Psychotherapy Section Review - Orgdyne Training and ... · H ELLO AGAIN ! Welcome to the Spring 2015 edition of the Psychotherapy Section Review.You may be surprised to read this

Psychotherapy Section ReviewNo. 54 Spring 2015

ISSN: 1747–1761

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Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 1© The British Psychological Society

Letter from the EditorTerry Birchmore

‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’ Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.’ Philip Pullman.

‘It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time.That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.’

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind.

‘We’re all stories, in the end.’ Steven Moffat.

OUR LIVES ARE WOVEN AROUNDSTORIES. We tell ourselves andothers the stories of our lives. Our

identity springs from the stories we tellourselves, the narratives we construct aboutour past, present and future. The stuff of ourpsychotherapy sessions is storied: patients orclients tell us stories: about their pasts, theirpresent difficulties and relationships, theirtraumas, joys and frustrations. We hearnarratives of repeated patterns, personallived themes that cannot be escaped despitechanges in relationships, settings, and time.Through stories we learn about who is thevictim, who is the persecutor, who is thewished for prince or rescuer, who identifieswith whom and for what reason. An under-standing of story and narrative structureseems essential in the business of listening tothe stories that we are told and the stories wetell ourselves. Our own construction of aprofessional identity may depend on thestories we construct from our experiences.These are sufficient claims to support theview that our trainings need to incorporateteachings about literary criticism and narra-tive structure.

In this issue of the Psychotherapy SectionReview two topics predominate: story andnarrative; and group therapy. We reprint twoarticles that were originally published in thePsychotherapy Section Newsletter in 1990: anarticle written by David Smail and acompanion article by Simon King-Spoonerboth discussing narrative and identity. DavidSmail’s article is reprinted as a further markof his importance to our Section in the pastand follows a second obituary written bycolleagues who worked closely with Davidover the course of many years.

We have reports from our Autumn work-shop on the theme of sibling relationships,part of which touched on siblings in litera-ture.

Other articles highlight the ability ofgroups to illuminate and heal personaldistress.

Please note that we are hoping to publish atleast one special issue on ethics this year.Please: if you can contribute anything on thisimportant subject, contact me. Your knowl-edge, experience and willingness tocontribute will only add to the strength andvigour of this Section.

Terry Birchmore

HELLO AGAIN! Welcome to theSpring 2015 edition of thePsychotherapy Section Review. You may

be surprised to read this letter from me as inthe last edition, I wrote that it would prob-ably be my last letter, as the Chair of theSection before the AGM on 26 November2014. Sadly, no one put themselves forwardto be nominated to take on the role of theChair. As a result, I was co-opted back ontothe Committee as the Chair for another year,while Neringa Kisler continues to serve asthe Honorary Treasurer, and Terry Birch-more the Editor. I would like to welcome ournew Committee members: Zara Rahemtulla(the Honorary Secretary); Steven Heigham,Peter Kelly and Erica Brostoff (OrdinaryMembers) who were co-opted at the AGM;and Abbie Darlington (the newly-electedStudent Representative for PsyPAG).

It is clear that as part of the contingencyplan for the Section, we do need more newvolunteers to come forward onto theCommittee so that we can serve ourmembers and engage with the Society moreeffectively. This is particularly important asthe British Psychological Society is under-going changes as part of its renewal, forexample, see its new Strategic Plan: http://www.bps.org.uk/what-we-do/bps/governance/strategic-plan/strategic-plan

At the time of writing, we (the

Committee) are conducting a membershipsurvey to seek to better understand yourneeds and expectations from the Section –please respond to the survey if you have notdone so already. Alternatively, if you wish,simply email me.

Dr Ho LawChair, Psychotherapy Section Email: [email protected] http://www.bps.org.uk/networks-and-communities/member-microsite/psychotherapy-section

2 Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015© The British Psychological Society

Letter from the ChairHo Law


Looking ahead at future plans for CPDSteve Heigham

FOLLOWING ON FROM THE AGM anda more recent Committee meeting, wehave begun to plan the CPD events for

the next six months, though these plans maybe supplemented in response to themember’s survey that is being sent around atthis time.

In consideration of the number ofchanging perspectives in the field ofpsychotherapy over the last few years – regis-tration with the HCPC, the accession of CBTto prominence through the introduction ofIAPT in the NHS, the controversiessurrounding the introduction of the DSM-5,the proliferation of new ‘brands’ of therapy,and so on, we would like to look at thecommonalities that unite psychotherapy as adiscipline.

It is easy to get the impression thattherapy is a very divided subject, yet there arecertain key trans-theoretical concepts andpractices that are fundamental to all of ouractivities, which we would like to develop inour future programme of continued profes-sional development.

Thus this will be the theme for ourannual conference event in the autumn,with contributors being invited to givelectures and workshops on themes such as:self-esteem; self-concept; family relation-ships; and time line work. Suggestions forother trans-theoretical themes would also bewelcome from members.

In the summer it is also hoped to have aworkshop on empathy and self awareness asaspects of human personality that are funda-mental to the therapeutic relationship andprocess, and that are a useful focus in everyschool of psychotherapy.

We look forward to meeting you all at someof these future gatherings.

Steve HeighamOn behalf of the Psychotherapy SectionCommittee.

4 Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015

Be a Psychotherapy Section ReviewWriter!

‘Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and thewriting will be just as it should be.’Mark Twain

Would you like to share your ideas or professional concerns with a wide range ofcolleagues? Writing for the Psychotherapy Section Review is an ideal opportunity to beginyour professional writing career with something that is informal, even witty or funny, a short piece that is a report of an event, a report about practice, a research report, a review of the literature, a review of a book or film, a reply to an earlier articlepublished here, or stray thoughts that you have managed to capture on paper.Accounts of innovations, research findings concerning existing practice, policy issuesaffecting psychotherapy, and discussions of conceptual developments are all relevant.Psychotherapy with clients, users, professional teams, or community groups fall withinour range as do articles about psychotherapy education and training.

I welcome contributions from Psychotherapy Section members and non-members onany topics related to psychotherapy.

Length: Full-length articles of up to 10,000 words, should show the context of practiceor research and relate this to existing knowledge. We also accept brief contributionswhich need focus only on the issue at hand: brief descriptions, reviews, personalreports of workshops or events attended, humorous asides, letters and correspon-dence.

Presentation: Articles, letters, etc., should ideally be in Word format and forwarded asan email attachment to the Editor.

Editor’s email address: Terry Birchmore: [email protected]

DAVID SMAIL, who has died at the ageof 76, was a leading clinical psycholo-gist and a man of great warmth,

compassion and humour – deeplycommitted to his family and much valued byhis colleagues and friends. A distinguishedand influential writer (he was described byhis fellow author Dorothy Rowe as‘psychology’s Voltaire’) David was a clear-eyed and sometimes hard-hitting critic. He drew upon his vast clinical experienceand his wide learning to highlight the limita-tions of psychological treatment in thecontext of the damaging effects on people ofthe (often) toxic social world that we havecreated. He argued that the theory andpractice of psychotherapy has largelyignored or downplayed the way in whichpersonal distress is ultimately rooted in theenvironments in which many people have tolive; and in doing so, psychological practi-tioners have too often become the unwittingagents of social control.

David was born in Putney, London, onthe 23rd of April 1938 – St George’s Day.Perhaps it was a sign of things to comethathe first reached public attention, whilestill at school, for the courageous rescue of atortoise from a household fire. His earlyinterest in the works of Carl Jung led him totake his first degree in psychology andphilosophy at UCL, where he moonlightedas a semi-professional jazz drummer. As apostgraduate, David cut his first professionalteeth in psychology in market research,

though he quickly found that making upresults did not lead to intellectual fulfill-ment; and so, turning his back on the chanceto make his pile, he signed up for clinicalpsychology training at the Horton Hospitalin Epston. After completing his training,David joined Tom Caine’s psychologydepartment at the Claybury Hospital inEssex, where he was among the pioneers ofthe therapeutic community approach to thetreatment of distress. Influenced by the ideasof R.D. Laing and of other critics of bio-medical psychiatry, this approach entailedthe introduction of a more democratic,thoughtful and humane regime to thehospital ward, where patients were encour-aged to become active participants in theirown and each other’s rehabilitation. David’swork at Claybury included the completion ofa PhD thesis encapsulated in his first book,co-written with Tom Caine, on The Treatmentof Mental Illness, published in 1969. Theyconcluded that the personal styles and pref-erences of those giving and receiving psycho-logical therapies were far more important tothe final outcome than theories or tech-niques, and that psychiatric diagnoses saidlittle about the patients’ confusion anddespair, which could be traced – not to theiraberrant brain chemistry – but to theunkindness and neglect that had marredtheir lives.

These insights, since upheld by a consis-tent body of research summarised byacademic friends and colleagues including


Obituary

David Smail: Exponent of a social-materialist psychology and clinicalpsychology’s VoltaireThe Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle

Mary Boyle, Lucy Johnstone, Mark Rapleyand Richard Wilkinson – were to be elabo-rated in David’s subsequent career in theNHS as a clinical psychologist, which was tospan nearly 30 years. From the beginning, hewas a key force in the shaping of clinicalpractice and service delivery, as head of theNottingham Clinical Psychology Service: theyoungest person in the UK to hold such asenior post at that time. In the 1960s, themain role of the clinical psychologist was toadminister psychometric tests, under thetutelage of the far more powerful professionof psychiatry. But clinical psychology grewrapidly in scope during this decade.

Under David’s leadership, the Notting-ham service swiftly expanded to take in thenorth of the county of Nottinghamshire. Inthe late 1980s, David successfully negotiatedthe move of the Nottingham District Serviceout of what was then known as the ‘MentalIllness Unit’ and into the new premiseswhich became known as ‘The CommunityUnit’ – in the belief that he could build acommunity-based service, focused uponprevention as well as treatment, and freefrom the domination of psychiatry.

But David never abandoned his academicinterests. He established a clinical option inthe psychology department at NottinghamUniversity; where he was later awarded thehonorary chair of Special Professor inClinical Psychology – which he held from1979 to 2000. For him, the practice ofclinical psychology was never about trying tofit in, pragmatically, with the latest govern-ment or managerial ideology, nor with what-ever happened to be most fashionable withinthe university. Rather, therapeutic psycho-logy was both a craft and an intellectualendeavour, based, above all, upon clinicalexperience. As a founder of the Psychologyand Psychotherapy Association and with twostints as chair of the Psychotherapy Sectionof the British Psychological Society (BPS), hewas an influential support for those whohoped that clinical psychology mightdevelop in more thoughtful and humanisticdirections. Those who worked with David

were encouraged to become creative butmeticulous applied scientists.

Indeed, David was highly critical of hisprofession’s early enthusiasm for behav-ioural therapies, followed by the currentfavourite, CBT. He was among the first tohighlight the simplistic nature of these treat-ments, their tendency to lay the blame fordistress upon the supposed failings of theindividual sufferer, and their limited effec-tiveness in day-to-day clinical practice – espe-cially for people struggling with entrenchedsocial and economic adversity – flaws thathave since been well documented by manyother critics and researchers, such asProfessor William Epstein, in the US(Epstein, 2006, 2013; and see, for example,Dineen, 1998; Moloney, 2013; Newnes,2014). Perhaps it is no surprise, then, thatmany who worked with David still recall hisadvice that current orthodoxies shouldalways be questioned, and that we shouldstrive to be mindful of how institutional andworkplace demands can blunt our capacityfor honest reflection and careful thought.

Because of his openness to what his ther-apeutic practice seemed to be showing him,David was always willing to revise his ideas,and he became increasingly doubtful aboutthe covert social and political functions ofpsychological treatment. In his landmarktext, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning ofAnxiety published in 1984, he focused mainlyupon the subjective experience of theafflicted individual. David showed how dailylife in an increasingly competitive andunequal society can spawn chronic insecurity– especially amongst those with the leastpower and control over their circumstances– and how these emotional states are all tooquickly labelled (by mental health profes-sionals and sufferers alike) as ‘clinical’ prob-lems, to be fixed via individual treatment. Heargued that these deep seated insecuritiesand fears can come to permeate our bodilyand mental experience, indeed our wholebeing – and far beyond the reach of meretherapeutic talk – an observation that hassince been amply confirmed by neuro-


The Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle

psychological research (Dillon, Johnstone &Longden, 2012). In his next book, TakingCare: An Alternative to Therapy (1987), hefocused upon the experts and the hollow-ness of their curative claims on the onehand, and on the other, upon how theirmythology of cure reflects the workings of asociety obsessed with facile imputations ofpersonal ‘blame’ and ‘responsibility’. Heshowed that it was those with the most powerand privilege who really benefit from thesearrangements, which serve, in the end, todisguise the widespread harm that iswrought when interests of commerce andthe pursuit of profit are put before thewelfare of the ordinary citizen. Psycho-therapy might offer comfort, clarificationand encouragement – but for many, andprobably most, it cannot cure. The only reli-able way to ease widespread distress, heargued, was through changes in our socialarrangements – an essentially political task.

Indeed, David once said that MargaretThatcher was the best psychologist that he hadever encountered. She had taught him moreabout the misuse of political power as thefulcrum of personal suffering than any onebefore, or since. In The Origins of Unhappiness(1993), he described how, by the middle ofthe 1980s, he had found himself trying to treatmore and more individuals afflicted byemotional ills that they often attributed totheir own failures of adjustment or personalresolve. Like many other NHS psychologists inthis period, and in addition to his traditionalconstituency – comprised of people strugglingwith enduring impoverishment and harshsocial circumstances – David also found him-self treating growing numbers of middle-classprofessionals. He saw that, in their differentways, the malaise experienced by both groupspointed to the arrival of cold and unsettlingtimes, which included the first moves in theretrenchment of the welfare state and in theenforced dismantling and privatisation ofpublic institutions that has marked thedecades since, and which has sped up, duringthe current period of ‘austerity’ (see Clark &Heath, 2014; Jones, 2014).

David’s work was remarkable not just forthese observations, which were strengthenedby psychiatric survey data and other healthindices, such as rising rates of depressionamongst the growing mass of unemployedpeople and climbing suicide rates for youngmen – (both of which revealed the shadowside of 1980s Britain) – but because so few ofhis colleagues seemed to officially noticewhat had been happening. The counsellingand self-help industries expanded massivelyduring this period – not because there hadbeen any new scientific developments, butbecause of the openness of so many thera-pists and psychologists to the new businessvalues. Anyone who could conceivably turn aprofit out of the marketing of make-believedid so. David himself was a victim of thesesocial and political changes. In the five yearsbefore his retirement, he was unable to stopthe fragmentation and destruction of theservice thathe had built, when the NHS fellprey to the first stages of the internal ‘busi-ness revolution’ that is now all but complete(Jones, 2014; Pollock, 2009; Tallis & Davis,2013).

After retirement, David continued towork as a visiting lecturer for several thera-peutic psychology-training courses across theUK, and he maintained links with commu-nity psychology groups in the Midlands,where his patient encouragement and advicewas always appreciated. David also keptwriting. In Power, Interest and Psychology(2005) – his last book, and the one which hefelt offered the best summary of his thought– he charted the outlines of what he called asocial-materialist version of psychology: onewhich places the experience of distressfirmly in an environmental context, andwhich embraces the extent to which our feel-ings, thoughts and conduct are shaped bythe sticks and carrots of economic and socialpower. Rather than the self-creating entitiesposited by all too many purveyors of psycho-logical techniques, we are real, embodiedbeings, living in an equally real world thatresists wishful thinking. David observed that,if we want to understand why we are

Psychotherapy Section Review 54, Spring 2015 7

David Smail: Exponent of a social-materialist psychology and clinical psychology’s Voltaire

unhappy, then, rather than the traditionalidea of ‘insight’ into a mythical interiorpsychological space, we need to cultivate‘outsight’ into the external world. Dismissedby less reflective colleagues as ‘negative’,‘depressing’, or even as ‘cynical’ – for David,this viewpoint was exactly the reverse: since itencourages personal modesty, an apprecia-tion of the importance of good and badfortune in our lives, and a compassionateacceptance of our shared humanity.

In the last 12 years of his life – despite orperhaps because of his disillusion with whathe saw as the increasingly hubristic claims ofthe leading practitioners of talking therapy –David found renewed zeal as the founder ofthe Midlands Psychology Group (MPG). A close knit collection of critically mindedacademic and therapeutic psychologists, theMPG was created in 2002, with the aim ofexploring the implications of social-materi-alist psychology, which it did through theorganisation ofanational conference andthrough articles published in a range of jour-nals and other outlets, including TheGuardian newspaper. In 2013, the grouppublished a manifesto, which explored therelevance of David’s ideas to the under-standing, ‘treatment’ and prevention ofdistress, and in early 2014 edited a specialedition of The Psychologist magazine, whichtook a sceptical look at recent UK coalitiongovernment policies in relation to ‘austerity’and their effects upon the mental health ofthe British population. Within the group,David both gave and received inspirationand good humour in equal measure; and theresolve of the MPG to continue his work isyet another testament to the enduring rich-ness of his intellectual and personal legacy.

Back in 1987, David concluded that, if weare to ease human distress, then we have nooption other than to drop our naïve faith intherapy, and to try to take better care of eachother. For his many readers, colleagues andfriends, these words have an even deeperresonance today. David is survived by his wifeUta, and by his two children, Alastair andDeborah, and five grandchildren.


The Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle

BibliographyClark, T. & Heath, A. (2014). Hard times: The divisive

toll of the economic slump. New Haven & London:Yale University Press.

Dillon, J., Johnstone, L. & Longden, L. (2012).Trauma, dissociation, attachment and neuro-science: A new paradigm for understanding severemental distress. Journal of Critical Psychology,Counselling and Psychotherapy, 145–155.

Dineen, T. (1998). Manufacturing victims. London:Constable.

Epstein, W. (2013). Empowerment as ceremony.Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Epstein, W. (2006). The civil divine: Psychotherapy asreligion in America. Reno: University of NevadaPress.

Jones, O. (2014). The Establishment: and how they getaway with it. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Moloney, P. (2013). The therapy industry: The irresistiblerise of the talking cure and why it doesn’t work.London: Pluto Press.

Newnes, C. (2014). Clinical psychology: A criticalexamination. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books Ltd.

Pollock, A. (2009). NHS Plc. The privatisation of ourhealth care. London & New York: Verso Books.

Smail, D. (1984). Illusion and reality: The meaning ofanxiety. London: Dent.

Smail, D. (1987). Taking care: An alternative to therapy.London: Dent.

Smail, D. (1993). The origins of unhappiness: Towards anew understanding of psychological distress. London:Constable.

Smail, D. (2005). Power, interest and psychology: Elementsof a social materialist understanding of distress.Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books Ltd.

Tallis, R. & Davis, J. (2013). NHS SOS: How the NHS wasbetrayed – and how we can save it. London:Oneworld Publications.

