I think, maybe thinking about why I ended up at Ububele for my internship, because we apply through an interview process for a position, and I was interested in community work and in working with communities and community spaces and community issues. So that’s why I ended up at Ububele for my internship. Or, that’s why I wanted to be there, to get that kind of experience in doing community-based work, mental health work in a way.
Thinking about the initial training, I think the kind of issues that were being discussed and the things that were being raised in the group training spaces were conversations I longed to be a part of, that I wanted to listen to, and I wanted to share my thoughts, and I wanted to engage with others on those issues. I guess that’s how I found my way to group analysis.
But then, I think why I stuck with it and why I went back for the second year and wanted to continue even further was because I felt I had found a space that was able to offer something that most other spaces don’t, which is the opportunity to directly engage with really complicated, difficult to talk about, unconscious sometimes, but not always, things that happen between us, actually, and that have an effect on us outside of just dyadic kind of relationships, you know? I found that amazing, that there was a language that I could use to talk about this that was an acceptable part of my profession. It’s been quite a long haul of studying and you spend all these years and then to find something that actually was a space and provided like I say, this language that connects people and that doesn’t feel so isolating.
Collective reflection:
One cannot help but link our experience to a sense of ‘lost and finding’. We had in our own ways been in spaces that felt limiting in servicing communities that lay bare at the hands of apartheid. In turn the ‘call’ to Group Analysis provided a space of finding an equalising language between the divides that were forged and still exist. Likeness can be found to Foulkes, trying to find healing in a traumatised matrix and perhaps we continue to still do this work in a continuously traumatising environment.
Being on the inside
A dialogue on the journey of being in training amongst us provides an opportunity for critical reflection due to the different positions we hold owing to the timing each of us entered the training. This ability to track what it might be like to be on the inside can be spoken into from multiple perspectives and help to provide a glimpse of the process of how trainees inherit and digest training.
Excerpt 2:
Safiya: I think in some places, I feel like I have a way of maybe talking about something but then it feels a little lost, I feel a bit alone in that. Whereas this [Group Analysis] was something that could be a connecting kind of way of speaking and thinking about some of these issues. So, there was something about that, that I think was quite a hook for me in wanting to continue and carry on. I remember being angry a lot of the time though, in those spaces. So, I think that even though I was hooked into these conversations, I was angry, most of the time, irritated, frustrated. But it was good. Must have been good enough that I wanted more.
Yahya: Yes. You know and in speaking about that, I was wondering about myself and I think the median group is actually the thing that really, really hooked me tremendously. And I was very angry. I think it only took me halfway through the second year to actually find my mind again. I really felt quite ‘not me’ for the first year and a half, really figuring out what’s going on. Not because I didn’t understand the process, it was invigorating. Because like you said, things that felt unspeakable were being spoken
[…] Those moments of madness and frustration and anger never went away.. I think, the good thing was we[Ububele] really did try to incorporate a lot of the context. But I felt a bit isolated from some of the readings which felt very, not contextual; very white, European readings, and they (local texts) were like sprinkles on the cake maybe to appease you. “We’ll put in a little bit here.” And I think that was part of the anger as well. And then I had to work, work through the anger and actually sit with the hurt. And that was really difficult. That carried on later into… I suppose where we are now
Patricia: Yahya, what was the hurt about?
Yahya: I think the hurt for me was I think when I said earlier, I had my own perhaps unconscious wishes and desires for what I felt group spaces could offer me and could offer people in South Africa. When Safiya said communities, it made my head turn up because I think it’s so important. And the hurt is perhaps that something didn’t feel represented for me in the full expression of working with material that could be translatable to the context.
Something always felt off for me. So, there would be a few articles or seminars where there would be readings from People of Colour. We never spoke about gender, we never spoke about sexuality, we never really spoke about what it means to be reading from a particular eye. So, we never really engaged it from that perspective, to really be critical of how we are engaging with group analysis.
Maybe that’s too soon, I don’t know. But something felt very fragmented. I think that was really hurtful. Because in a in a world, like South Africa, where things were ingrained in us to be fragmented. I think I was hoping for something to come together and when it wasn’t, it felt very hard and I felt hurt in an embodiedsense. I couldn’t bring all of me, I had to bring fragments at different points because the frame couldn’t hold that. That was very hard for me.