FTER A LONG PERIOD OF NEGLECT,narrative has received a great deal ofattention in the last 20 years from

psychologists and literary theorists. Despitethis, we are still some way from under-standing the processes of response to literarynarrative, or understanding the role thatreading stories and novels plays in the life ofthe reader.

My main aim in this paper is to sketchsome of the components of a model ofresponse. I will be arguing that the centralcomponent, which has largely beenneglected, is affect, and that a reconsidera-tion of affect will enable us to go some way toseeing how the life of a story and the life ofthe reader interrelate creatively. But I willalso review some of the existing theories ofnarrative which I find helpful, which willprovide a framework for the model I will bepresenting.

But to begin, I will indicate one of themain themes of my talk by looking at theopening works of a well-known literary narra-tive, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte:

1801 – I have just returned from a visit tomy landlord – the solitary neighbour thatI shall be troubled with.

Even this first sentence provides quite a lotof information about situation and charac-ters. If you knew nothing about the novel,you would already be inclined to think thatthe situation was one of remoteness and soli-tude; you would be aware that there are twocharacters, the speaker and the landlord,and that, if you stopped to think about it, therelation between them is one of property –landlord and tenant.

But, more important, such a sentenceinvites the reader to take up an attitudetowards something. In this sentence it is the

phrase ‘troubled with’ that does the trick:‘the solitary neighbour that I shall be trou-bled with’. The speaker appears to welcomethe solitude: and because the verb is in thefuture tense, ‘shall be’, it also seems that thesituation is a new one for the speaker.Perhaps the novel seeks the reader’scomplicity in this preference: it speaks tothat in us that (from time to time) seeks outremoteness or solitude. I will argue that weread literary narratives for this affective viewor perspective, rather than for information.

If this is correct, then the primary vehicleof response to narrative is affect. However, a literary narrative works to shift or alter insome respect the focus of the emotions itarouses in the reader. To account for thework that narratives do in this way, I will laterpoint to several properties of emotion thatare frequently neglected. At the same time, I want to show how this view relates to somecurrent accounts of narrative by psycholo-gists and literacy critics: in a number of waysit sits well alongside story grammars, and thestructuralist and reader response views. Eachof these contributes an important dimensionto the view I want to present.

To demonstrate the issues which must betaken into account, if we are to understandthe process of reading literacy narratives, I’llreturn to the opening of Wuthering Heightsand look at it in a little more detail.

Going beyond the reader’s assumptionsHere is the first paragraph as a whole (it consists of five sentences):

1801 – I have just returned from a visit tomy landlord – the solitary neighbour thatI shall be troubled with. This is certainly abeautiful country! In all England, I do notbelieve that I could have fixed on a


Changing the Self: The affective plot inliterary narrativesDavid Smail

A

situation so completely removed from thestir of society. A perfect misanthropist’sheaven: and Mr Heathcliff and I are sucha suitable pair to divide the desolationbetween us. A capital fellow! He littleimagined how my heart warmed towardshim when I beheld his black eyeswithdraw so suspiciously under theirbrows, as I rode up, and when his fingerssheltered themselves, with a jealousresolution, still further in his waistcoat, asI announced my name.

As I said, the first sentence seems to inviteyou to share the speaker’s welcome for thesolitude. The continuation certainly rein-forces that attitude: he says the country isbeautiful and completely remote fromsociety, ‘a perfect misanthropist’s heaven’.Now, love of solitude, celebrating theremoteness of the wilder parts of England,had become rather popular by the time thenovel was published in 1847. The Romanticrevolution in taste had been accomplished.Wordsworth in particular, from his station inthe Lake District, had established thecultural value of the scene in Naturecontaining only one or two (or perhaps no)human figures. This value, in the openingparagraph, is the starting point of Bronte’snovel. The speaker seems to be a type ofrefugee from society (as Wordsworth was),and he invites us to identify ourselves withhis pleasure in this new situation.

However, the value is a double-edgedone, and the phrase ‘misanthropist’s heaven’hints at potentially negative implications.Although for the speaker himself the phraseis probably fairly trivial, a kind of pleasantry(appropriate for the social world he has leftbehind, perhaps – and this helps us to locatethe speaker’s social position), its effect isironic. It undermines the virtues which heseems ready to assign to solitude.

Halfway through this paragraph, then,there are already two opposing values inplay, relating to the virtues and the vices ofsolitude. The virtues are the overt theme ofthe passage, however, and for the reader atthis stage it may be that the ‘misanthropist’s

heaven’ would be a passing dissonance thatis hardly noticed. But we then immediatelyget what looks like a description of a misan-thropist in Mr Heathcliff: his black eyes arewithdrawn in suspicion, his fingers shelterjealously in his waistcoat. If we have locatedthe speaker in a social class, prompted by thestyle of his remarks so far, we may alsosuspect that his attitude to Heathcliff ismistaken. His assumption of equality, offellowship in solitude – ‘Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the deso-lation between us’ – may be too easy: it maybe overlooking something more malevolentthan mere, lovable, misanthropy. The ques-tion of property is also raised again, indi-rectly, in the phrase referring to Heathcliff’sfingers sheltering ‘with a jealous resolution’in his waistcoat – it seems that Heathcliff hassomething to defend, since he seems to treatthe speaker’s visit as a kind of trespass. Andthe next few pages will show that thespeaker, who is called Lockwood, is indeedmistaken about Heathcliff.

By the end of this first paragraph, then,the reader has both been invited to share inthe speaker’s feelings about solitude, and atthe same time has received signals(ambiguous so far) of the possible negativeimplications of solitude. In some way thenovel, as it proceeds, must develop the issuewhich this presents, and furnish evidence forthinking further about it. The reader’s ownemotions relating to solitude will provide anagenda of issues which he or she mightexpect the novel to raise (such an agendaneed not be present consciously): the readerwill, in other words, from the first paragraph,be anticipating certain possible outcomesand further values.

Indeed, one can readily imagine twoquite different types of reader for this novel:the Wordsworthian reader, looking for theadvantages and wisdom which flow from thesolitude amidst nature; the other on thewatch for the destructive effects of isolationand the abuses of property. There is plentyof evidence as the novel gets underway tosupply both readers, but it must be said that


David Smail

neither could be entirely satisfied with thenovel as a whole (although both types ofreadings have been argued at length inprint). Whatever values the reader applies,the novel will almost certainly require theirmodification of suspension, since the novel(I believe) is actually about somethingbeyond that particular issue. But my purposeis not to offer you a third way of reading thenovel, but to discuss the principles forunderstanding narrative which the exampledemonstrates. I want to point, first, to theknowledge and assumptions that the readermust have in order to support their reading;then I will indicate in what ways readingrequires us to go beyond our assumptions,and suggest how affect probably provides theprimary vehicle for doing so.

Narrative and the reader’s knowledgeThis first paragraph, then, requires that youdeploy your knowledge of solitude, and theassumptions you make about it. It suggests avalue which most readers will readily under-stand, whether they share it or not (andsurely most modern readers do). At this levela narrative depends on the readers worldknowledge and a set of pre-existing valuesand conventions. In psychological termsthese are often described as scripts orschemata. In the present instance they alsoinclude conventions about narrative (thisopening, for example, with the yearprovided and the tense of the first phrase,proclaims itself a journal entry). But first ofall literary narratives obviously depend onworld knowledge: information about situa-tions, people, events, places.

Cognitive scientists have developedwhole theories of narrative around thispoint. Called story grammars (a relateddomain is text grammars), They are basedon an analysis of the structure of schemataand our ability to remember schema-basedinf ormation and relate items acrossschemata (examples of such work includeBower, Black & Turner, 1979; Graesser,198l; and Mandler, 1984). In this approachthe various elements of a narrative can be

assigned to one or other category.Graesser’s model, for example, includesphysical or mental events, goal modes, andstyle elements, and these are related accord-ingly to various well-defined narrative links.The categories by which story grammarsdivide up knowledge, however, tend to betoo rigid to account for the often indetermi-nate or ambiguous elements of literacynarrative.

The explanation of response to storiesthat are given by the story grammariansreally only work well for relatively simplestories, such as folk tales or fairy stories,which tend to be constructed from conven-tional situations and stereotyped characters.And despite the empirical basis of the theo-ries, repeated experimental testing has notresolved some fundamental ambiguities overhow schemata are conceptualised and howthey relate to reading (Smail, 1989).

It is obvious that schemata, or someequivalent structure of world knowledge,must be involved in reading. But a literarytext is distinguished from other texts byrequiring that the reader go beyond theschemata that are given: the text calls theadequacy of the schemata into question, andinitiates a search on the part of the reader tofind or develop a more adequate way ofaccounting for the issues presented by thestory. To read is, in this respect, necessarilyan active, creative process, in other words,the reader of Wuthering Heights cannot takethe cultural value of solitude that Lockwoodholds for granted: it will be tested, ques-tioned, and perhaps superseded as the novelproceeds. But this novel doesn’t merely askthe reader to change his or her mind aboutthe value of solitude: it requires the reader tofind a perspective from which to view theissue of solitude and see why it is problematic– and this is a creative process. The studies ofcognitive science have paid considerableattention to how schema are deployed, but ithas been acknowledged that so far very littleis understood about how a schema (if that isthe construct we need) is created (e.g.Rumelhart & Norman, 1978).


Changing the Self: The affective plot in literary narratives

Literary texts also, as I mentioned, drawon conventions which are specific to a givengenre, such as narrative. these are signalledby various narrative structures and devices,which indicate the time frame, the point ofview, which character is the protagonist, andthe like. The reader new to WutheringHeights, for example, must not only recog-nise the journal convention, but alsoconsider whether Lockwood will be theprotagonist, and what role, if any, will beassigned to Heathcliff (who appears at firstto be a typical antagonist from a Gothicnovel). Much valuable and detailed work hasbeen carried out by structuralist critics onthese aspects, especially in France. Forexample, following Propp’s (1928/1968)analysis of standard situations in folk stories,Greimas (Bal, 1985, pp.26–36) developed atypology of roles in narrative. Asking who isthe protagonist, who is the antagonist, whoor what helps (inanimate objects can also be‘actors’), shows that characters fulfill certainfunctions within a story, and allows for thefact that one function may be fulfilled bymore than one character. The approachserves to emphasise the structural relation-ships at work in a narrative: it diminishes thepsychological emphasis on individual char-acters (against the tendency of the naivereader to respond as though such individualsreally existed), and it shifts emphasis ontothe play of actions in the narrative.

Similarly, Genette’s (1980) work offers aproductive analysis of narration and plot, thehandling of time, mood and voice in narra-tive. in the case of time, for example, as well asshowing the ways in which narratives makeuse of retrospection and (less often) anticipa-tion, Genette also examines the frequency ofevents, or what he calls more precisely, itera-tion, which is an event described as havinghappening only once, or was it a recurringevent? Compare the differing effect of thesenarrative fragments. The first describes some-thing that takes place only once:l I went into town to visit the market. Near

the West gate I saw Mr Alvani the musicteacher. He was walking with a limp.

l I used to go in to town to visit the market.Near the West gate I would see Mr Alvanithe music teacher. He walked with a limp.

The first seems to be a fragment from a plot,perhaps involving the appearance of Mr Alvani – a degree of suspense is alreadypresent. The second seems rather theaccount of a situation, a description of whatwas typical at a certain time and place. Interms of a plot, nothing has happened as yet,but the passage creates an atmosphere of acertain kind. It can be pointed out that intheir affective tone the two passages differconsiderably, although this is an aspect thathardly concerns Genette.

Following the work of Greimas,Gennette, Roland Barthes, and others, wenow have a sophisticated theoretical appa-ratus for describing the elements of narra-tive. From my perspective, however, themain problem with such accounts, howeverexhaustive they are, is that they eitherassume that the categories they describedetermine the reading process, or theprocess of reading as such is left out ofaccount. For example, in Genette’s study,Narrative Discourse (1989), which is one ofthe most detailed and scrupulous studies ofnarrative available, the reader is hardlymentioned until the very end. Interestingly,what Genette then does is to offer a quota-tion from Proust on the act of reading whichis unexpectedly subversive of his owntheoretical edifice. According to Proust, thereader is constructing his own book out ofthe instrument provided by the author.Proust concludes: ‘in reality every reader is,while he is reading, the reader of his ownself’ (cited, p.261). While this comment doesnot in itself invalidate Genette’s ownapproach, it does raise the question to whatextent the reader notices and is influencedby the array of narrative elements thatGenette catalogues. However, unlike storygrammarians, structuralist theorists havebeen uninterested in empirical research totest their view of narrative.

If the reader is reading ‘his own self’, thisproposes a quite different starting point for


David Smail

an investigation of narrative. The issues thatconcern the self of the reader will throw akind of filter over the narrative features thatGenette described: some features will influ-ence the reading, others will not be seen.The reader’s concerns will determine whatoverall structure will be given to the narra-tive. Whether any or all of the features in thestructuralist account are relevant to thisprocess remains to be established, althoughit seems certain that many of them must be.My own work with readers of narrative hassuggested that, whatever meaning a readerbrings to or finds in a text, all readers, forinstance, might respond in a significant wayto a certain passage of iteration, as shown bytheir comments or by ratings for impor-tance; but the emotional meaning theyattribute to the passage may vary consider-ably from one reader to another. Knowingwhat structural features are present inanar-rative doesn’t in itself tell you what meaningreaders will come to see in it: such featuresdon’t determine how a text will be read (cf.the criticism of Genette by Van Rees, 1985).

The process of readingThe process of reading a literary text seemsto begin in this way: The reader mustcontribute their existing knowledge – theirschemata – in order to understand the refer-ential world of the text, and they must findwithin their own experience the values thatthe narrative seems to require. But thelanguage of the text and perhaps variousstructural features conspire to call in to ques-tion the adequacy of their values and theirschemata.

The opening of Wuthering Heights hasalready provided an example of this process:the hint of irony surrounding Lockwood’sfirst paragraph undermines the positivevalue as signed to solitude in a remote partof the country. In this way the narrative indi-cates that your schemata as a reader must bereconsidered. The concepts and values bywhich you understand the world are beingput in a different light: what is to youfamiliar and unquestioned the way the world

is – becomes defamiliarised. It is this sense ofthe inadequacy of your familiar schematathat, in part, drives your reading, becauseyou are now obliged to create a perspectivein which the unfolding narrative is mean-ingful.

Defamiliarisation is often cited as a stan-dard effect of literary texts: critics fromColeridge (1871/1965) through Shklovsky(1917/1965), to Roger Fowler (1986) haveargued that a primary function of literatureis to dehabituate perception. For example,according to Coleridge (in a famous passageof the Biographia literaria), the intention ofWordsworth’s poetry is to arouse the readerby awakening the mind’s attention from thelethargy of custom, and directing it to theloveliness and the wonders of the worldbefore us; an inexhaustible treasure, but forwhich in consequence of the film of famil-iarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yetsee not, ears that hear not, and hearts thatneither feel nor understand (Coleridge,1965, p.169).

The defamiliarising work takes placethroughout the text, thus the reader willexperience a conflict of fluctuating perspec-tives. One of the major reader responsecritics, Wolfgangiser, remarks that as weread, ‘we oscillate to a greater or lesserdegree between the building and breakingof illusions’ (Iser, 1980, pp.62–64). In histerms, our schemata or world knowledgeconstitute the ‘primary code’ of the narra-tive; but the activity of the reader transcendsthis as they bring in to being the secondaryor ‘aesthetic code’ (Iser, 1978, p.92). As weread on in Wuthering Heights, a major focus ofattention in the first four chapters is theinadequacy of Lockwood’s understanding ashe encounters Heathcliff’s world. In thissense Lockwood represents the reader’s ownprior perspective, except that we know fromthose first ironies that in attempting tounderstand the situations and the charactershe meets, all the concepts that Lockwoodapplies are already too conventional andshallow. But so far we probably have nothingadequate to set beside them. Lockwood is



then replaced as the main narrator for mostof the novel by Nellie Dean, who has been awitness to the strange events involvingHeathcliff and Catherine. But the readereventually realises that there is a greatersignificance in the events that Nellie relatesthan she herself can understand. This inade-quacy of the narrator is itself a defamil-iarising technique, requiring the reader tosearch for a more adequate meaning – thereare, in fact, no reliable narrators in thenovel, and this places a special burden onthe reader’s values and creativity.

Now critics such as Iser offer, I think, anaccurate account of what the reading processlooks like. Iser also, and perhaps with betterreason, reaches the same conclusion as thatof Proust, which I quoted earlier, the signifi-cance of the text, he says, ‘does not lie in themeaning sealed within the text, but in thefact that meaning brings out what had previ-ously been sealed within us… Thus each textconstitutes its own reader’ (Iser, 1978,p.157). But there is little help from Iser, orthe others who work within this mode,towards understanding the psychologicalprocesses that make such reading possible.

While they accept the role of the text inarbitrating the reader’s new understandingof the self, as well as referring to the affectiveimplications of this process, the methodsused to account for reading are still predom-inantly cognitive. But affect appears to methe primary candidate for understandinghow reading, in the defamiliarisation model,is possible. In the last part of my paper, I willbriefly sketch some of the properties ofaffect, or emotion (I use the terms inter-changeably), that may be involved.

Emotion and narrativeI should also say at once that the points I want to make about emotion and narrativecut across a long-standing and still currentdebate about the place and role of emotionamong psychologists.

As I understand emotion, its organisingpower over such cognitive functions asperception, memory and problem-solving,

has generally been underestimated. Indeed,the standard view has usually been to asso-ciate emotion with disruptions of the cogni-tive system: for example, the ‘interrupt’model, elaborated by George Mandler(1984, p.46); another recent and moresophisticated model in this tradition is thatof Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987) whoclaim that emotion comes into play duringthe transition between one cognitive processand another.

There are alternative views, but so farthey seem marginal to the mainstream workof psychologists. You are probably familiarwith the debate started by Zajonc (1980),following which Zajonc (1984) and Lazarus(1984) in further papers argued overwhether affect or cognition is ‘primary’.

Even in this debate, despite all the empir-ical evidence that Zajonc brought to bear onhis claim for the primacy of affect, the workof affect was somewhat underestimated.Zajonc suggested that affect can determinethe tenor of a response, without the need fora prior cognitive appraisal. I’m sure this iscorrect (cf. Derryberry & Rothbart, 1984,who point to the existence of brain pathwaysthat would support such a process). Butmore important, having established aresponse, I will argue that affect can alsothen organise cognitive functioning tosupport or elaborate it. To illustrate this,here is a comment by Coleridge. He istalking here, in his notebook in 1803, aboutthe emotion of grief, but what he says is true,I think, quite often of other emotions as well.It is best to talk of a grief, he says since:

Unspoken grief is a misty medley, ofwhich the real affliction only plays the firstfiddle-blows the Horn, to a scattered mobof obscure feelings. Perhaps, at certainmoments a single almost insignificantsorrow may, by association, bring togetherall the little relicts of pain and discomfort,bodily and mental, that we have enduredeven from infancy – (Coleridge,1957–1973, 1, 599)

As this shows, emotion is able to transcendthe normal logical boundaries by which we


David Smail

categorise experience: I will call this thecross-domain power of emotion. The storieswe tell about ourselves often follow this quitedifferent logic of emotion: having estab-lished a certain emotion, a series ofdifferent, otherwise unconnected events arebrought in as evidence to extend, augment,or justify it.

Another feature of this aspect of emotionis that it brings into play, as Coleridge puts it,other ‘obscure feelings’ and ‘little relicts’ ofprevious events: in other words, emotionorganises, below the level of consciousness, aseries of memories or ideas, in advance ofour conscious awareness of the relationbetween them (perhaps some cannot bemade conscious). In this sense, emotionanticipates trains of thought that may onlybecome conscious later. And perhaps, bylinking certain memories and ideas, newconnections and new implications may begenerated in thought (almost this probablydoesn’t happen in a significant way veryoften). Thus emotion anticipates, and helpsto guide a cognitive process.

Given the importance of affect in organ-ising cognitive functions (if you accept theargument so far), it has also seemed to beprobably that what we call the self must bedefined primarily in terms of the emotions. I won’t argue this in detail here (see Smail,in press): but I have felt that the predomi-nantly cognitive account of the self providedin social psychology – the self as schema(Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984) – is too static:it makes better sense to conceptualise theself in more dynamic terms, embodied inemotions which, through their power overthe memory and their anticipatory function,present issues for action. The self is alwaysworking to some end, whether to maintainits position or to gain new ground. Speakingvery simply, a given emotion anticipates afuture state of the self, and this requiresaction either to avoid it or to bring it intobeing.

The work of McCoy (1977), workingwithin Personal Construct Psychology, ishelpful here. She takes further Kelly’s

account of emotion, suggesting the specificissues that the main emotions present inrelation to the self. Speaking of the self asthe core construct system, McCoy then showssystematically how the emotions arise in rela-tion to this system. For example, love is ‘vali-dation of one’s core structure’, etc. Theadvantage of this approach lies in its fertilityfor suggesting the agenda of significantexperiences, memories, and ideas, that arelikely to be implicated by a given emotion.

In summary, there are three functions ofaffect that can help to explain the process ofreading. In the empirical work I have beendoing with readers I have begun to obtainevidence for each of these functions. First,affect is cross-domain; where a significantaffect has been elicited by the text for a givenscene, for example, other information toaccount for the affect is available from thereader’s own experience – informationwhich may normally be unavailable to inter-pert the schemata relevant to the scene. Inthis way the reader is impelled to re-evaluatethe schemata currently in use. The cross-domain work of affect also serves to relatenarrative elements across conceptual bound-aries. A simple but very common example isthe transfer of mood from the weather tointerpret the meaning of a meeting betweentwo characters or a certain event.

Second, affect is anticipatory. Duringreading the meaning of the text as a whole(probably several alternative and conflictingmeanings) is created at a level beyond thecontributory values and schemata: this iskept on line, as it were, by a series of affectivecontrols over relevant information an impli-cations. The important of stories in helpingus to anticipate has already been pointedout: through stories, says William Doty, ‘weextend ourselves towards becoming otherthan we are’ (Doty, 1975, p.94). It has alsobeen shown empirically that readers ofnarratives anticipate, but that readers ofordinary discourse don’t (Olson, Mack &Duffy, 1981).

This affective sense of the potentialwhole acts something like a hypothesis,



guiding the reader to seek for evidence tosupport or disconfirm it.

Thirdly, affect is self-referential. Byarousing affect in the first place, the textdraws into play some of the major concernsof the self, perhaps concerns that wouldnormally remain hidden. Through the de-familiarising work of the text, the reader isrequired to some degree to re-evaluate theiraims and their self-concept. Given that theconcerns of the self are reshaped by the text,it can be seen how each reader, as Proust andIser claim, creates their own text duringreading. whatever the obstensible meaning ofthe narrative – for example, the story of Lock-wood’s encounter with the strange tale ofHeathcliff and Catherine – the reader knowsthat the story being told didn’t happen inreality. The real, but submerged, plot of everyliterary narrative is the changing of the self ofthe reader: that shift in the position andmeaning of the self that an attentive readingof a literary text brings about.

Much more work, both theoretical andempirical, is needed to develop thisapproach, but I feel that the several existingapproaches to narrative that I have discussed

– the story grammarians, the structuralists,the reader response critics – all provideimportant elements for the framework ofsuch a model. A better understanding of therole of affect will enable us to make realprogress in accounting for the dynamics ofthe response to literary stories. Thisapproach is not entirely new: once again,Coleridge, although he never worked it outin detail, provided a succinct statement ofthe outlines of a theory of response based onfeeling. This is a remark he jotted in a note-book in 1804, he is actually thinking ofShakespeare, but his remark applies just aswell to narrative:

Poetry [is] a rationalised dream dealing… to manifold forms our own feelings,that never perhaps were attached by usconsciously to our own personal selves …there are truths below the surface in thesubject of sympathy, and how we becomethat which we understandly [sic] beholdand hear, having, how much God perhapsonly knows, created part even of theForm. (Coleridge, 1957–1973, 2, 2086).

David Smail


David Smail

Bal, M. (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the theory ofnarrative (C. van Boheemen, Trans.). Toronto:University of Toronto Press.

Bower, G.H., Black, J.B. & Turner, T.J. (1979). Scriptsin memory for text. Cognitive Psychology, 11,177–220.

Coleridge, S.T. (1957–1973). Notebooks (Ed. K.Coburn). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Coleridge, S.T. (1965). Biographia literaria (Ed. G.Watson). London: Dent Everyman. (Originalpublication: 1817)

Derryberry, D. & Rothbart, M.K. (1984). Emotion,attention and temperament. In C.E. Izard, J. Kagan & R.B. Zajonc (Eds.), Emotions cognition,and behaviour (pp.132–166). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Doty, N. (1975). The stories of our times. In J.B.Niggins (Ed.), Religion as story. New York: Harper& Row.

Fowler, R. (1986). Linguistic criticism. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Genette, G. (1980). Narrative discourse (J.E. Lewin,Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Graesser, A.C. (1981). Prose comprehension beyond theword. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Greenwals, A.G. & Pratkanis, A.R. (1984). The self. In R.S. Wyer & T.K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of socialcognition, Vol. 3 (pp.120–178). Hillsdale, NJ:Lawrence Erlbaum.

Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading. London: Routledge& Kegan Paul.

Iser, W. (1980). The reading process: A pheno-menological approach. In J.P. Tompkins (Ed.),Reader-response criticism: From formalism to post-structuralism (pp.50–69). Baltimore: John HopkinsUniversity Press.

Lazarus, R.S. (1984). On the primacy of cognition.American Psychologist, 39, 124–129.

Mandler, G. (1984). Mind and body: Psychology ofemotion and ustess. New York: Norton.

Mandler, J.M. (1984). Stories scripts and scenes: Aspectsof schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

McCoy, M.M. (1977). A reconstruction of emotion. In D. Bannister (Ed.), New perspectives in personalconstruct theory (pp.93–124). London: AcademicPress.

Smail, D.S. (1989). Beyond the schema given:Affective comprehension of literary narratives.Cognition and Emotion, 55–78.

Smail, D.S. (in press). Anticipating the Self: Towardsa personal construct model of emotion.International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology.

Oatley, K. & Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1987). Towards acognitive theory of emotions. Cognition andEmotion, 1, 29–50.

Olson, G.M., Mack, R.L. & Duffy, S.A. (1981).Cognitive aspects of genre. Poetics, 10, 283–315.

Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folk tale. Austin, TX:University of Texas Press. (Original publication:1928)

Rumelhart, D.E. & Normand, A. (1978). Accretion,tuning, and re-stucturing: Three models oflearning. In J.W. Cotton & R.L. Klatzsky (Eds.),Semantic factors in cognition (pp.37–53) Hillsdale,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Shklovksy, V. (1917/1965) Art as technique. In L.T.Lemon & M.J. Reis (Eds. and Trans.), Russianformalist criticism (pp.3–24) Lincoln, NE:University of Nebraska Press. (Originalpublication: 1971).

Van Rees, C.J. (1985). Implicit premises on text andreader in Genette’s study of narrative mood.Poetics, 14, 445–464.

Zajonc, R.B. (1980). Feeling and thinking:Preferences need no inferences. AmericanPsychologist, 35, 151–175.

Zajonc, R.B. (1984). On primacy of affect. In K.Scherer & P. Ekman (Eds.), Approaches to emotion(pp.259–269). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.



References

Originally published in the Psychotherapy Section Newsletter, No. 8, June, 1990.

THE TERM ‘introspection’ comes appar-ently, from the Latin words ‘spicere’, ‘tolook’ and ‘intra’, ‘within’. The idea is

that we can know our mental states or eventsor processes – that is, our motives, desires,emotions, thoughts and hopes, our decision-making and problem-solving, and so on – by some kind of direct internal observation.

There are two main points I want to makeabout this notion. The first is that we do nothave such a capacity in the sense in which itis usually understood – I will look at the posi-tion taken by the philosopher William Lyons,who argues that ‘introspection’ in this usualsense is a ‘myth of our cuture’.

My second point is that we have,nonetheless, varying degrees of access to ourcognitive and appetitive and emotionalstates and processes, and that this is possiblepartly because such states and processes havetheir existence not in some Cartesian innervessel, nor solely within the boundaries ofour physical selves. but in a complex inter-action which includes the world outside ourskins. The ideas on which I base this claimcome largely from another philosopher,Michael Polyanyi. (Though the source of theunderlying principle is Wittgenstein.)

A point about the bearing of all this onpsychotherapy: It seems to me that it isgenerally taken for granted in psychotherapythat much or all of a client’s supposedlyinner world of emotions. hopes, desires,beliefs, motives and so on can. at least inprinciple – perhaps after the relevantdefences, selective blindness or whateverhave been overcome – be observed andreported. Even where such statements aresubject to a high degree of interpretativescrutiny, as in psychoanalysis or transactionalanalysis, one possible outcome of suchscrutiny is that the client’s (patient’s) asser-tion be taken at face value — Freud discusses

this at some length in his Introductory Lectureson Psychoanalysis, where he argues that ananalyst is entitled to judge whether theexplanation of his or her slip of the tonguegiven by their patient is accurate or whetherit should be interpreted in terms of theirdefences.

A few more big names: Rogers postulates‘three ways of knowing’, by one of which,‘subjective knowing’, I may (to give hisexamples) check whether I love her or not,or realise that I don’t really hate him but thatmy feeling is one of envy; Kelly discussesintrospection as a technique in connectionwith fixed-role therapy; Assagioli also has itas a technique in its own right in psychosyn-thesis; although clear references to intro-spection are not easy to pin down in EricBerne’s writing, his pre- and post-therapy‘script check lists’ include such introspection– requesting items as ‘Do you like to showthat you are able to Suffer?’ and Can yourAdult talk straight to your Parent and Child?’(as well as ‘Have you taken off your sweat-shirt?’ and ‘Have you cut down your reach-back and after-burn so they do notoverlap?’); and Perls (with Hefferline andGoodman), in Gestalt Therapy seems to besuggesting that the client be asked not just tointrospect, but to examine the way in whichhe or she does so – thus perhaps completingthe first spiral of an infinite regress.

A stand against this tendency to take acapacity to introspect for granted is made(characteristically) by David Smail in hisbook Illusion and Reality: The Meaning ofAnxiety. The points made in the book areillustrated by sketches drawn from clinicalexperience; one such runs as follows:

Jeremy was a 10-year old in the care of thelocal authority. He had spent the first twohours of one particular morningbarricaded in his room. systematically


The fictional nature of introspectionSimon King-Spooner

destroying every object in it eventually hewas extracted by the staff and subjected toa searching enquiry by three child careofficers as to what was disturbing him.Anxiously concerned, gently and withoutany threat, they asked him in every waythey knew how why he had done it, whatwas worrying him. They racked theirbrains to present him with possiblealternative explanations, but always with arequest for his affirmation or denial. In other words, they were absolutelyconvinced that he knew the explanationfor his conduct, and that he could inprinciple put that knowledge into words.However, it seemed clear from hisexpression of pain, confusion andbewilderment that Jeremy had not theslightest idea why he had acted as he had.What he desperately needed (and did notget) was someone to tell him why, so thathe could acquire a verbal purchase on hisanguish.

David Smail goes on to make a general asser-tion that the explanations we give for ourconduct – our reports of decision, intention,motive, and so on (he does not seem toinclude emotion) – are not based on anyprivileged access to cognitive and appetitiveprocesses, but that we are obliged, like anyother observer of our behaviour, to ‘read off’the reasons for our actions from the actionsthemselves and their context; he adds thatthe various forms of self-interest often resultin an actor’s own accounts being less accu-rate that those of disinterested observers.

Smail’s position points towards thatdeveloped more fully by William Lyons.

The greater part of Lyons’ book TheDisappearance of Introspection consists of adiscussion of the main attempts psycholo-gists and philosophers have made to explainwhat is going on when we report on our‘mental events’, with in each case apainstaking refutation of the explanationgiven.

I will pass over these arguments and goon to Lyons’ next move: the assertion thatthere is no need for these variously tortuous

and heroic attempts to explain what we aredoing when we claim to introspect, becausethere is nothing requiring special explana-tion; that our ‘faculty for introspecting’ is, as he puts it, the ‘Loch Ness Monster ofPhilosophy of Mind’. Some of his reasons forsaying this are as follows:1. Already mentioned, the consistent failure

of theorists of introspection to give aplausible account of what might be goingon.

2. In the several decades in which intro-spection was an accepted and much usedmethod in experimental psychology, anddespite increasingly Byzantine attempts toelaborate and refine it as such it failed tocome up with much in the way of results;indeed the famous dispute between theCornell and Hurzburg schools over theexistence or imageless thought demon-strated the flimsy and problematic natureof such findings as there were, andsuggested that cultural factors (in a broadsense) were important in producingthem.

3. Children seem to have to learn how tointrospect, only attaining apparentproficiency at somewhere around the ageof 8 – contrary to what might be expectedif some straightforward process equivalentto the various kinds of sensory perceptionwas involved.

4. People of some other cultures – such asthe Balinese the Maori, and the Ifaluk (of the Northern Pacific) – do (or did)not seem to have anything like our notionthat we can report on what is going on inour minds, and indeed have strikinglydifferent ideas of ‘self’ and ‘mind’ anyway.

5. A number of striking findings fromexperimental psychology indicate that weare very often unaware of why we dothings, and on such occasions giveexplanations for our conduct which makeno mention of factors which aredemonstrably influencing it. Twoexamples, cited in a review of suchevidence by Nisbett and Hilson follow.(a) In a mock consumer survey, subjects


The fictional nature of introspection

were asked which of four identical pairs ofstockings they preferred. There was astrong position effect – the pair on thesubjects’ right was chosen almost fourtimes as often as the pair on the left.When asked why they had made thechoice they had, no subject mentionedposition; …when asked directly about apossible effect of the position of thearticle, virtually all subjects denied it.usually with a worried glance at theinterviewer suggesting that they felt eitherthat they had misunderstood the questionor were dealing with a madman. (b) Latane’s and Darley’s studies of thebystander effect show that: ‘…people areincreasingly less likely to help others indistress as the number of witnesses orbystanders increases’. Subjects appearedto he oblivious to this effect, and denied iteven when it was directly suggested as apossibility. The same result was foundwhen subjects were asked to predict howothers would behave, suggesting that suchdenials could not he put down toreluctance to make an embarrassingdisclosure. or whatever.

Nisbett and Wilson point out that subjects’accounts of their cognitive processes are notonly no more accurate than those proposedby observers or other non-participants, butare actually very similar to them. This andother considerations lead them to make thefollowing proposal:

…when people are asked to report how aparticular stimulus influenced a particularresponse, they do so not by consulting amemory of the mediation process but byapplying or generating causal theoriesabout the effects of that type of stimuluson that type of response.

Such causal theories, it is suggested. may beidiosyncratic, or they may originate in aperson’s culture or subculture.

And this proposal goes a long waytowards presaging the position Lyons finallytakes on what is really going on when we areallegedly introspecting.

He says that:

…‘Introspection’ is not a special andprivileged executive monitoring processover and above the more plebeianprocesses of perception, memory andimagination; it is those processes put to acertain use.

What he means is that when we ‘introspect’our motives. Decisions, desires. plans, and soon, we derive or construct more or less plau-sible ‘stories’ about these things from ourperceptions and form the percept-likeimagery of memory’ and imagination, usingour implicit folk-psychological theories to doso. The validity of the stories we come upwith will be limited by the validity of thesetheories, however rich the evidence of oursenses and our imagery.

And (by implication) when a particularinfluence on our actions has no place in oursystem of implicit theories we will have noway of knowing about it or reporting on it,however powerful it might be.

Lyons’ argument seems powerful andpersuasive. I want to make room for some-thing a little nearer our naïve assumptionthat we have access to mental events of ahigher level than percepts and experiences.However, partly by shifting their locationform ‘within us’ to some less easily construedarena which in part comprises the worldabout us.

But I would first like to question, albeittentatively. Lyons’ implied position that theonly content of our consciousness arepercepts and percept-1ike images. Thereseems to be at least one such content whichis by definition not percept-like, yet thereporting of which seems to be unproblem-atic and to have a high predictive validity –the ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, thesense (or ‘sense’) that a word, usually aname, that has been temporarily forgotten ison the edge of recall. and there is a granderversion – the feeling, in intellectual pursuits,that a sought-for formulation is about to beachieved.

The poet Stephen Spender talks of:…a dim cloud of an idea which I feel mustbe condensed into a shower of words, and


Simon King-Spooner

Einstein, of …a feeling of direction, ofgoing straight towards somethingconcrete persisting for several years of hissearch for the principle of relativity. Partof my unhappiness with Lyons’ position isthat I am sure ‘imageless thoughts’ ofvarious kinds slither about continually onthe edge of my consciousness. though I admit they seem to have an eel-likeresistance to capture – indeed it may be anecessary characteristic that they cannothe brought into focal attention.

The alternative picture I want to put up mayhave more room for dim clouds, senses ofabsence, and any number of other problem-atic ‘inner events’. First, though, I need tosketch out some of the ideas of anotherphilosopher, Michael Polanyi.

Polanyi was a distinguished chemist – hewas Professor of Physical Chemistry atManchester for 15 years – who later movedinto philosophy, a field in which his originaland idiosyncratic approach has no doubtcontributed to his neglect. His best knownbook is probably Personal Knowledge,published in 1958; the ideas I am using herewere more fully developed in a later book,The Tacit Dimension from 1967, and in twopapers also published during the 1960s.

The main notion that I want to take up isone that forms the heart of Polanyi’s concep-tion of knowledge – ‘knowledge’ being in hissystem one of a cluster of terms, with ‘skill’,‘perception’, ‘awareness’, and ‘meaning’,whose mutual boundaries are unclear.Polanyi sees knowledge as necessarily having

a ‘subsidiary’ (or ‘proximal’, or ‘tacit’) termand a ‘focal’ (or ‘distal’, or explicit one, suchthat we know the focal from the subsidary; allknowledge, he claims, and all meaning, hasthis ‘from-to’ structure.