Safiya: I suppose it really does just make me think about how that’s kind of what apartheid did so much was to try to kind of fracture society in according to the sort of decided markers. That could be as crude as you know, the texture of your hair or the shade of your skin. And, there is something about bringing things together that feels very frightening I think in a South African context. So if I’m thinking of it in terms of it bringing different people together, but also, I wonder if it isn’t difficult. Or, there’s a particular kind of difficulty with our South African history in bringing together all the kinds of different parts of a person as well into one. Instead of seeing a person reduced to just one, identifier and then therefore, they are categorized as this or that, but to be able to see a person for all the parts of themselves and to not have a need to then categorize this person in a particular way. And I think our categorizing those according to superior or inferior, where do I put this person, I’m better than them, or I’m less than….
Excerpt 3:
Patricia: I still don’t know if I’m capable of running the best group. But the group went the course in the sense that we ran for 10 weeks but it left me with a certain sense of what I’ve learned and what I imagined. And what that group really taught me was that you never really know. So, for instance, within community psychology you are taught that you need to tap into the indigenous knowledge, as the knowledge is the wisdom within the communities. And you work with that. But it doesn’t address the structural inequalities. You know, it goes to that part that talks about building resilience. And for me, it goes back to the boot and the straps. It doesn’t address the institutional inequalities, the institutional oppression, and the continuing oppression of people within those institutions, it doesn’t address that. And sitting with people who come from communities like that, or should I say where the lived experience is really hopeless. All these cultural institutional stuff. It is hopeless. And I’m not stating it as a pessimistic thing.
The thing is, there are real things that people are grappling with. Like simple things like having a toilet that works, having water, having just access to basic stuff. And then of course being just surrounded by so many different forms of violence. And here you are sitting in this group as a conductor, no one actually spoke to you about your positionality. Because the mere fact that I could go to school, that I had some kind of education, that I arrive at the centre in a car, impacts the group. It positions me in a certain way. And I would say primarily, that is what I had to deal with in the first half of the group; figuring out my positionality and how I work with it, what I do with it. Because, I mean, at the same time, I see, you know the way I saw myself, I’ll put it in the past tense, is that I’m someone who grew up under those kinds of conditions. I know what is happening. And, you know, and the reality is that no, I don’t know. Maybe at some point I knew, but at the point when I was re-entering that particular community, I didn’t know.
So, we talk about the conductor being reflective, we talked about the conductor becoming a member of the group. And I don’t know if underneath all of that, positionality is assumed, I don’t know. What I do know is that I needed to examine it. And I needed to test the theory against the reality of that group. And that required becoming critical of the theory or thinking about the theory differently. You know, not as given, because I think when one learns something new, you know, for me in any case, it feels like you need to engage with it as given and then somehow then have space to start reflecting on what is given and how it works and so on. Well that first group, I needed to do that and that helped tremendously. And I think that, that is most probably why well, I hope it was a rewarding experience for the group participants because it was really a rewarding experience for me.
And then in a certain way, learning theory and recasting it based on existing, can one say existing knowings? You know, so that you are comfortable in redrawing the frame of the group and comfortable in the members being part of redrawing that frame and holding to it. Because I think that in a lot of the communities that we work in, or that we would want to work in, if the members are not part of drawing and holding that frame, the frame is going to collapse. Because on the one hand, people are always very polite when it comes to knowledgeable people coming into the community to help them you know, that’s how it is, you know, to help them, they will be very polite and appear very cooperative. But at the same time, looking out for the disrespect that’s going to come or the not acknowledging and seeing of the group members, or the community members.
Collective reflection:
The interwoven experiences of being met by Group Analysis in our context conjures up images of being met at the shore of The Cape of Good Hope as colonising ships arrived to espouse the knowledge from far off lands and bring forth civility. At the same time there is an anger, frustration, disillusionment through this process of being duped into the thinking that this ‘package as a whole’ could be the panacea of the ills relevant in the daily lives of the people in this system.