The best way to get hold of this idea is bylooking at some examples (see box below).The first two were used by Polanyi in anumber of writings.

The simplest example might be that of aprobe. To quote:

…Anyone using a probe for the first timewill feel its impact against his fingers andpalm. But as we learn to use a probe …our awareness of its impact on our hand istransformed into a sense of its pointtouching the objects we are exploring.This is how an interpretative efforttransposes meaningless feelings intomeaningful ones … We become aware ofthe feelings in our hand in terms of theirmeaning located at the tip of the probe …to which we are attending.

There are one or two points worth makinghere. In this case the ‘from-to’ structureinvolves literal, physical distance between ourhand sensations and the tip of the probe – inother instances the separation of the twoterms is of a less concrete kind. Again in thiscase the sensations that form the ‘subsidiary’term are potentially available to conscious-ness (though this may not be so if kinaes-thetic feedback is also involved); if, however,we draw our attention back from the tip ofthe probe to our hand sensations they imme-diately lose their meaning and become just



FROM TO(Subsidary) (Focal)

PROBE Sensations in hand Tip of probe-shape of cavity

RELATIVITY Conventional physics RelativityParadoxes from thought experimentsMetaphysical beliefs (?) Non-Euclidian geometryTensor calculusEtc.

sensations, rather than the means by whichsomething is known. (In other cases some orall of the constituents of the subsidiary termare non-conscious in principle.) A thirdpoint, related to this loss of meaning whenthe subsidiary components are attended to, isthat we always know more than we can tell –because, as I understand it even if we can inprinciple direct our awareness to thesubsidiary components the consequentdestruction of their meaning leaves us withno means of verifying any attempt to cata-logue them; and even if this were not so alsowe could not describe them while actuallyknowing from them – that is we never, at thetime anyway, know how we know. And finally,any act of knowing is always active – meaningsare not passively assimilated but are achieved,through a process that seems to be closelyanalogous with, if not simply a broader appli-cation of the achievement of closure in theGestalt Psychology of perception.

The second example is that of knowing aface from its features. This is a little moreelusive, partly because both the subsidiaryand focal components appear to have thesame location. But the same points apply: wesee the ‘meaning’ of a face – that is, werecognise it, or see its expression – from itsfeatures, and if we focus on the features welose the meaning. The implication is, I think,that we must be wary of the tendency tolocate meaning – the Focal term – otherthan very vaguely, except where (as with the‘probe’ example) the location is, in somesense, the meaning. And secondly, we do notknow how we achieve that meaning – we areunable to say what it is about the featuresthat would enable us to distinguish that facefrom (literally) a million others, let alonehow we know whether a smile, say, is joyful orresigned, guizzical, lecherous, strained, obse-quious, or vacant, tender or sadistic,triumphant or humble.

The third example, Einstein’s discoveryor formulation of the principle of relativity,shows the comprehensiveness of Polanyi’stheory – it also relates, in connection with theearlier point about Gestalt closure, to a view

he was already taking 20 years before TheTacit Dimension that science can be seen as ‘a variant of sensory perception’. Here we seethat the components on the ‘subsidiary’ sideof the ‘from-to’ structure do not have to beperceptual in nature. They can come fromour indefinitely extensive repertoire of cogni-tive models and operations, from relativelysimple recollections and expectations to themost sophisticated and abstract theoreticalstructures. In the previous example, forinstance, the way in which I see your smile,see the meaning of that configuration of yourmouth and whatever other features, might bepartly determined by such additionalsubsidiary components as any knowledge thatyou are recovering from Bell’s Palsy, or theprejudices I have about people with largemouths or stiff upper-lips-cognitive compo-nents join the perceived ones, your features,in the subsidiary term, and are made use of inan essentially similar way.

So also if Einstein’s long struggle towardsthe principle of relativity the subsidiary como-ponents included, no doubt among others:thorough knowledge (presumably) of thephysics of the day; an awareness of paradoxesin conventional physics. derived at least partlyfrom ‘thought experiments’ such as thefamous one on which he imagined himselfriding on a beam of light: possibly metaphys-ical beliefs. such as a belief in an essentiallyorderly universe (God does not play dice …);and his assimilation of what were then veryabstruse and speculative branches of mathe-matics. Including Riemann’s non-Euclideangeometry, and tensor calculus.

Then what? Going back to Gestaltclosure, there is a well-known ‘degradedimage’ that appears at first to consist ofrandom or near-random black blotches on awhite background. Once you have stared at itfor a while, looking for the image that youknow to be there, you suddenly see a Dalma-tion sniffing a kerb. So with Einstein – thesubsidiary components in which heimmersed himself (knowing ‘something wasthere’) are the blotches. ‘relativity’ the dog.A final point – the focal term in one act of


Simon King-Spooner

knowing can be a subsidiary component inanother – the theory of relativity, once madeexplicit, can become a blotch in some othercognitive enterprise.

All of which should, I hope, providesome of the subsidiary components for anunderstanding of ‘introspection’ onPolanyian principles.

The claim I want to make is this: thatwhen we report, reflectively and in goodfaith. on our thoughts, motives, intentions,desires, emotions, and so on, we generally doso on the basis of subsidiary componentsfrom several fields. and that the statementswe come up with are (or at least reflect) thefocal knowledge drawn from, andcomprising the meaning of, those compo-nents.1. Sense data.2. Percept-like imagery.3. Imageless thought?4. Bodily perturbations5. Muscular tension (miniature behaviour?).6. Beliefs, expections, etc.7. How things look.The first two categories seem to be the mainones William Lyons is saying we make use ofwhen we introspect (using folk-psychologicaltheories) from.

The third section is a dubious one thatincludes the tip of the tongue phenomenonand so on.

The fourth field comprises the results(not necessarily potentially reaching aware-ness) of autonomic nervous system activity —stomach churning, swelling tear glands,increased heart rate, and so on (the termcomes from Ron Harre). Field five –‘muscular tension’ (again not necessarilyavailable to consciousness) – may seem self-explanatory. But I quite like Skinner’s ideaof covert behaviour – both Polanyi andpossibly Merleau-Ponty seem to be hinting atthis, and it seems clear that at least occasion-ally muscular tension is something like aphysical equivalent of muttering under one’sbreath (think of people at a boxing match,where the constraints that keep thebehaviour covert start to break down).

The sixth category. ‘beliefs and expecta-tions’, is meant to cover any relevant parts ofour cognitive systems, including especiallyimplicit, folk-psychological beliefs (and inthe psychologically learned, of course, ourexplicitly held, non-folk beliefs).

I want to claim that the last sectioncomprises a particularly interesting andinstructive field of subsidiary knowledge,perhaps the one that our cultural presuppo-sitions most effectively blind us to. Theproposition, odd as it might sound, is that animportant part of our knowledge of ourminds derives at least sometimes from theway in which we see the world in whole or inpart (how we see, not what we see) – that toa significant degree our cognitive, appetitive,affective states can be discerned as much outthere as in ourselves.

In certain extreme cases such effects areso powerful that they break through intoawareness, against all the investment of ourcognitive system (and our culture) in, as itwere, holding the world steady. It mighthappen much more often that eloquentchanges in our phenomenal worlds remainunnoticed while acting as subsidiary compo-nents of our ‘introspections’.

What I am trying to get at is obviouslydifficult to talk about in the abstract or togive any kind of account for, so I will use afew annotated examples. Perhaps the bestknown instances of overall changes in theperceptual tenor of the world occur withdepression. Two examples:

My senses all seemed to have become lessacute: food was tasteless; I didn’t noticesmells, such as a gas leak, that I’d formerlyhave picked up; my fingertips seemedinsensitive to texture; I was less aware ofwhere my various extremities had got to;even my sense of pain was attenuated.

Ordinary objects were altered. Tablesand chairs, or whatever it might be, nowappeared as sinister, devoid of familiarity,drained of the feeling formerly investedin them.

Virginia Woolf describes such‘ontological draining’ as Roger Poole has



called it in his analysis of her madness inrelation to her life and work – no doubtfrom her own experience. For example,in The Waves …the scene beneath mewithered. It was like the eclipse when thesun went out and left the earth.flourishing in full summer foliage,withered, brittle, false The woods hadvanished; the earth was a waste of shadow.No sound broke the silence of the wintrylandscape.

Later in the same passage the process isreversed, meaning floods back:

…Then off twists a white wraith. Thewoods throb blue and green, andgradually the fields drink in red, gold,brown. Suddenly a river snatches a bluelight. The earth absorbs colour like asponge slowly drinking water.

Powerful descriptions of such flooding-in ofmeaning occur in accounts of conversionexperiences; here are sections from two ofWilliam James’ The Varieties of Religious Expe-rience:

…The appearance of everything wasaltered; there seemed to be, as it were, acalm, sweet cast, or appearance of divineglory, in almost everything. God’sexcellency, his wisdom, his purity andlove, seemed to appear in everything; inthe sun, moon, and stars; in the cloudsand blue sky; in the grass, flowers andtrees; in the water and all nature; whichused greatly to fix my mind.

…I remember this, that everythinglooked new to me, the people, the fields,the cattle, the trees. I was like a new manin a new world.

Something very similar can occur with beingin love, particularly the sense of newness(there is a powerful long passage inLawrence’s Women in Love, but unfortunatelyit doesn’t seem to break down into quotablechunks). As well as such general effects, theloved one is undoubtedly seen differentlyfrom others – a vision in some sensebecoming more generous, tender, withgreater enthusiasm for detail. There is astrange finding, apparently, with the Ames

Room illusion, which is reported not to workif the person in the room is one’s spouse. (I am not sure if it goes for any spouse, or onlywhere the couple are fairly recently married.)

Fear is another state of mind that can beseen in the phenomenal world. There aresome nice accounts by people who weretaken in by the famous Orson Welles broad-cast of War of the Worlds, when half of NewYork apparently thought the Martians hadlanded. Whatever they saw from theirwindows confirmed their worst fears – ifthere seemed to be more than the usualnumber of cars on the street, people werefleeing; if fewer, they had gone to ground.The world. as it were, was imbued withthreat. Film makers, perhaps most impres-sively Hitchcock, often have and exploit apowerful sense of what is involved in suchseeing-with-fear.

There are any number of instances ofspecific parts of the perceptual world beingtouched by intense preoccupations (in addi-tion to ‘the loved one’). It has been pointedout that the spectators of opposing teams donot, literally, see the same game; the politesmile with which a hostess covers herboredom at the anecdotes of a male guest isseen by her morbidly jealous husband as thecrudest of invitations; the anorexic girl seesherself as fat; and so on.

Okay. To summarise – I am claiming thatour ‘introspections’ are, or can be, derivedfrom an indefinitely large and remarkablyvaried ground of subsidiary components.

It might be worth remarking that theposition I have outlined gives unlimitedscope for getting it wrong, especially whereour folk psychology blinkers or misleads us –though, unlike Lyons, I am suggesting that itis possible in principle to transcend ourculturally determined beliefs. And the possi-bility is also there of indefinitely refining ourcapacity to absorb ourselves in (‘dwell in’)the relevant subsidiary fields, and so,through something like the cultivation ofskill or sensibility, gain greater knowledge ofourselves. (I believe something like this canhappen through meditation.)


Simon King-Spooner



Assagioll, R.M.D. (1980). Psychosynthesis: A collection ofbasic writings. New York: Thurnstone Press.

Berne, E. (1974). What do you say after you say hello?London: Andre Deutsch.

Freud, S. (1922). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis.Third lecture (trans. Joan Riviere, trans.). London:Allen & Unwin.

Ghiselin, B. (1952). The creative process. New York:Mentor.

Gregory, R.L. (1966). Eye and brain: The psychology ofseeing. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson,referring to W.H. Ittleson (1952), The AmesDemonstration in Perception. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

James, W. (1958). The varieties of religious experience.New York: Mentor. (First published 1902)

Kelly, G.A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs.New York: Norton.

Latane, B. & Barley, J.M. (1970). The unresponsivebystander: Why doesn’t he help?New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Lawrence, D.H. (1960). Women in love. London:Penguin. (First published 1921)

Lindsay, P.H. & Norman, D.A. (1972). Humaninformation processing: An introduction to psychology.New York: Academic Press.

Lyons, W.E. (1984). Towards a new account ofintrospection. Paper presented to Londonconference of the British Psychological Society,December.

Lyons, W.E. (1986). The disappearance of introspection.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lyons, W.E. (1988). The disappearance of introspection.New York: MIT Press.

Nisbett, R.E. & Wilson,T.D. (1977). Telling more thanwe know: Verbal reports on mental processes.Psychological Review, 84(3).

Perls, F.S., Hefferline, R.F. & Goodman, P. (1973).Gestalt therapy: Excitement and growth in the humanpersonality. London: Penguin. (First published1951)

Polanyi, M. (1946). Science, faith and society. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Polanyi, M. (1955). The structure of consciousness.Brian, 88.

Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. London: Routledge & KeganPaul.

Polanyi, M. (1967). The tacit dimension. London:Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Polanyi, M. (1968). Logic and psychology. AmericanPsychologist, 23, 27–43.

Poole, R. (1931). The unknown Virginia Woolf.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rippers, V. & Williams, R. (1985). Wounded healers;mental health workers’ experience of depression. New York: Kiley.

Rogers, C.R. (1964). Toward a science of the person.In T.N. Mann (Ed.), Behaviourism and pheno-menology; contrasting bases for modern psychology.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smail, D. (1984). Illusion and reality; the meaning ofanxiety. London: Dent.

Wertheimer, M. (1945). Productive thinking. New York:Harper.

Woolf, V. (1931). The waves. London: Hogart Press.

References

Originally published in the Psychotherapy Section Newsletter, No. 8, June, 1990.

I have really had two main aims: the first,to try and rescue ‘introspection’, or some ofit from its critics, by re-construing it: and thesecond, to push for a notion of our cogni-tions and motives and emotions and so on ascomplex constructs whose subsidiary compo-nents are in both us and the world.

Simon King-Spooner

Terry BirchmoreThe one-day workshop, ‘Siblings: An explo-ration’, was held at the Society’s Londonoffice in November 2014. My intention wasto provide participants with research andother material touching on sibling relation-ships, and to use two unstructured groupsessions to provide an opportunity for parti-cipants to explore this material more fullyand to discuss personal sibling relationshipsif they wished to do so.

The day began with a brief showing of aYouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLLn1a6DPU) which showed thepsychotherapist Juliet Mitchell talking aboutsiblings. I then gave a 30-minute talk startingwith a number of quotations about personalsibling relationships, and then going on tocover psychoanalytic views of sibling rela-tionships; sibling dynamics in teams and

organisations; and the methodology andconclusions of research into sibling relation-ships.

After a coffee break the participantsmoved into a 90-minute unstructured group.

After lunch I gave another talk focusedon siblings in literature: the biblical storiesof Cain and Abel and Joseph and hisbrothers; Lemony Snicket’s A Bad Beginning;and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child. I endedwith a presentation of Anna Freud’s researchand work, shortly after the Second WorldWar, with the Bulldog Bank Children.

Finally, we moved into a second 90-minute unstructured group to discuss all ofthe above themes and associations to the day.

ReferenceFreud, A. & Dann, S. (1951). An experiment in group

upbringing. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 6,127–168.


Siblings: An exploration

A one-day Psychotherapy Section Workshop, was held at the British Psychological Society’s London Office on26 November 2014. There follows four short reports from delegates who attended this workshop.

Erica BrostoffOur Editor, Terry Birchmore, cannilydevised a workshop on ‘siblings’ to coincidewith the AGM of the Psychotherapy Sectionin November 2014. The majority of us havesiblings, so that this topic was likely also toensure a quorum for the AGM, together withan audience keen to learn more about thislittle-addressed topic in the psychotherapyliterature, up to the last decade or so.

For this event, 13 members of the Sectionfound themselves able to attend on that day,a truly Agatha Christie setting. Terry set thescene in his first presentation, drawing atten-tion to the mysterious lack of siblings inFreuds’s writings, which has been attributedto a double bereavement in his earliest years.Freud’s younger baby brother, Julius, diedbefore Freud reached the age of 18 months.Freud’s uncle, also named Julius, died inroughly the same period. Much is made in

psychoanalytic circles, about what is not said,and what cannot be said; the lacunae createdby unresolved pain and loss. Freud’s notice-able lack of mention of siblings in his writingis attributed by biographers to these earlyevents; his mother’s likely grief and ‘unavail-ability’ and to his own possible sense of guiltand confusion. The family also moved hometo another town, away from their relatives,due to his father’s business failure. Freudclaimed to have been haunted by a sense ofloss for the rest of his life.

After this presentation, we met togetherto share thoughts about our own siblings,and this continued after the second presen-tation by Terry after lunch. This second pres-entation concerned Biblical siblings, inwhich older siblings acted upon their resent-ment toward the favoured younger oryoungest sib. Abel the younger brother, whofound ‘greater favour in the sight of the

Lord’, was murdered by the older andenvious brother. When questioned, Caindenied any responsibility, in the timelesswords ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ In theother well-known Biblical story of brothers –the envious older brothers of Joseph weretempted again by murderous thoughts.Instead, Joseph was sold into slavery. Boughtby chance by Potiphar who was responsiblefor the Pharaoh’s court, Joseph later rose tohighest rank through his wise interpretationof the Pharaoh’s premonitory dreams.Joseph ultimately became reconciled withhis brothers, a compassionate advance onearlier Biblical stories.

The 13 of us present, formed a mini-research forum, each speaking in turn aboutour own sibling experience. It was strikingthat each of those who had one other sibling,had experienced the most difficulties in thesibling relationship: in two instances thisrelationship took on a Cain and Abel char-acter, with overwhelming behaviour of the‘partner’ sibling experienced in the form ofharassment or rejection. Although thesiblings present were professional psycholo-gists, clearly no resolution had beenpossible. Little access to effective adviceseemed available, especially to the one whowas a twin. The opposite example of offeringcare and support to an older sibling‘partner’ who became ill, was the experienceof a younger sibling; changing career tobecome a psychotherapist. One who wasexpecting a second child, was concernedabout the future sibling relationship andhow to handle conflict. Three who wereyounger siblings from a large family, spokeof the greater responsibilities and expecta-tions to continue family traditions resting onthe shoulders of the older sibs. leaving themrelatively free, among other things, topursue their professional careers. Womenseemed more preoccupied with sibling rela-tionships and determining who was respon-sible for family distress. A question was raisedabout the mother’s role, but not answered.

Singletons mentioned finding childhoodcompanionship in books. The strongest

exchanges were between those who weremost frustrated by their sibling partners, butwithout being able to offer each other anycomfort in their dilemmas, and thesedilemmas also seemed to leave the group ‘at a loss’.

Terry had mentioned that in 1946, AnnaFreud and Sophie Dunn studied six warorphans, aged between 3 and 4 years, whohad bonded together and provided eachother with the care and protection whichhad not been available from adults in theirextreme situation in a concentration camp.This is a reminder that sibling/quasi-siblingrelationships depend very much on context.Real neglect of one child is possible even infavourable circumstances, if demands on amother are too great – sometimes onlynoticed by grandparents or therapists. If asibling is ill, or needing greater attention,this perceived preference can lead topowerful feelings of thwarted entitlement.Even twosome siblings who grow up togetherin mutual support and creative play, which isa joy to watch, may have some lingeringconflicts. Therapists will often be faced withdisentangling a hidden web of feelingbetween siblings, which may show upstrongly in a group therapy or work settings,as well as in the family.

It had been hoped that more wouldattend, so that mini-groups could meet toshare experiences according to family type.The event was instructive in its own right,especially as regards the defusion of conflictpossible in a larger family, via shiftingalliances – which also occur in group therapysettings. It is said that modern life increas-ingly encourages groupings of the like-minded outside the family, but I foundmyself somewhat envious of these larger andpotentially harmonious families of manysibs. The day ended on a collegial note inwhich several were co-opted into the largerfamily of the Psychotherapy SectionCommittee. The family ritual of the annualreport was satisfactorily concluded. Potentialnew family members were due to be vettedby ‘grandparents’ in the form of British



Psychological Society requirements andprocedures. The many unasked or unan-swered questions of the day, and potentialsubtleties of interaction in our group, left uswanting more. Siblings are the topic ofseveral recent new books published byKarnac, and also in the following list.

ReferencesColes, P. (2003). The importance of sibling relationships

in psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.Coles, P. (2007). Transgenerational conflicts between

sisters. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 23(4),563–574. doi:10/111/j.1752-0118/2007.00051.x

Fearon, R.M.P., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J. & vanIJzendoorn, M.H. (2013). Jealousy and attach-ment, the case of twins. In S.L. Hart & M. Legerstee (Eds.), Handbook of jealousy(pp.362–386). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.


Terry Birchmore

Zara RahemtullaI attended the workshop, ‘Siblings: An explo-ration’, with very little conscious idea of whatthe day would entail. I did not have othersibling-related workshops to compare, and I was not aware of the topics that might bediscussed. Naturally I was curious about howthe day would be organised and how thetopic would be approached and, of course,how many people and whom would bepresent. I attended with my own researchagenda, but also with my own experiencesand knowledge about what the word siblingsmeant for me.

I was keen to share experiences withothers who might have a research interest insibling relationships and ascertain whatothers thought about the significance of thisrelationship. The structure of the day beganfrom a research perspective, however, themajority of the day was dedicated to what thetitle of the workshop clearly stated – explo-ration. We spent the day in an analytic groupstyle situation whereby people were invitedto speak about their experiences, thoughtsand musings in relation to siblings; both ona personal and professional level. AdmittedlyI was not prepared for such an open andperhaps exposing discussion, particularlywith people I had never met before, and itcertainly was not what I had initially had inmind for the rest of the day.

I was amazed not only at how quickly myopinion began to change about the task, butmore significantly how my feelings ofcomfort towards talking about myself andlistening to others’ experiences (some ofwhich were indeed distressing) changed.Indeed, something about the process oftalking with others about this topic invitedmore stories to emerge and allowed peopleto feel more at ease about disclosing theirperhaps more private thoughts and experi-ences. Once we began to speak it was asthough everyone had a story to tell and I found the afternoon enlightening and illu-minating – it has left me feeling curious andeven more interested in the way peopleexperience their sibling relationships.

In summary, although consciously I didnot know what to expect during this siblingsday, I wonder if unconsciously I hoped toshare my sibling story amongst others whowanted to do the same. Did we all attendhoping to discuss a topic which does not getaddressed in our everyday lives and thatsociety does not perhaps prioritise as aconversation worth having? The day was verywell organised and the hospitality was alsogreat, which I think contributed to theoverall feelings of ease, understanding andcompassion that were generated throughoutthe day.

Steve HeighamThe first part of the workshop started with avideo and other presentations, and wasfocussed in a general way on sibling relation-ships and their importance throughout life.All participants contributed personal andclinical experiences of the richness, varietyand depth of such relationships, and thegroup got to know each better.

After lunch the second part of the work-shop looked in more detail at the two mostimportant themes that have emerged frompsychotherapeutic research on the subject:sibling rivalry and siblings as attachmentfigures. On the first of these, the materialpresented stimulated some lively debate anddisclosures of fairly intense rivalry in child-hood, and some indications of what individ-uals had found healing for these originalhurts.

On the second theme some participantscontributed personal and clinical anecdotalevidence about how supportive some clientshad found sibling relationships in child-

hood, supporting ideas that Judy Dunn hasput forward about how sibling relationshipsmay be some of the most important attach-ments some people experience in their life,especially where parents are unable toprovide that stability and love.

This led on to a discussion of how this ismore implicitly so in many other culturesaround the world where (particularly) oldersisters are very much surrogate parents inlarge families that rely on subsistence agri-culture. Again this relates to psychologicalresearch by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on the impor-tance of surrogate parenting in less devel-oped cultures everywhere. It was alsomentioned that this aspect of sibling rela-tionships is included in the current researchof two participants on the course.

Overall, I came away from the day bothbetter informed about the importance ofincluding sibling relationships in work withclients where appropriate, and quite movedby the depth of feeling that such relation-ships invoke in us, even as adults.



SELF-EXPERIENCE and personaltherapy are implemented as a manda-tory part of the five-year music therapy

training programme in Aalborg University(Department of Communication andPsychology), Denmark. The fact thatpersonal therapy processes are highly priori-tised can be traced back to the analyticalmusic therapy orientation (Pedersen, 2002;Priestley, 1994). A unique aspect in Aalborgis that the students are involved in thera-peutic activities from the very beginning,and the personal developmental workhappens parallel to theoretical and musicallearning. It is considered a benefit that theself-experience training is integrated in anacademic culture and the experiences fromthe self-development processes are involvedin the understanding and the communica-tion of psychological and music therapeutictheories and music therapy methodology(Wigram et al., 2002).

The aim is for the future music therapistto develop and constantly tune her personand personality as the most important instru-ment in the therapy, in order to becomeaware of her own subjectivity and to be moreopen-minded, containing and empathic inmeetings with clients in the future(Pedersen, 2007). In the Aalborg pro-gramme it is considered to be of high impor-tance, that the therapy that the studentsundergo is primarily music therapy. TheAmerican music therapist Ken Brusciasuggested that every music therapist shouldexperience music therapy as a client in orderto truly understand the medium he/she is

using: ‘In terms of the old adage, “Physicianheal Thyself!”, I am saying not only that amusic therapist should heal himself, but alsothat he should take his own medicine’(Bruscia, 1998, p.116). During the therapytraining the students experience the powerof music to explore their own inner life andas a tool for reflection of emotional states,communicative and relational patterns,personal limitations and potentials, etc.Through music they will know more abouttheir own strength as well as vulnerabilityand they will learn that the therapeutic useof music can lead to contact with conflict-material as well as resources and creativity.

In this paper I will concentrate on aspectsconcerning group music therapy which isthe first subject that the students attend inthe therapeutic track of the training. Themusic therapy students start with groupmusic therapy in the first three semesters, allin all about 120 hours of group musictherapy over a period of 18 months.

Concerning group music therapy one ofthe aims is to develop the group identity andthat the students experience the potentialpower and strength of being a part of agroup. The students learn to share authenticmaterial; they work with their own rolewithin the group and develop theirconsciousness about themselves and theothers. In group music therapy the studentshave extraordinary good conditions toexplore who they are; they get the mirroring,resonance and support from the otherstudents and they witness and resonate withthe processes of their peers.


Listen to the Group!Group music therapy – a part of the music therapy students’ training atAalborg UniversityCharlotte Lindvang

The room where group music therapytakes place is equipped with a number ofchairs (placed in a circle) equal to thenumber of people who are a part of thegroup. The main contrast from regularpsychodynamic oriented group work is thatmusic therapy draws on the music, a non-verbal medium, alongside the ordinaryverbal exchange. Thus the room hasdifferent instruments, melodic instruments,rhythm instruments and string instrumentsin different material and different sizes. Theinstruments have various possibilities ofexpression and evoke various sensations andemotions in each group member. One of theimportant things in the learning process inthe group is that the students learn how towork with improvisation in music therapy.

I will now focus on describing the use ofimprovisation and offer some vignettes toillustrate some aspects of this work. In animprovisation the music is not composedbeforehand; it is a ‘sound-picture of the here-and-now’. With other words a room forplaying is created or a ‘space for action’ wherethe students’ feelings and needs can beexpressed and exchanged in the spontaneousinteraction. Different than in a verbal discus-sion more people can ‘talk’ (make sounds) atthe same time in a musical improvisationwithout doing any harm. It even makes itclearer that each person contributes and is apart of the group as a whole.

An improvisation can be framed as a freespace that allows free expression without aspecific play rule corresponding to a freediscussion in a verbal therapy group. Or itcan be structured to various degrees, forexample, with a musical play rule as acommon starting point (for example: ‘startby playing only one note at a time, and thenafter a while allow yourself to play morenotes’) or with a common theme that thegroup wants to or are asked to investigate bythe group therapist (for example: ‘beingvisible or invisible in the group’).

In a music therapy group with studentsthe verbal parts and the non-verbal/musicalparts of the group therapy process are

weaved together, and the improvisation canbe used in many ways during the group work.First of all the improvisation can be ameeting place, that is, the group may startthe session with an improvisation with thetask of trying to ground themselves throughthe music and from there investigate thepossible contact with the others in the music.And after the improvisation they may get afew minutes to make a spontaneous drawingto hold on to a certain aspect of their expe-rience in the music. This non-verbal part isthen followed by a verbal part where thegroup members have the possibility ofputting into words how they felt in themusic.

The group was together again after along holiday. After the initial welcoming I invited the group to improvise to investi-gate ‘the temperature of the group’. Thesounds and the music that they played werecharacterised by a rather chaotic and some-times fragmented type of expression. After-wards the discussion about what was goingon in the improvisation was characterised bysome very different experiences anddifferent feelings among the students, fromhappiness to frustration and feeling lost. Thegroup discussion led to the recognition thatthe group was not really a group yet sincemany of them had not really arrived withtheir whole being yet. Acknowledging thisthey took an important step in the directionof being together as a group.

Another important aspect of the improv-isation is that this way of spontaneous inter-action and non-verbal communication leadthe participants to play and to access boththeir inner source of creativity and thesource of creativity that springs from theinteractive space between them. Improvisa-tion is a creative method framing the spaceand time for a group inquiry and mostcommon the improvisation will holdmoments of surprise. The group createssomething new together in the moment.

After an improvisation it is a possibility tolet the music speak for itself or to invite thegroup members to reflect verbally upon what


Listen to the Group!

happened and why. An improvisation can bedescribed concretely in terms of what wasbeing heard, and what is often interesting forthe group work is to listen to how eachmember experienced the improvisation; whatis each person concerned with, what kind ofinner pictures and what kind of feelings andmemories were evoked? The creativity iscontinued after an improvisation in the verbalpart because the shared ‘sound-picture’ canbe interpreted in many ways. Sometimes thecommonalities will be put into words andsometimes the experiences are totallydifferent and the group is momentarily in astate where subgroups are appearing.Through these experiences the aim is that thegroup will come to acknowledge that multipleexperiences are illustrating how complex andmanifold a group of people are. Thus theimprovisation gives the group members apotential space to investigate themselves andeach other, to listen deeply to each otherwithout losing their own perspective andthereby they get the possibility of developingtheir ability to contain the differences amongthem – both within the music and outside themusical space.

As a group leader I try to balancebetween following the process of the specificgroup of students and offering a structuredframe for the group work.

I may invite the group to work with aspecific theme. For example, the theme ‘theinner child’ and a focus within this thematicframe could be to facilitate the group workwith their senses, and the group is invited toapproach the instruments as if the saw themfor the first time. Each of them holds his orher instrument, feels the different material itis made of and probably smells it. Next theyinvestigate the instrument like a child woulddo, trying out the sounds that it can make.

As the group members investigated theinstruments the sounds were so cautious andso fine to start with; one student touchingone string of the guitar with a fingernail, onestudent fondling the skin of the drum, andanother gently sounding her voice inside thepiano, etc. Then little by little the group

started to experiment and make a lot offunny and unexpected sounds which startedlaughter in the group. Afterwards severalgroup members put into words how liber-ating and redeeming this improvisation was,allowing them to immerse themselves in aninquiry and to allow the impulses to sound.Further the theme of safety was mirrored inthe group discussion – some of the groupmembers discovered that they did not feelsafe enough yet to let go and be playful. Fearof ‘doing something wrong’ was shared.

My role as group music therapist (called‘educational therapist’ in our curriculum) isto guide the group through learning areasdescribed in the curriculum and as a part ofthat facilitate a space for improvisation andinteraction. I usually do not take part in theimprovisations; I focus on listening andholding what they express in my mind as wellas safeguarding the frames around the groupwork. In some ways the metaphor fromFoulkes about the therapist as a conductorcould be used to describe my role as thegroup music therapist. As a conductor I workto facilitate a therapeutic space for the groupand for each of the participants in the group.I encourage the group to participate andengage, communicate and reflect. On theother hand, since this is a group therapy as apart of an education I am sometimes verymuch in front in order to secure a certainstructure, to sum up and make clear what thegroup is working with, and sum up thethemes that are revealed. I also start eachgroup session by going briefly through whatthe group has been working with last time inorder to create a common place to start fromand to show that I hold the group in mind inthe long breaks between the group meet-ings. Concerning the role as therapist theapproach is inspired by mentalisation-basedgroup therapy (MBT-G).

The improvisation can expose dynamicthemes within the group. For example, it willshow who is loud and powerful in the musicand who is softer or barely audible, who is inthe front and who is in the back, whichperson is playing together with whom, who is


Charlotte Lindvang

following, who is leading, etc. The ambitionof the improvisation is to be honest orauthentic, not to be harmonious or correctin any way. The aim is to create a safe spacefor a here-and-now experience, and therebycreate group material for reflection in orderto stimulate the students’ development ofself-awareness as well as relational awareness.The improvisation is a tool in the processwhich clarifies relational patterns and givesthe possibility of changing these patternsinto a more appropriate pattern.

A woman told about her nightmare inthe group. One of the main points was thatshe was in a kind of prison and she neededhelp but there was no help to get. A groupmember drew the attention to elements inthe dream pointing at her ability to reachout for help. I asked the woman to expressthis resource – the ability to reach out forhelp – in an improvisation, with the supportfrom the group. Afterwards she told that herenergy was transformed and she had acompletely different feeling about herdream. She realised how used she was to bealone and to manage everything by herself,and how much she needed other people,and needed to go out and reach out more.

The improvisation is like a potentialspace; if the group has built a safe commonground, it is possible inside the improvisa-tion to experiment and investigate new waysof being and acting.

All in all the improvisation gives eachparticipant in the group a possibility toexplore and expand herself and creativelyfind new ways of expressing and relating.Sometimes an improvisation can capturesomething that the group is not consciousabout yet or are not ready to investigate inthe verbal realm yet; then the theme is takeninto the non-verbal potential room of thegroup, shared in sound.

To end this paper I have a few generalreflections about music and therapy groups.The therapeutic process or you may say thelearning process of a group takes place ondifferent levels, both the verbal and thenonverbal, regardless of which kind of groupwe are talking about. Every therapy groupcould be viewed as a musical group with itsown sound and with its own pulse andunique way of expression. Group dynamicsmay be sensed, felt or heard – not only in thecontents of what is said, but indeed in theway things are said, in the sound of the voiceor the melody of the language or in the waythe members are having a ‘communicationaldance’ together. We get a lot of informationfrom each other in the pauses and throughthe tempo of the speech. Each member ofthe group plays his or her own instrumentand has his or her own voice you might say,and like an orchestra the group works withthe dynamics between the instruments andvoices. It can be an experience of joy andstrength when there is a harmony andsynchronicity in the group and the groupmoves on common ground in polyphonyand in a shared pulse. But the diversity ofexpression in a group is a challenge, and inevery group there is a process of learning tolisten and attuning to each other and soundtogether.

Charlotte LindvangMusic Therapist PhD, Associated Professor.Email: [email protected]


Listen to the Group!

Part OnePrefaceThe danger (of this enterprise), in short isthat instead of providing a basis for whatalready exists, one is forced to advancebeyond familiar territory, far from thecertainties to which one is accustomed,towards an as yet uncharted land and unfore-seeable conclusion (Foucault, 1972, p.39).

I first came across the Keatsian expres-sion ‘negative capability’ in a paper byFrench (2000) in which the author makesimportant linkages between the poet’saesthetic notion, dispersal, and the contain-ment of emotion. I was so captivated by the

phenomenon that I continue to follow itwith great curiosity.

Cusa (1440) suggests that as we accumu-late knowledge, the darkness of ‘unlearnedignorance’ is diminished; however, the moreknowledge we acquire and the more welearn, the greater our awareness of howmuch we do not know. This new awareness,he refers to as ‘learned ignorance.’ I makean analogy between the notion of‘unlearned ignorance’ and Bion’s (1984)formulation of ‘knowing’ which hedescribed using the symbol ‘K’. In directcontrast to the former, Bion conceptualised


Negative capability: A phenomenologicalstudy of lived experiences at the edge ofcertitude and incertitudeAnil Behal

The study examined what it was like for leaders in academia, private practice, and business organisationsto be in a state of negative capability during periods of uncertainty and conflict in the workplace. ‘Negativecapability’ is an expression that was coined by the English romantic poet John Keats and suggests a peculiardisposition to stay in mysteries, doubts, and uncertainty without the irritable reaching after fact and reason.Interviews were conducted using the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) methodology. The analysis indicates that the context in which a leader is embedded does not have a significant bearingon how that individual experiences and makes sense of negative capability. The majority of participantsinterviewed appear to have a diminished capacity to contain uncertainty when faced with paradoxicaldilemmas. In such situations, they resort to behaviours such as problem solving, consulting others, shuttingdown, and dispersing as a means of defending against the uncertainty. An interesting correlation seems toexist between negative capability and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This warrants future research,and is reported in the final section of the paper under ‘deviant findings.’Keywords: John Keats; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); negative capability; OCD; paradox;levels of abstraction; certainty; uncertainty; dialectics; Zen Buddhism; dispersal; social defenses; reframing.

‘The danger (of this enterprise), in short is that instead of providing a basis for what already exists, one isforced to advance beyond familiar territory, far from the certainties to which one is accustomed, towards anas yet uncharted land and unforeseeable conclusion.’ Foucault.

‘…let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatientlyfrom a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive andreceptive – budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favoursus with a visit – sap will be given us for meat and dew for drink. John Keats.