One cannot help but wonder if the mind could imagine Group Analysis meeting Group Work here in South Africa (whatever it could have been named in its own language) as equals, whereby the learnings intertwine, build on each other and take what is needed. For if it is indeed to embrace the psychosocial science, the social needs to be held in its complexity and its glory, recognised as its equal. If Group Analysis is (and perhaps needs to be interrogated) steeped in a colonial legacy, would it ever be ‘taken up’ by its contexts as equal partner and not as the ‘charitable’ enforcer of what’s good and right?
The library of knowledge to be used in a training is always an indication of what constitutes knowledge. It is curious that academic texts, vetted by specific authorities are seen as the de facto way of learning. What would be gained by time spent on the learning of the social idiomatic group expressions in South Africa, the canons of Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, the many in Black Consciousness? How do we read into and through each other? How do I learn when my tongue feels heavy from a borrowed language?
Transition and Imaginative Futures
When initially planning this piece of writing we had attempted to keep the dialogue separated – transition (i.e., movement from one phase of training to another) and then imagining what group analysis might be or even NEEDS to be within in our context. We found it incredibly difficult to stay the course as the dialogue will show.
Excerpt 4:
Patricia: What that opens is another layer, in just how difficult it is to be part of and wanting to stay part of a movement but group analysis is very much on the fringe of therapeutic models. I mean, we don’t even have a registration category for it so there is something about the field not being recognized. So you’re busy with something you know you can’t get accreditation for, and it is expensive. You know, it might not be as expensive from a financial perspective, but it is stuck in a whole economy that is expensive. Because, it’s on the fringes and the people who do the training, they do it for nothing. So, it requires a kind of a, I don’t know, to me it seems like you know, it’s almost like a faith-based something you know, where you do it because you believe in it. And yeah, so it isn’t one of those sorts of attractive fields almost.
Safiya: I wonder if that’s what also makes it sometimes difficult though to challenge sometimes. Because, people kind of, like you say, I think people stay in this field because they believe in it, you know, there’s a faith in it, there’s a lot of emotion attached to it. And if I think of myself as well, a lot of what hooked me into it were my own experiences with small groups, large groups and facilitating a group of my own and actually having that experience of profound learnings about myself and thinking about others, and then in facilitating the group, seeing how the group experience could be so profoundly meaningful for others as well. So, there’s a lot of that kind of feeling that I think maybe keeps people in our context committed to this way of working. But I think it can be very difficult then to challenge that sometimes, or to get people to be willing to look more critically at things that they feel passionately about. So passionately that they’ll do the work practically for free like you say, or that they are giving up time and themselves in a way that isn’t providing any material or measurable compensation, which can sometimes feel a bit charity driven maybe.
So, to say ‘let’s be critical about this’, I think can be a lot harder for people. You know, passion projects are harder to criticize, and if somebody is approaching something with, I don’t know what the word. . . what the opposite of a passion project would be, but just in a more functional or practical kind of way, you know, that they could then be open to that engagement. And I think the only way for group analysis to grow and develop in South Africa is if we who are doing it take it seriously as well. That we ask to be taken seriously and for the work to be taken seriously. And part of that is being prepared to quite critically engage with the work, it includes our passion for the work, but it’s much bigger than just the passion for the work. And it’s more than just our own positive experiences and feelings towards the work, it’s much bigger than that
Patricia: Well, the problem is mental health, and the professionals involved in mental health are by and large, sort of, captured within the system. And the capitalist system that also piggyback on this idea that those who are more fortunate should give some for those who are less. I mean, that’s where your NGO work and that sort of thing comes from because you need to have something to give you know? But at the same time, for instance, when I think of how psychology in particular, coming out of psychiatry, how it is really not geared towards delivering mental health to everybody. So, coming from the institution of psychology and psychiatry, and the institutions in terms of government delivery, it just isn’t geared towards that. And, I suppose that that is one of the things that hooked me because it(GA) does offer this possibility for social justice, that somehow in the evolution of it, one could make mental health more accessible.