‘O’ as the ultimate embodiment of truth thatis unknown and unknowable. Bollas (1987)conceptualised this construct as the‘unthought known.’ While the truth-in-the-moment may never enter the realm ofknowledge and certitude, Bion believed thatit is through the encounter at the edge ofknowing and not knowing that we may comeunder its influence. As Eigen (1998) writes,‘It can be creatively explosive, traumaticallywounding, crushingly uplifting’ (p.78). As I make sense of my own uncertainty, it seemsas though I am lost in reverie, allowingmyself to be receptive and yet, perturbed bythe experience.

Introduction‘Negative capability’ is not an expressionthat is very familiar outside the realm ofEnglish literature. Even those who have readKeats may not be particularly conversantwith the construct – after all, the poet onlyused it once in a letter to his brothers in amoment of intense speculation. It is aunique capacity for introspection when weare open to thoughts, feelings, and sensa-tion, such that we are able to stay withmysteries, doubts, uncertainties, and ambi-guity without the irritable reaching after factand reason (Keats, 1817).

Simpson and French (2006) posit thatattending to the present is a ‘refrain,’ a means of avoidance that is both ancientand modern. It implies the ability to live withuncertainty, tolerate frustration, and makeroom for multiple perspectives that mayrequire a certain degree of patience andpassive acceptance. The authors suggest thatthe practice of negative capability calls uponus to remain in this unsettling mental spacein order to face the terrifying pressure of thepresent where most problems seem toreside. The refrain that they address, isrefraining from action. ‘In the pressure ofthe moment, “what we know” may not beavailable to us. What we thought we know, ordid indeed knew once, can disappear inaction when we are “under fire”, to useBion’s metaphor’ (p.245).

An idea so rich – steeped in the dialecticof predictability and unpredictability capti-vates my imagination. The predictabilityarises from the fact that all leaders from timeto time are thrust into conditions of uncer-tainty and perplexity. Ironically though,holding this tension requires a unique stateof mind – a peculiar disposition such asnegative capability where one is comfortablewith doubt, uncertainty, and unpre-dictability. Batchelor (1990) suggests that‘such doubt is neither a cognitive hinge, nora psychological defect, but a state of existen-tial perplexity’ (p.16).

Research questionWhat is it like for leaders to be in a state ofnegative capability during periods of uncer-tainty and conflict in the workplace?

I suggest that negative capability repre-sents a dialectical tension that is virtuallyendemic to the human condition. We arethrust into these perplexing spaces wittinglyand unwittingly. These discursive tensionsare evoked in every relationship, regardlessof whether it is personal or professional andmay be defined as core tensions or opposingvalues that arise when two seemingly incom-patible forces coexist in the mind. Someexamples might be the dichotomous rela-tionship between autonomy and connected-ness, disclosure and secrecy, and intimacyand abstraction. We seem to oscillatebetween these values, often unconsciously,and may view them as contradictions orinternal conflicts. These conflicts may some-times produce the opposite of what we aretrying to accomplish.

Study objective and needThe study was an attempt to understand howleaders experienced the phenomenon ofnegative capability during periods of uncer-tainty and conflict in the workplace. Theyoften find themselves in difficult situationssuch as this, when the pressure to react isstrong. Israelstam (2007) suggests thattensions evoked in dialectically charged situ-ations often create new spaces for learning


Negative capability

and growth that are related to mindlessstates. Regardless of whether a leader exer-cises restraint or decides to take quickaction, these tensions may never be trulyresolved. My interest in conducting the studywas to explore these phenomena in order toshed light on this predicament. While thestudy was not specifically directed to thelived experience of psychotherapists, itshould come as no surprise that in order topractice good therapy, one must havemastery over this unique skill set.

Part TwoLiterature reviewSeveral interrelated theories and paradig-matic frameworks inform the study. Theseinclude conversations from the field oforganisational psychodynamics (Argyris,1990; Laiken, 2001, 2002; Raab, 1997) andthe work of contemporary theorists who haveextrapolated the concept of negative capa-bility to developing a better understandingof servant leadership (Greenleaf, 2008).Additionally, literature from poetry (Keats,1817), Tibetan and Zen Buddhism (Batch-elor, 1990, 2000; Eigen, 1998), and dialo-gism and dialectics (Bakhtin, 1981; Baxter &Montgomery, 1996) was reviewed in order toexplore the connections between thesemeta-theoretical perspectives and the topicof the study. Elson (2010) contributed to anunderstanding of levels of abstraction.Johnson’s (1992) ideas on polarity manage-ment and paradoxical thinking are particu-larly worthwhile when thinking aboutnegative capability.

This paper is an extrapolation from amuch larger body of work that constitutesthe author’s doctoral dissertation. Given thespace limitation, it is not possible to discussall the theoretical constructs that inform thestudy, however, in order to provide thereader a deeper understanding of thephenomenon, literature from a primary fieldof inquiry is reviewed below.

Dialogism and dialecticsDialogism and dialectics are meta-theoreticalparadigms and core conversations thatinform the study. They address the sophisti-cated subtleties of negative capability in a waythat none of the other paradigms can achievesingularly. While the literature on dialecticsdoes make occasional references to Keats’saesthetic concept (see below), no studieswere found that directly address the phenom-enon from the standpoint of dialectics.

The origin of dialogism as a philoso-phical doctrine is attributed to the Russianphilosopher Bakhtin (1984), who untilrecently was best known in literary circlesonly. It would be fair to say that ‘dialogism’has not been a part of mainstream socialscience, and scholars interested in studyinginterpersonal relationships are only justbeginning to reference his work. ‘Dialectics’has its roots in dialogism, therefore it may beimportant to understand its meaning andsignificance. Bakhtin believed dialogue to bethe essence of all interpersonal communica-tion. Unlike monologue, dialogue is multi-vocal and characterised by at least twodistinct voices.

Bakhtin (1981) writes, ‘our owndiscourse is gradually and slowly wrought outof others’ words that have been acknowl-edged and assimilated’ (p.345). Hecomments about and contrasts dialogic andmonologic works. Unlike the latter, Bakhtinbelieved that dialogic work informs and isinformed by previous works. It is an ongoing,bidirectional conversation between languageand discourse (both past and present).Bakhtin (1984) further suggests that allmeaning making is a dialogue and may beunderstood literally and metaphorically as afusion of different systems and discourses.Participants engaged in dialogue must tosome extent fuse their perspectives in orderto construct a shared meaning. Conversationtherefore, is a form of unity of differentperspectives, even though participants retaintheir own unique perspectives on the topic.Multiple perspectives on the same phenom-enon, co-constructed by the participants and


Anil Behal

myself added a richness and depth to thestudy.

Dialogism has been around for thou-sands of years in ancient cultures such asChina, India, and Japan. It has helped shapethese cultures very dramatically, and yet itseems difficult to provide a singular answeror definition of what constitutes dialogism.More contemporary authors such as Altman,Vinsel and Brown (1981) look at dialogismas having two meanings: (a) a style ofreasoning used to establish the truth andvalidity of ideas; and (b) a worldview orconception of the nature of phenomena.Both are germane to this study, particularlygiven its phenomenological focus andmethodology. It is important here to make adistinction between a dialogic process(Bakhtin, 1984) and a dialectic process(Hegel, 1977, 2003), despite the comple-mentarity of the two constructs:l Various existential approaches seem to

co-exist in a dialogic process. It does nothave a great deal of rigidity and strategiesare open to changes. The outcome isoften open-ended and no closure istypically sought.

l In a dialectical process as conceptualisedand formulated by Hegel, the goal seemsto be to merge point and counterpoint(thesis and antithesis), thereby arriving ata compromise (synthesis). The end resultof the process is a desired outcome – a solution that establishes primacy overother alternatives.

In constructing their grand theory of ‘rela-tional dialectics’, Baxter and Montgomery(1996) choose to use the words dialogismand dialectics interchangeably, even thoughBakhtin and other scholars have made adistinction between the two seemingly alike,but different constructs. They write, ‘ToBakhtin (1984), the essence of dialogue is itssimultaneous differentiation from, yet fusionwith another. To enact dialogue, the partiesneed to fuse their perspectives while main-taining the uniqueness of their individualperspectives’ (p.24). ‘Just as dialogue issimultaneously unity and difference, Bakhtin

(1981) regarded all social processes as theproduct of ‘a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies’, thecentripetal (i.e. forces of unity) andcentrifugal (i.e. forces of difference)’ (p.25).The self may be constituted as a result of thefusion of these forces, that is, the simulta-neous need to connect with and separatefrom the other. It is this interplay betweenthe opposing forces (centripetal andcentrifugal), which creates contradictionand difference and brings about a dialecticalvoice. Bakhtin (1986) was a critic ofHegelian-Marxist dialectics in the followingway: ‘Take a dialogue and remove the voices(the partitioning of voices), remove the into-nations (emotional and individualisingones), carve out abstract concepts and judg-ments from living words and responses, crameverything into one abstract consciousness –and that’s how you get dialectics’ (p.147).

Dialectical tension is produced as a resultof the friction between what appear to becontradictory or opposite phenomena.‘Hegelian dialectic’ is an argument thatposits a thesis and antithesis (point-counter-point), which are then resolved through asynthesis. A dialectical tension can take manyforms. As an example, let’s take the tensionbetween Blacks and Whites, Christianity andIslam, and public and private. The eventsthat are currently occurring in the MiddleEast may be a result of dialectical tension.

Baxter and Montgomery (1996) findtheir own dialectical voice based on theactual and imagined dialogues with scholarssuch as Bakhtin. They highlight several keythemes borrowed from Bakhtin’s work ondialogism, from which to formulate theirown emerging meaning of social and rela-tional dialectics. ‘These themes reverberatewith Bakhtin’s notion of ‘dialogue’ asenacted communication, ‘dialogue’ ascentripetal – centrifugal flux, ‘dialogue’ aschronotopic, and ‘dialogue’ as distinct from‘monologue’’ (p.42).

Baxter and Braithwaite (2008) comment,The central proposition of ‘relational dialec-tics theory’ (RDT) is that all of communica-


Negative capability

tion is rife with the tension-filled struggle ofcompeting discourses – the discursive oppo-sitions of sociality. An analysis of communi-cation framed by RDT seeks to understandthis dialectical process by: (a) identifying thevarious discourses that are directly or indi-rectly invoked in talk to render utterancesunderstandable and legitimate; and (b)asking how those discourses interpenetrateone another in the production of meaning.(pp.352–353)

In an interesting analysis of the interpen-etration of discourses, the authors use theexpressions ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ todescribe the emergence of meaning indialogue. Diachronic means occurring overtime, while the former is taken to mean asingle moment in time. Even though mean-ings may appear to be fixed at any givenmoment in time, they may also be fluid andchanging in the next. Participants mayjointly reinforce an old meaning or simplyconstruct a brand new meaning in anongoing process of production or reproduc-tion. The authors believe that it is this inter-penetration of competing discourses thatconstitutes social reality. Bakhtin (writing asVoloshinov, 1973, p.85) believed that it is notexperience that organises expression, butthe other way round – expression organisesexperience. The relational dialectics theory(RDT) is unique in that it is the articulationof the ‘tensionality of difference’ as a mech-anism that constitutes reality (Baxter, 2006).This process of constitution involves a decen-tring of the sovereign self that Keats mayhave referred to in his own way as the annul-ment of the self. It is through multipleperspectives on the same phenomena, asstudied in different contexts, that we may beable to derive meaning through conver-gence and divergence.

The literature that I have reviewedinforms negative capability in some way andpoints to one thing – being in an ephemeralstate of not knowing, ambiguity, and limi-nality all call for holding and managingdialectical tension over time, and are charac-terised by different, often contradictory ways

of thinking about something. We may expe-rience dialectical tension when our world-view includes two seemingly contradictory(not necessarily dissimilar or unrelated)thoughts, or at least competing ways ofthinking about a given topic with no real wayto resolve the problem. Some examples ofdialectical tension are as follows:l Group members’ struggle between

wanting process and content.l Autonomy (abstraction) vs. intimacy.l Togetherness vs. separateness.l Privacy vs. disclosure.l Introversion vs. extroversion.l Emotion vs. cognition.We are often called upon paradoxically tohold very conflicting and often-painfuldialectical tensions that cannot be easilyresolved and may leave us emotionally andpsychologically paralysed if left unmanaged.Like a state of liminality, we are not fullyvested in either polarity. We are at both endsat the same time. It would be like standing atthe edge of the boundary that separates thetwo positions, and yet fully taking up oneposition means giving up the other; andwhat makes this quandary even more diffi-cult is that both positions are somehow inter-related, not mutually exclusive, even thoughat first they might appear to be.

I see dialectical tension as the commonthread that runs through the bodies of liter-ature that I have been discussing, and yet,this tension resides as subtle nuances in eachdiscipline. A practicing Buddhist who is in astate of mindful awareness and reflectiveinaction might experience the tension differ-ently from an adult learner. A psychoanalyst,who by virtue of training and expertise holdsthe dialectical tension with a patient, mightexperience it very differently from a poet oran organisational consultant. I was inter-ested in contextually understanding howthese subtle nuances contribute to the livedexperience of participants.

In his 1939 monograph on ‘negativecapability’, Bate (2012) discusses disinterest-edness, passiveness, sympathy, impersonality,and annulment of the self as key elements.


Anil Behal

While most scholars who are familiar withKeats’s literary genius, would support Bate, I have often wondered if there isn’t some-thing radically important that has been over-looked in the literature. As an organisationalconsultant who has done some work withKeats’s ideas over the past 10 years, it hasbeen my experience and that of othercolleagues whom I have worked with, thatnegative capability represents a quandary – a rather perturbed and conflicted frame ofmind that may be steeped in dialectics.

A search for the expression negativecapability on several academic sites,including the Fielding Graduate Institutelibrary of journals and dissertations,returned several pages primarily featuringthe work of scholars in organisationalpsychodynamics and articles critiquing theKeatsian construct in aesthetics. As thesearch was narrowed to include the expres-sions ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘Buddhism’, a plethora of resources was found that makereferences to the construct.

As I previously discussed, negative capa-bility is not a mainstream expression thateveryone is familiar with. People relate to itin different ways and may think of it ascontainment, refrain, mindful awareness,reflective inaction, and liminality to name afew. Even Keats, after having used theexpression only once, subsequently thoughtof it as diligent indolence, disinterestedness,annulment of the self, and restless imagina-tion – all of which may suggest an opennessto sensation and feeling, the ability to tran-scend rationality, and the rejection of episte-mological bounds.

Part ThreeResearch method, design, and methodologyA qualitative research methodology entitledinterpretative phenomenological analysis(IPA) was deployed to study negative capa-bility. Given the novelty and innovativenature of the topic, IPA was best suited tostudy the phenomenon.

Unlike the natural science that studiesobjects of nature, human science inquiry isabout the study of persons or beings thathave consciousness. Van Manen (1990)writes, ‘Phenomenological research is thestudy of lived experience. It is seeing theworld without taxonomising, classifying, orabstracting it. It does not test hypotheses ortheories, but offers plausible insights’ (p.9).

‘Phenomenology’ is an attempt to under-stand the true meaning and essence of expe-riences as recounted by participants(Heidegger, 1962; Husserl, 1970; vanManen, 2007). In doing phenomenology,one is immersing in the life world of theparticipants and reliving their experiencesor rethinking the actors’ thoughts, consis-tent with the philosophical tradition knownas ‘Verstehen’ (Martin, 2000). It alsoinvolves setting aside (bracketing) assump-tions, biases, and judgements that may other-wise impede the data collection process.

Study designFourteen leaders were recruited fromacademia, private practice (self-employedpractitioners), and business organisations,following the selection criteria below. Noneof the participants had previous sentient tieswith the researcher. In-depth interviews wereconducted on the Go To Meeting web plat-form and digitally recorded. Examiningnegative capability from multiple perspec-tives and contexts added depth andcomplexity to the study. Smith, Flowers andLarkin (2009) suggest, ‘in multi-perspectivalstudies, the exploration of one phenomenonfrom multiple perspectives can help theanalyst to develop a more detailed and multi-faceted account of that phenomenon’ (p.52).

Participant selection criteria The selection criteria were as follows:1. Participants should be US residents within

the age range of 35 to 65. 2. Should be currently employed (or self-

employed in the case of privatepractitioners) and have at least five years’experience at their place of work.


Negative capability

3. Be familiar with the notion of negativecapability.

4. Must have experienced significant anxietyat work where they find themselves in astate of uncertainty and conflict.

5. Must be comfortable sharing theirexperiences with the researcher.

6. Must agree to sign the informed consentform and be willing to have theconversations digitally recorded andshared anonymously in the dissertationand subsequent journal articles andpresentations.

Data collectionThe data gathered during the interviewswere personally transcribed and analysed bythe researcher in consultation with theresearch supervisor. The Inq-Scribe softwarewas used for transcription and analysis.

Data management With each of the four transcript readings,the data collected were coded and recodedby the researcher, then finally coded as awhole in order to identify any emergentthemes and patterns. As a reiterative process,it called for checking and rechecking withthe participants’ accounts to make sure thatwhat was being recorded is what theyintended to convey in the interviews. All datawere treated with the utmost confidentialityand securely stored.

Part FourAnalysis and interpretationIt is important to note that I conducted theanalysis by interpreting the text at two levels.Ricoeur (1970) writes about these levels ofinterpretation, using the expression‘hermeneutics’ to refer to the theory ofinterpretation:l The ‘hermeneutics of meaning-

recollection,’ which provides a faithfuldisclosure of the participants’ accounts asthey make sense of the phenomenon.

l The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ mayinvolve going below the surface and oftenbehind the phenomenon being studied,

in order to understand and interpret itsdeeper meaning. The researcherconducting this level of analysis tries tomake sense of the phenomenon from theparticipants’ accounts, as the participantsare making sense of the phenomenonfrom their own standpoint. This is knownas the ‘double hermeneutic’.

BracketingIn phenomenological inquiry, theresearcher is intimately involved in eachaspect of the study, beginning withrecruiting and interviewing participants, tothoroughly gathering the data, and finalanalysis and interpretation. It is a solitaryrole. Given the complexity of this process, itis anticipated that the researcher’s bias andpreconceived notions may interfere with therobustness of the approach and integrity ofthe data collected and analysed. For thisreason, I carefully reflected on and set aside(bracketed) my own paradigmatic frame-work, assumptions, and familiarity with thenegative capability phenomenon so I couldstudy it more objectively. This meantconsciously assuming a state of negativecapability (refrain) myself, without regardfor the doctrinaire of knowledge.

Assumptions1. Even though the leaders that I recruited

claimed to have a good understanding ofnegative capability, I had some appre-hension that they clearly under-stood thephenomenon, given the obscurity of theconstruct in everyday life.

2. During various stages of recruitment, I provided a clear definition of negativecapability, including an example of whatmight constitute it. Despite that initiative,I had assumed that leaders might not beable to clearly articulate how they madesense of the phenomenon.

3. After I replaced the negative capabilityexpression with other, more familiarwords such as uncertainty, ambiguity, andperplexity in the interview schedule, I suspected that we might end up


Anil Behal

researching the conditions, rather thanthe disposition itself.

Group analysisAfter completing the individual analyses oftranscripts from the 14 interviews, the datawere then analysed for the entire group. Theinterview data are too voluminous to bereproduced here. The analysis wasconducted in four steps:l Listing of the recurring emergent themes,

including key phrases and metaphors.l Clustering of group level themes (derived

from the previous step).l Master listing of superordinate themes

(extrapolated from the clustering ofthemes).

l Group narrative.Verbatim extracts from the original tran-scripts that address the superordinate themetitled ‘intermingling of personal and profes-sional lives’ (see group narrative below) areprovided as an example of the kind of datathat were analysed. In part five of this paperunder ‘deviant findings’, excerpts from aparticipant interview (Amanda) are repro-duced to illuminate the peculiar relationshipof negative capability and obsessive-compul-sive disorder (OCD).

Participant Leader 1‘First of all, I think that no one can trulycompartmentalise their personal and profes-sional lives. It may be the noble lie we telleach other, that what happened at home canbe separate from work. It’s like saying whathappened in our childhood would neverinfluence our lives. That is a grand illusion.Everything affects everything else.’

Participant Leader 2‘Absolutely! Not to do with my work, butpersonal life. I have to deal with mentalhealth issues in my family. As you canimagine, with mental health, your best toolsdon’t serve you well. You are dealing withthings that your mind cannot rationallydetermine. Right or wrong are irrelevant.How do you manage yourself in the face of

extreme stress? I have most definitely beenin situations where there was a great deal ofchaos. A great deal of emotion and danger,where my past tools and experiences were inmany ways, of little help to me.’

Group narrativeSeveral superordinate themes emerged fromanalysis. Some of the more salient recurringgroup themes are stated below. l Exercising servant leadership.l Intermingling of personal and pro-

fessional life.l Discomfort with managing and holding

polarities and paradox (Figure 1 below isa schematic representation of the theme).

In the interviews, leaders commented thatthey typically adopted one of four stanceswhen faced with paradoxical dilemmas:l Go into a problem-solving mode in order

to understand the situation.l Consult confidants at work who may shed

light on the situation.l Emotionally shut down in the face of an

impasse where no clear resolution was insight.

l Disperse into action, which may includeengaging in a string of explanations orrationalisation in order to break theimpasse or bind. If the anxiety becomestoo intolerable, the leader may decide toexit the organisation.

This is the most crucial finding of the study.In particular, there seemed to be an innerconflict between how leaders perceived theirown style of leading (such as servant leader-ship) and the manner in which they reactedto conditions such as uncertainty andconflict (by dispersing into action).

It would be fair to say that a servant leaderideally has a highly developed capacity to staywith uncertainty and hold the paradox ratherthan reacting and fleeing into action when shefinds herself in a state of perplexity. This wasnot found to be true in the majority of inter-views, and leads me to believe that the negativecapability frame of mind is one that needscultivation over time. It is not a naturallyoccurring phenomenon for most leaders.


Negative capability

Part FiveDiscussion, findings, experiences, and implicationsLeaders are expected to get things donemost effectively, most efficiently, and withina designated timeframe. Action thereforetakes a higher status than reflection, leavinglittle or no room for thoughtful meditationand the inclusion of multiple voices andperspectives. I consider this to be a seriouschallenge facing organisations. Unless this isaddressed, important voices will continue tobe muted or marginalised, making organisa-tions the perfect ground to breed tensionand hostility, both of which are counterpro-ductive.

Batchelor (1990) suggests that there arethree factors that need to be cultivated inour quest for new knowledge: great faith,great doubt, and great courage. The ‘faith todoubt’, writes the author, ‘does not refer tothe kind of wavering indecision in which weget stuck, preventing any positive movement.It means to keep alive the perplexity at the

heart of our life, to acknowledge that funda-mentally we do not know what is going on, toquestion whatever arises within us’(pp.16–17). As leaders learn to be morecomfortable with doubt and uncertainty, it ishoped that a new cadre of leaders will beginto emerge who can then become trailblazersfor others to follow.

FindingsThe outline of individual and group analysesin part four illuminated how leaders madesense of uncertainty and conflict in a varietyof ways. They typically chose to deal withperplexing situations rather than sitting andreflecting on them patiently. They became‘instruments of action’ rather than ‘instru-ments of thought’. The analysis indicatesthree important findings: (a) The context inwhich leaders are embedded may not have asignificant bearing on how they experienceand make sense of negative capability; (b)the majority of leaders interviewed appear tohave a diminished capacity to contain uncer-


Anil Behal

Figure 1: Schematic representation of holding polarities and paradox.

Problemsolve

DisperseConsultothers

Shutdown

Holdingpolarities and

paradox

tainty when faced with paradoxicaldilemmas; and (c) they resort to behaviourssuch as problem solving, consulting others,shutting down, and dispersing as a defenseagainst the uncertainty.

As I conducted the in-depth interviewsand explored the leaders’ workplace inter-actions, it was interesting to observe theoutpouring of highly sensitive personalissues. It seemed to me that there was anintermingling of personal and professionalissues. I had not expected that the leaderswould share issues of a personal nature witha total stranger like myself, especiallybecause the focus of the interviews was theworkplace. Is it perhaps possible that whenfaced with uncertainty, conflict, andperplexity at work, many leaders regress tothe comfort of their personal lives as a meansof escape and avoidance? Is it also reason-able to expect that their openness and trans-parency were an outcome of the perceivedsafety and comfort that they felt with me?

Deviant finding: Obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD) and Negative capabilityIn participant interview number 1 withAmanda, there was a unique connectionestablished between negative capability andobsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Whilethis was not a shared theme among theremaining leaders, I consider it to be worthyof further exploration. In IPA studies, it isnot completely unusual to discover some-thing that at first seems to have no relevanceto the study phenomenon, and yet, addssignificant value to the project. I share thisfinding here with the hope that it maycontribute something worthwhile to theexisting body of qualitative literature onOCD. I provide below excerpts from myinterview with Amanda.

Case 1: Amanda (private practice)Amanda is a highly articulate independentconsultant of British origin who lives in theUS with her husband and children, andworks predominantly with high-end clientsin the health care industry. She is a certified

coach who seems to be greatly influenced bythe work, thinking, and methodology ofKegan and associates. Amanda is strugglingwith serious mental health issues of her twosons, one of whom suffers from chronicobsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) andthe other with a severe form of anxiety. Bothsons are grown, but still live with her. Whileshe feels very competent and qualified tohandle even the most challenging issues forher professional clients, she feels utterlyhopeless, uncertain, and shaky on the homefront. Even though Amanda came to theinterview extremely composed and confi-dent, the enormous tension that she mustfeel on account of her personal issues waspalpable throughout our conversation.

During the interview, I pursued the link-ages between uncertainty, negative capa-bility, and OCD in order to betterunderstand how Amanda made sense of herstate of perplexity that seems to have beenexacerbated by the hopelessness of herunique situation. As a leader in privatepractice, how does one deal with the ever-present threat and danger of having toconfront these huge challenges in one’spersonal life? Verbatim excerpts from myinterview with Amanda follow.

Intermingling of personal and professional lifeWhen asked to talk about a time that shefound it particularly hard to determine(make sense of) certain experiences,Amanda commented, ‘Absolutely! Not to dowith my work, but personal life. Wait! I amjust going to check if I am in a place in thehome where I can speak openly. Wait amoment.’ (She seemed very guarded andanxious about the situation on her homefront.) ‘Okay, so I can. I have to deal withmental health issues in my family. As you canimagine, with mental health, your best toolsdon’t serve you well. You are dealing withthings that your mind cannot rationallydetermine or figure. Right or wrong are irrel-evant. How do you manage yourself in theface of extreme stress? I have most definitelybeen in situations where there was a great


Negative capability

deal of chaos. A great deal of emotion …danger, where my past tools and experienceswere in many ways, of little help to me.’

Obsessive-compulsive disorderAmanda: ‘So two of my children have hadvery significant struggle. One was diagnosedwith severe OCD. I talked a bit about thatwhen we last spoke. And it’s a condition inwhich the brain gets stuck on certain intru-sive thoughts that become rooted. They livewith those thoughts and sometimes theycome to faulty conclusion that if they docertain rituals they will either manage theanxiety or prevent the feared event fromhappening. ‘My mother is going to die. If I count backward from 100, I can stop it. If I do that, she will be safe.’ The secret togetting better is by reframing the fear (it’sjust the OCD) and enduring it withoutengaging in the soothing ritual, because thebrain then gets habituated to the fear. Everytime you perform the ritual to get rid of theanxiety, you actually make it worse in yourneural network in the brain until you breakthe connections.’

Amanda: ‘When they have the thoughtand don’t perform the ritual, there isabsolute terror at first. In that space there isabsolute terror. It is a life and death situationfor them. It’s about brain chemistry becauseif you force yourself to experience the fearand don’t perform the ritual, you will gradu-ally feel less fear. You will break the faultyconnections that say ‘If I do X, Y willhappen.’… Neurons that fire together, wiretogether and OCD is a faulty connection youneed to break.’

Ritualistic behaviour during uncertaintyAmanda: ‘OCD is a doubting condition. Youdoubt everything. It is only when youembrace doubt integrally that you can freeyourself from it.’ She further commented, ‘I would not necessarily say it is irrational. It may be irrational from my perspective, nottheirs. People are constantly managing theirfears … fear of looking stupid, fear of losingrelationships, fear of not progressing, etc.’

Levels of Consciousness (Abstraction) and Work of Kegan (1994)Amanda: ‘So I hesitate using the word OCDabout a situation other than a disease. Whenyou know someone who has it, you find theuse of OCD for other than disease, insensi-tive.’ ‘There are repetitive behaviours basedon narratives just as OCD is based on narra-tives. A good coach helps them see narrativesthey have created and then call them intoquestion. So what Kegan would say is that thegoal is our foot on the gas, but the things weare protecting ourselves from … whateverthey may be … are our foot on the brake. Weget stuck. Underneath those fears, we findthe stories and when we tease apart thestories that maybe served us in the past, werealise that they may be completely falsetoday.’

Amanda: ‘Going from one level ofconsciousness to the next is about taking theunconscious and making it conscious. Kegantalks about the socialised mind, self-authoring mind, and self-transformingmind. How little we can really control.Control is such an illusion. We cannotchange the uncertainty, but only our attitudetoward it. I cannot be like some Buddhistswho are able to stay with the uncertainty andaccept things without wanting to changethem. I want to have an impact.’

Managing polaritiesAmanda is a leader who has a good concep-tual understanding of negative capability,and so I directly broached the topic with herand inquired how she made sense of theconstruct. Her response: ‘It is an approachwhich is both-and, not either-or. My philos-ophy of leading is not one thing or another– it is keeping people psychologically safeand holding them accountable. There canbe tension there – polarity management.American business used to say you can havecost or quality – not both. The Japaneseshowed that it was a false dichotomy. Managethe polarities and you can come up with awin-win, both-and solutions. Is negative capa-bility a transient stage? Leaders exist to


Anil Behal

create results and so leaders need not beparalysed by not knowing. To be able toacknowledge that they don’t know, butperhaps use their past experiences to figureout something that might work and try it out.It is comfort with discomfort!’

Quite often it is not a matter of taking aneither-or approach to solving problems, butrather asking whether the problem is indeedsolvable or if it requires holding paradoxesand polarities. Amanda shared in the inter-view that she does not think that there is aresolution on her home front, as it relates toher sons’ illness. She seems to have come toterms with her helplessness. All she can do iscontinue to hold the tension (see thefollowing theme).

Negative capabilityAmanda: ‘Negative capability is calledaccepting uncertainty – or embracing uncer-tainty because it is the need to know [certi-tude] that drives the behaviour. And if youcan live with doubt when you have OCD, youcan get better. I don’t know that if I countfrom 100 backward that my mother woulddie. Maybe she will, but parents are notcomfortable with letting their childrenstruggle and experience anxiety – they areenablers – they clean the entire house withLysol; they act as though they themselveshave OCD. The importance of not enablingis central – it is absolutely central. Every timeyou create an illusory safety, you are playinginto the problem by running away fromuncertainty and not knowing.’

In order to better understand the corre-lation of negative capability and OCD, I paraphrase Keats’ definition. ‘Negativecapability is the capacity to remain inmysteries, doubts, and uncertainty withoutthe irritable reaching after fact and reason.’Remaining in mysteries, doubts, and uncer-tainty for any length of time is not easy. OCDis a chronic ‘doubting condition,’ one inwhich the sufferer is overwhelmed by recur-ring and intrusive thoughts. As Amanda(case 1) shared: ‘There is absolute terror inthat space. There will be explosive behaviour

if you get between the thought and theritual.’ As the patient’s anxiety is height-ened, so is the impulse to alleviate it byperforming a ritual. While performing theritual is a patient’s defense mechanism formanaging and containing the anxiety, itserves to both alleviate and perpetuate it.The key would be to help the patient breakthe linkage between a thought and a ritual.Not performing a ritual would be tanta-mount to resisting the impulse to reach outwith action, fact, and reason.

It is hoped that this initiative may helpalleviate the suffering of those who areafflicted with moderate to severe OCD.

Experiences and continuing researchIn addition to the findings, I would like toshare other experiences. As I undertook thestudy, I had speculated that negative capa-bility was an ephemeral state of mind thatmay easily give way to an overwhelming needfor certitude. I had also hoped, on the otherhand, that there would be some leaders thatcould potentially stay in a reflective mindsetwhile resisting the temptation to engage indispersal. Clearly, that has not been theoutcome of the study in all three contexts. Itseemed as though leaders tried to makesense of the phenomenon as it related totheir emotional and psychological condi-tions such as uncertainty, doubt, ambiguity,and perplexity, but found it difficult to relatethose conditions to negative capability as aframe of mind.

In future studies of a phenomenologicalnature, especially those involving theresearch of an abstract phenomenon such asnegative capability, it may be helpful toinvest more time into recruiting a morepurposive sample. It is not sufficient to takeparticipants’ assurances for granted that theycomprehend the research topic. They mustalso demonstrate their understanding of it.Perhaps, they should be required to answer ashort questionnaire or respond to a casescenario before they are finally selected.

I am entertaining the notion ofconducting a further study on negative capa-


Negative capability

bility in the future, solely with participantswho come from a psychotherapeutic back-ground. My reasoning for this is that thera-pists, by virtue of their training andexpertise, would perhaps have a deeperunderstanding of the complexities involved.Consequently, they may be able to shedmore light on this intriguing phenomenon.

Negative capability and team creativityI am wondering if negative capability is an‘internal constraint’ or a ‘transformativemindset’. Based on the study, one couldreason that the phenomenon could beexamined either way. On the one hand, itcreates a great deal of anxiety, which as wehave seen, may be defended against byactions that seem to alleviate the pressurethat a leader feels. By taking action, theleader rids herself of that tension andescapes the quandary. On the other handthough, leaders that have cultivated thecapacity to stay in mysteries, doubts, anduncertainties without the irritable reachingafter fact and reason, may successfully createand negotiate an environment in whichtransformations may occur.

Is it possible that highly creative peopleworking in teams can manage internal andexternal constraints while remaining true toteamwork? The study indicates that contraryto the commonly held belief that internaland external constraints impede creativityand transformation in groups, the reversecan be true. Internal constraints such asnegative capability may help catalysecreativity by thrusting team members in astate of not knowing. It provokes them tothink, reflect, and find new ways of being.On the other hand, external pressures suchas deadlines, limited resources, andemphasis on metrics do not suppressivecreativity. They may actually enhance it.

Redefining negative capability: Final thoughtsThis study is important because anincreasing number of professions demandthat leaders be able to deploy negative capa-

bility as part of their jobs. The construct isfascinating, but when it comes to practice,people seem to find it challenging. Theremay be a need to develop a postmodern defi-nition of negative capability that is morepragmatic and realistic for our times.

The practice of negative capability pres-ents a strange paradox as we attempt to holdtwo contrasting and conflicting attitudestogether, resulting in a state of tension. Whatmakes the predicament even harder is thatthe two positions (polarities) may not necessarily present us with an easy choice(either-or). They very often are complemen-tary and interdependent, not mutually exclu-sive. And yet, the creative tension that wespeak of is a result of contradiction, which isnecessary for discourse and dialogue. Whilehomogeneity and consensus are congenial,contradiction and difference, on the otherhand can be terrifying.

Research scholars, especially those thatare engaged in qualitative studies, may findthat the practice of negative capability mayprovide a means of holding their anxietiesand tensions in what can be a very messyprocess that is replete with uncertainty.Denzin and Lincoln (1994) write, ‘The fieldof qualitative research is defined by a seriesof tensions, contradictions, and hesitations’(p.15). On the one hand, a researcher with apost-positivist mindset who takes a detached,hands-off approach in the interview maycreate more objective space, but on theother hand, the individual may also beviewed as disinterested and distant. So howdoes one hold this difficult dialectic?

Glesne and Peshkin (1992) suggest that asuccessful researcher is one who can remain‘paradoxically bilateral’ (dominant, but alsosubmissive). Oakley (1981), a feministresearcher contends that the goal in mostinterviews is best achieved when the inter-viewers and interviewees are in a nonhierar-chical relationship, with the former willingto invest their personal identities in the rela-tionship. I made an attempt in this study toremain paradoxically bilateral – subjectiveand objective at the same time. The study


Anil Behal

was full of challenges and contradiction, andyet, it was in the very nature of the inquirythat I discovered new insights. I would nothave been able to engage in the study if I could not practice negative capabilitymyself. Scholars with a positivist mindset,entering qualitative research for the firsttime, may do well to cultivate a negativecapability frame of mind.

Being in a negative capability mindset islike undertaking a journey without a cleardestination. Phenomenologists are calledupon to constantly work in liminal spaces.Bentz and Rehorick (2008), using themetaphor of a wild horse to describe thefinal stage in hermeneutic phenomenologywrite, ‘In level 3, one rides the wild horse,taking the risk of ending up in a place onedid not expect. One lets the horse becomethe guide’ (p.21).

It may be that in contemporary times,staying in the present without regressing tothe past or fleeing into the future is all thatwe can learn to do. Attending experientialconferences in the Tavistock tradition is aunique way to cultivate a ‘here-and-now’awareness that may build the capacity tocontain perplexing experiences and staywith the present. It provides an opportunityfor members to experience what it is like toface and make sense of anxiety. Such experi-ences bring us face-to-face with unconsciousand tacit processes that are pervasive ingroups.