Also accessible in a way that isn’t racialized and that fully recognizes the people or the person that’s receiving the service. That it’s not sort of pathologizing the person but can see the whole person, not just the symptom, not just this, not just that, but really offers the possibility of working with the whole person, and not just the fact the person in front of you, but the whole village that comes with the person, the whole society that the person sits in and not make treatment the locality of the individual. I really can’t remember who said it, it could have been one of the Americans about the idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I think it’s one of the African Americans. You know, the idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, one, it assumes that you have boots. And two, it assumes that your boots have straps. Yeah. And then, a more important one is that…
Yahya: What makes boots so important? Because I think about walking around when I was growing up on the farm, boots were not part of what’s important in my context. And I think that’s what is worth looking at, these constructs of even our language, you know, so interrogating structures and systems. So even if you’re looking at it from a point of social justice, how do we think about this, the structures that need to be put in place in a particular way that serves social justice from a group analytic lens, right?
Coming out of the bubble of first two years of training and then trying to see where do I go from here? What were the structures that were available to me at that stage, right? It was UGAS [Ububele Group Analytic Seminars], kind of the offshoot, that came out of a particular structured and structuring way of thinking, which obviously, I didn’t know the history of but because something couldn’t be critically looked at something got enacted and I left. And I think by all well-meaning intentions, the structure was put in place using the old tools, or is it Audrey Lorde, cannot remember the quote. We were still using the same old tools. You might know this quote better Safiya, I can’t remember.
Safiya: The one about the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house?
Yahya: Yeah. So, you know, so the structure felt like it was well intentioned, but we were still using the same tool. And perhaps, if we thought about it critically, still knowing that we have the passion, passion will not override us, things could be different.
Excerpt 5
Yahya: It’s interesting that we are moving between transition and future, if we’re fluctuating back and forth, back and forth, I think there’s an interesting dynamic that we can’t stay in these modes of transition and future. And I think that says something. It says something about how our minds, for me, my mind feels very stuck in something of trying to imagine something that has been, so the journey doesn’t fit. Linear narratives feels so difficult, like something feels very difficult to hold a linear narrative. Reimagining feels so difficult […]
Patricia: Narratives are not linear, actually. Because the word is recursive: the past is always present, and the past is always in the present and the present in the future. I think the way I carry the memory of that first group informs how I have subsequent groups. So, it’s always there in each group almost….
Yahya: Because even as Patricia was speaking about positionality, I thought about my group as well. And also, that, how that translates to how it could be now. I remember one of the concepts is around how the group will find its normality point. You know, the group constructs its sense of normality, and its rules and way of engaging. But I remember me questioning that to my supervisor. Because I said, what if that centre needs to be questioned because that centre might not be helpful to the group in some way.
Would we need to have a form of social justice in a sense to enter the normality? I think this comes from an ideal. What do we mean by co- creating this centrality? This needs to be examined a bit more.
I remember when I was in my group, one of the group members, and then it became two and then it became three, very overtly questioned me about my sexuality. Classically you would kind of hold the ambiguity, because then projections come up, and it’s lovely. But I remember thinking there’s actually no literature I could go to think and help me think about this. Because actually, it could be a moment of importance for the group, self-disclosure could be something important for the group? A way to set a new level of “normality” of this co creation process. I didn’t really disclose it. But after discussing it, someone in the group did express their homosexual desires. And what came into my mind was the sense of how in dynamic administration if the conductor is not interrogative of a way of positionality, you run with heteronormative patriarchal assumptions. We have name, surname, gender etc on forms, and it restricts conversations, and how you actually even imagine the group, how you step into the group?
Interesting, Patricia, that you mentioned, your arrival at the centre with your car. I arrived to the centre at a place where I had my group, and I parked my car across from where the window was for our group. And one of the members stood outside and said, “Is that your car? And that’s very nice for you to have that car”. So, you know, it’s very interesting then to follow on a conversation around privilege. And would a conductor actually be willing to take up the conversation or just make it free flowing in a free associative way completely instead of owning their position. And I think that’s where I challenge the assumption of you just allow the centrality to emerge. I don’t think that’s actually helpful. Because you can actually exert some level of agency I think, which is actually necessary.
Patricia: Yeah. But the difficulty with some of that is the one thing I think that as South Africans we’ve become very good at this, we have learned to suss out and label very quickly. For instance, if I’m in a community setting, you know, the sussing out and the labelling, I mean, it happens on sight. It really happens on sight. When I walk in, people start speaking Afrikaans to me already, because they have labelled me as Coloured. So many things can go with it, plus, I arrive in a car. So, I’m one of those who think that ‘I’m better’.
Yeah, because I’ve got a car, I speak English, and also there’s a whole lot of things that just happen. When some of those things happen, it is actually okay. I am finding that it is okay to leave it until people can test some more. So, for instance, over the years my Afrikaans has deteriorated and because language is so fluid, if I’m going to what’s called a coloured community, the Afrikaans that I know is very different because of the way things morph and change and acquire new meanings. I mean, for some of the young people, our English doesn’t match, you know, because of the way the words are used and the meanings that’s attached to it. So, I always go in with a language deficit, it doesn’t matter where I am. There’s a language deficit because of the generational gap, and…
Safiya: I’m wondering if the word mismatch maybe isn’t better than deficit? Because there’s something about the deficit meaning sort of like a shortcoming, whereas it may be sort of more of a, just that they’re not exact, they’re not the same. There’s a difference more than a deficit, there’s always a language difference, I think, that needs to be worked with more so than deficit.
Patricia: There’s always a language mismatch, you say?
Safiya: Yeah.
Patricia: Where at some point, I’m not going to know what people are telling me? You know, understand it, I might recognize the word, but I might not understand. And for me, it is actually symptomatic for most of the people in South Africa, because of all our languages. And also because acquiring language has been essentialised to ethnic group or race. If you’re Zulu, you will speak isiZulu, if you’re Basotho you speak Sesotho. If you look like this (gesturing to face), you know, you will speak Afrikaans. All of these sorts of things, racial and racist assumptions are always, really just floating around
Collective reflection:
Movement from what is, the movement forward and the ability to imagine are knotted together. It seems that the legacy of trauma has taken away the ability to be playful and even more so to be playful in our dreaming as therein lies the nightmares too. What we have done with Group Analysis as we have done with many modalities is weaponize them behind a cause, a form of activism that must push to a purpose that’s all consuming. This has far reaching unconscious consequences that still need to be examined. Allies, informants, struggles hero’s, martyrs’; all these terms are steeped in our social unconscious of the Apartheid era and seem to blend into how Group Analysis is set up and continued to be spread in unconscious ways.
Our fractured minds seem to form splits on how to approach the imagined states and the difficulties of transitions; and the need for intersectionalist lenses are missing in the way we approach the work. Can we assess the fundamental way we train and what it means to be trained? Does it NEED to be a one-year therapeutic group? Where do we include training in median and/or large groups which form catalytic processes in South Africa? This harkens back to the Truth and Reconciliation days in South Africa. Might there be room to think through new applications that might produce a more radical humanism of Group Analysis as Fanon pushes us to think about? Might there be room to think deeper of the relative apolitical stance therapeutic models impose in a therapeutic relationship if we are indeed to revolve around an idea of social justice as a central axis of praxis?
Conclusion
In this article we have shared a level of intimacy into our dialogue as a way of tracing history in a different way, where the colonial structure of dismantling each part is not enacted, but instead a dialogue is held by the history keepers and experiencers. This was not an easy under taking. It questioned us on what we include and exclude, what we reveal about ourselves in this history as so often historians hold that responsibility and position of privilege.
More questions are raised in imagining new ways of engaging around Group Analysis particularly in spaces that are not in the traditional ‘eye’ of the GASi involvement. Our membership of GASi and what that means remains in question as belonging is a word with heightened meaning and the ‘I’ in GASi, is in lowercase. We offer this as a reflective practice for ourselves and a teaching, of sorts, to the fraternity as we continue our journey and exhort one another to:
Brother, trim the crazy thing,
Beyond dreams lies the hope;
Crazy is the world of living dreams
And dreams we have to burn into hopes;
Hopes we have to bend into reality;
Its where freedom lies.
– Mafika Pascal Gwala (Beyond dreams)
patricia.soaringwings@gmail.com