Nearly 200 years after its coinage by aromantic poet in his early 20s, negative capa-bility continues to be raised by scholars to acanonical status. There is no finality, and if I were to put a definition around somethingso elusive, I am indulging in the pursuit ofknowledge, as opposed to staying with thenot knowing. If I profess to know all thatthere is to know about negative capability, I will have failed miserably in this endeavour.What I hope I have tried to do is engage thereader’s questioning mind. Batchelor (1990)

suggests that where there is great ques-tioning, there is great awakening. Wherethere is little questioning, there is little awak-ening. Where there is no questioning, thereis no awakening.

Understanding that the void of ‘notknowing’ is the womb for new creations andbreakthroughs, is perhaps a powerfulenough awareness that may lead to changeand transformation in society. It is my hopethat many courageous leaders will continueon that journey and set an example forothers who are too anxious or fearful toembark on that path.

Notes: 1. This is a significantly condensed version ofa larger body of work that constitutes theauthor’s doctoral dissertation. The lattermay be accessed in its entirety at thefollowing URL: http://gradworks.umi.com/36/24/3624967.html2. Phenomenological studies of this natureare often reported in the first person. Theresearcher takes a paradoxically bilateralposition and is intimately involved in everystep of the research, beginning with in-depthinterviews with participants, and followed bydata collection and analysis.

Dr Anil BehalDr Behal holds a PhD in Human and Organ-isational Development and a Master’s degreein Human and Organisational Systems fromthe Fielding Graduate University, California,US. His areas of expertise include appliedcommunication theory, phenomenology,and the psychodynamics of organisations.He is the managing director and founder ofORGDYNE Training and Consulting, LLC(http://www.orgdyne.com).

CorrespondenceEmail: [email protected]


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Negative capability

Academic research on ‘premonitions’, ‘presentiments’ and/or ‘intuitions aboutthe future’

A member of the Psychotherapy Section is conducting research on this topic, usingqualitative interviews, in a novel approach to such experiences, and involving psycho-logical and attachment-based concepts.

Such experiences have mostly been studied within the framework of paranormal oranomalous research. This research is based on the premise that such experiencespossibly can b explained largely by existing psychological concepts. Some potentialrespondents have insisted that they do not believe in the paranormal, and theresearcher makes clear that claims to have such experiences does not imply such abelief.

Enquiries about participation from members of the Psychotherapy Section would begreatly welcomed, as familiarity with careful attention to processing internal andexternal sources of interpersonal information is directly relevant to the qualitativeinterviews.

Expenses and a small monetary reward are offered.

For further information, please contact Erica Brostoff, MSc, at: [email protected]

This research is being conducted as part of an postgraduate research programme at theUniversity of Greenwich, Department of Psychology, Social Work and Counselling, andis supervised by Dr David Luke and Professor Pam Maras.

RESISTANCE is a phenomenon that canemerge in any counselling situation,even when the most experienced and

expert counsellors use counsellingapproaches exactly as prescribed and taughtin counsellor training programs (Watson,2006). However, resistance has been concep-tualised differently by different theoreticalframeworks. For example, resistance hasbeen seen as: (a) an unconscious defence(protective) mechanism to block painful,anxiety provoking memories and insights(psychoanalytic viewpoint) (Busch, 1995), ora means to prevent changes to the currentinteraction patterns and balance of powerwithin the family (family systems theories)(Watson, 2006); (b) the result of clients’ diffi-culties with coping with challenging circum-stances and/or disbelief in the efficacy ofcounselling (Behaviourist model) (Shelton &Levy, 1981); or (c) a by-product of the coun-sellor-client relationship (post-modernistview) (Guterman, 2007, 3 March).

In the first two conceptualisations, resist-ance is seen as coming from within and/orbeing created by the client. The counsellor’stask is to help the client to access andacknowledge one’s own inner subjectiveexperiences (ISE), and reinterpret, reframe

or challenge one’s perceptions of theseexperiences in more adaptive ways (Leahy,2001; Watson, 2006). In the third conceptu-alisation, resistance can only be reducedwhen both counsellor and client are aware oftheir roles in creating the resistance andmodify their behaviours accordingly(Guterman, 2007, 3 March; Watson, 2006).

Since it is only possible to know anotherperson’s ISE through his/her explicit verbalexpressions (Hansen, 2005; Rudes &Guterman, 2007), counsellors and theirclients essentially accomplish their work viathe use of verbally expressed language whichseeks to elicit, express and process theclients’ ISEs. Similarly, while clients’ ISEsfrom the past or environment outside of thecounselling session may be the source ofresistance to counselling, the client’s ISE ofthe counsellor’s verbal and non-verbalbehaviour could also contribute to resist-ance. As such, the counsellor’s ISE of theclient, is also the result of the counsellor’spersonal ISE from other aspects of his lifewhich he brings into the relationship. Fromthe psychoanalytic perspective, the impact ofISEs on the therapeutic relationship andresulting work or lack thereof would betermed as transference and countertransfer-


The language of resistance in a counsellinggroup: Dynamics of authority and powerPhey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong, Vilma D’Rozario & Rhodas Myra Bacsal

This study presents a qualitative exploration and analysis of the experiences of eight trainee group counsellorsfrom Singapore, Malaysia, China and Japan, in an in-class face-to-face and online support group. Thestudy sought to understand how participants co-constructed their experiences of the critical incident ofresistance, which they had identified as significant in their post-group reflection papers. ConversationAnalysis was used to analyse all session transcripts During the analytical process, it was found that two co-facilitators and one member had used interactional features such as the turn allocation process,conversational practices, declarations and prescriptions, to create and implement their authority and powerin influencing the other group members in ways which were considered judgemental, disempowering andoffensive by one member, who in turn became increasingly resistant.

ence, and the post-modernist perspectiveposits that the results of this counsellor-client interaction are co-constructedthrough the use of language.

Post-modernist philosopher, Lyotard(1979/trans. 1984), suggested that one keyproduction of language games betweenspeakers is the creation and legitimisation ofauthority ingroups and societies. Within thetherapeutic context, authority is derivedfrom the expertise and knowledge of thespeaker (Anderson, 2001). This expertiseand knowledge is communicated throughthe language game (Lyotard, 1979/trans.1984), whereby new meanings and knowl-edge are continually co-constructed by thespeakers (Anderson, 2001; Gergen, 1994;Shotter, 1993) in this fluid and dialecticalrelationship (Sutherland & Strong, 2010),thus creating a power differential betweenthe therapist and client (Bernard &Goodyear, 2009). Although, therapists tendto be perceived by clients as authority figuresbecause of their expertise and knowledge(Bernard & Goodyear, 2009), they canchoose to share their power with their clientsby allowing them to be the experts on theirissues, and by involving them in the co-management of the therapeutic process(Anderson, 2001; Strong, 2002; Sutherland& Strong, 2011).

By the same token, it can be argued thattherapist behaviour in managing the use ofpower during any therapeutic conversation,can result in either the reduction or increaseof resistance in the client. In this study, wetherefore attempt to understand how traineegroup counsellors use their authority andpower to manage conversations with groupmembers to build resistance. We havechosen to focus on how undesirable coun-selling outcomes are created, so that coun-sellors may avoid them in the future.

MethodIn order to understand how language can beused in interaction patterns to build resist-ance in clients, we chose to use the qualita-tive method of conversation analysis (CA) to

examine how therapists and clients organiseand negotiate the content and process oftheir dialogues, so as to generate and conveynew understandings to each other duringtheir therapeutic conversations (McLeod,2006). In this study, we examined howGroup Counsellors-in-Training worked witheach member, each group subsystem and thegroup as a whole, while simultaneouslyattending to relationships among groupmembers, much in the same way that a ther-apist would do with clients in family therapy(Pinsof, 1995). The categorisation andsequential organisation of talk-in-interactionwas analysed minutely by working directlywith the detailed renderings of naturallyoccurring interactional activities, such astranscripts and recordings. This allowed usto take into account the details andsubtleties of interaction that are not found inother approaches (ten Have, 2007).

ParticipantsGiven the nature of this study, it was decidedthat having counsellors-in-training as respon-dents would be appropriate, as trainees aremore likely to engage in non-facilitative thanfacilitative conversational practices com-pared to professional counsellors. There isonly one Master’s level group counsellingcourse in Singapore that uses authenticsupport groups in-class, whereby participantsself-disclose and worked on their personalissues. Hence, participants were selectedusing purposive and convenience samplingmethods.

Purposive and convenience samplingmethods were used to select Master’s leveltrainee counsellors attending the only groupcounselling course in Singapore which usesuses authentic support groups in-class.Although 16 graduate students in the groupgave their written consent to participate inthis study, this study only focuses on the workproduced by eight students, whose groupmaintained resistance throughout the groupsessions. To protect their identities, Westernpseudonymns are used here and ethnicbackgrounds are not revealed.


The language of resistance in a counselling group: Dynamics of authority and power

The eight graduate students (three men,five women) ranged in age from 22.58 to 43.25years (M=31.93 years). There were four Singa-porean Chinese, one Singaporean Indian, oneMalaysian Chinese, one Chinese from thePeople’s Republic of China and one Japanese.Five participants had some experience in indi-vidual counselling, and only two had priorexperience doing group counselling.

Research team and auditors The research team included a primaryresearcher, two research assistants and twoadvisors. At the time of data collection, theprimary researcher was a doctoral studentwith a Master’s degree in counselling, whilethe research assistants were Bachelor degreeholders, and the advisors were doctoraldegree holders. All research team memberswere effectively bilingual in English andMandarin/Malay. Two external auditorswere also engaged to monitor the analyticalprocess, and to provide a check againstpossible researcher bias towards or againstparticipants (Hill, 2005). Both auditors hadMaster’s degrees in counselling, were effec-tively trilingual in English, Mandarin andMalay/Japanese, and had significant qualita-tive research and multicultural counsellingexperiences in the Asia Pacific region.

Site of studyThe participants were randomly paired as co-facilitators for one or two sessions in theirgroup. This sequence of sessions is detailedin Table 1. Before and after each supportgroup session, co-facilitators were briefedand debriefed by their process observer, whowas a member of the research team.

Each face-to-face support group was givenits own room, so as to ensure privacy forgroup members. The support group sat onchairs in a circle in the middle of the room,during each face-to-face session. Each groupalso had its own asynchronous forum pagewith separate threads for each asynchronouson-line session, which ran continuouslythroughout the week, and which participantscould participate in as they desired.

ProcedureData collection. Since Conversation Analysis(CA) assumes that social life is the outcomeof talk-in-interaction, which in turn is a ‘situ-ated’ achievement, it was, therefore, neces-sary to capture such naturally occurring datalive, rather than retrospectively. Naturallyoccurring data was captured live, with theuse of audio and video recording equip-ment, and transcribed using a simplifiedform of the Jefferson Transcription System(Jefferson Convention), thus allowing theelaboration, clarification and explication ofphenomena (ten Have, 2007).

Data analysisSelection of the episodes of resistance. For example,Co-facilitator Janice explained that the grouptried to offer Resistant Member Vivian, ‘a supportive environment to clarify hermisunderstanding within the group andencourage her to stay with the group to workthrough her resistance’; while Co-facilitatorSean reflected that, ‘Vivian showed resistanceby declining to participate actively in thesupport group.’ Member Susan said of Vivian,‘I sensed her reluctance to be part of thegroup’; while Member Alice said, ‘I thoughtthat she was really being difficult as she keptvoicing out differing opinions.’ Even the iden-tified resistant member, Vivian, reflected thatthe group ‘do [sic] not accept disagreementand difference style till (the) end’.

I rarely felt that it was a safe and genuineplace to fully express myself … During groupsharing, the atmosphere did not allow me touse the ‘pass’ privilege despite my feeling ofinsecurity. I felt really obligated to talk about[sic] at least ‘something’ even when I havevague feelings and ideas of what the groupwas discussing about sometimes…’

In addition, the primary researcher alsoindependently reviewed the seven hours ofvideo-recordings and accompanying tran-scripts, as well as six on-line session archivesto identify emerging phenomena from allsessions. Twenty per cent of the phenomenawhich the primary researcher deemed signif-icant to the group outcomes were deemed


Phey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong, Vilma D’Rozario & Rhodas Myra Bacsal



Table 1: Group session sequence for support group used in this study.

Week Session Number Co-Facilitators[Face-to-Face (FTF)Online (OL)]

1 Post OL debrief and Vivan and ClarissaPre-FTF session briefingFTF 1Post-FTF session briefingOL 1

2 Post OL debrief and Adam and SusanPre-FTF session briefingFTF2Post-FTF session briefingOL 2

3 Post OL debrief and Sean and JanicePre-FTF session briefingFTF 3Post-FTF session briefingOL 3

4 Post OL debrief and Alice and JohnPre-FTF session briefingFTF 4Post-FTF session briefingOL 4

5 Post OL debrief and Vivian and ClarissaPre-FTF session briefingFTF 5Post-FTF session briefingOL 5

6 Post OL debrief and Sean and JanicePre-FTF session briefingFTF 6Post-FTF session briefingOL 6

7 Post OL debrief and Alice and JohnPre-FTF session briefingFTF 7Post-FTF session briefingOL 7

significant by the participants in the group,and these phenomena were all present inthe same episodes of resistance highlightedby the participants. Following this, theresearch team then referred to the existingliterature to confirm that the identifiedepisodes could indeed be defined as that ofresistance.

The primary researcher started the firstphase of the analytical process by reviewingall data from the identified episodes, takingnote of behaviours and talk that were inter-esting or significant, and referring to theprocess observer’s field notes. She wouldalso constantly reflect on and discuss withthe research team on a weekly basis, her feel-ings and reactions to the data.

Transcript analysis process. The primaryresearcher conducted a ConversationAnalysis using the four types of interactionalorganisations: (1) turn-taking organisation;(2) sequence organisation; (3) repair organ-isation; and (4) the organisation of turndesign (ten Have, 2007). Key interactionalfeatures of the group conversations that hadcontributed to the dynamics within thegroup were identified, and the analysis wasthen checked by the research team and twoexternal auditors. There was unanimousagreement between the research team andthe auditors about the findings.

ResultsThis section focusses on a description of thekey interactional features that were observedin the creation and maintenance of a groupmember, Vivian’s, resistance.

Allocation of turns of talk. The turn-takingprocess is important because it allows theparties present to be participants in theconversation. Speaker change can happenvia selection of the next speaker by thecurrent speaker or self-selection by a newspeaker (ten Have, 2007).

In this group, co-facilitators, Sean andJanice, present themselves as authorityfigures (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) by

controlling talk, and allocating speakingrights to themselves and selected groupmembers (Freebody, 2003). In Excerpt 1,Co-facilitator Sean opens the session (Lines1 to 3), thus exercising first-starter rights indetermining the topic and allocating thenext turn to another speaker (Sacks, Sche-gloff & Jefferson, 1974). In Line 5, Sean alsoallocates a turn to one member, John, whenhe opens an adjacency pair by asking thelatter for his opinions (Line 5). Co-facilitatorSean’s action also serves to invest Member,John, with authority, which he and Janicefurther reinforce by agreeing with him(Lines 14 to 15).

Declarations. The co-facilitators’ alsocontrolled the direction of the group discus-sion by using declarations. An example of adeclarative statement that participantsaccepted as a fact without verifying its validity(Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) is seen whenCo-facilitator Sean declares that MembersVivian, Alice and Clarissa (Lines 1 to 3) arebold and honest about their preferences andfeelings. Alice responds with the agreementtoken, ‘Ok’ (Silverman, 2001). This is imme-diately followed by John’s declaration, whichhe further objectifies (Academic Diction-aries and Encyclopedias, 2011) and legit-imises (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) bybeginning his statement with the third partypronoun ‘it’. Later on (Excerpt 2), Johndeclares that ‘Vivian has a really bigproblem’ (Lines 254 to 255).

Vivian attempts to exercise her power byweakly rejecting (Pomerantz, 1984) John’sdeclaration of her having a big problem withan interruption which indicates her frustra-tion with the discussion. She ends her state-ment by emphasising her point with amicro-pause (‘(.)’) followed by ‘really’(Lines 256 to 257) (Strong, Busch &Couture, 2008a).

Prescriptions. When one participant pre-scribes a course of action for other parti-cipants, he or she places himself in a positionof authority, while placing a clear expecta-





Excerpt 1 from Face-to-Face Session 3.

Line Speaker Talk

1 Sean (F) I realise that the both of2 you, the three of you3 actually have the same

characteristics, being bold,being able to voice out what you #like (.) and whatyou #feel.

4 Alice OK.

5 Sean (F) John, what do you think?

6 John A good point. As in being7 able to accept differences8 between ( ). There will be9 differences but we still can10 look at commonality in the11 sense.12 (1.9) 13 That, so that is the:: key of

group message. With allthese difference, (.) but we are here, let us focus on the common rather than the difference. (.) It's good that they are expressing themselves rather than being politically correct.

14 Sean (F) That's true. 15 (1.2)

16 Janice (F) I agree with John about (.) 17 the commonality…So ah:: 18 Vivian actually brought at 19 some point that (.) she did20 not feel sense of belonging21 to this group. Just want to22 know, how everybody can

help to br(hh)ing her feeling of belongingness to this group? (1.3) Yeah.

23 Vivian Ok, th(h)at's me. You asking the group? ((all mumble))

(F) denotes Co-facilitator for session


Line Speaker Talk

254 John Just to talk generally, 255 Vivian has really big

problem and we have to give her credit for that. The fact that she’s being honest about that, right?

256 Vivian Yeah, actually, I had a 257 choice. I feel maybe

ishould just shut up (.) really.


Line Speaker Talk

Perhaps it's good time askaround rather that to

109 assume. Adam, zero to ten,110 Sean (F) ten being (.) the most sense111 of belonging, zero being

completely nothere, (.) where would youstand?

112 Adam I am not sure, ( )

113 Sean (F) So if I were to ask you to give a number now?

114 I think it's still high? (Because I have seen the

115 Adam group sharing struggles and116 fears.) There's some form

of trust in it. ( ) If I were togive a number, around eight.

117 Sean (F) Ok, Clarissa?

Six to seven. Yeah, because118 I think it's still fear (.) and119 Clarissa not confident with what

ishare, what isay.

tion that the other participants wouldperform the action. For example in Excerpt1, Co-facilitator Janice asks the group toprovide solutions to help Vivian feelasense ofbelonging to the group. By addressingVivian’s sense of belonging as if she is notpresent, and asking the group to solve thisissue, Janice implies that Vivian has aproblem that has to be solved by the group.The prescription is offensive to Vivian, as sheasks Janice why she is asking the group tosolve her issue.

In Excerpt 3, Co-facilitator Sean asks thegroup members to rate their sense ofbelonging on a scale of 1 to 10 (Lines 109 to111). Member Adam initially declines to givea number (Line 112), and Co-facilitatorSean seeks to repair this trouble source(Schegloff, 1992) by asking Adam to give anumber now (Line 113). Adam accedes(Lines 114 to 116). As a result, severalmembers, including Clarissa, follows suit bygiving her rating (Lines 118 to 119). Co-facil-itator Sean’s authority is thus legitimised bygroup members when they respond asrequired.

In Excerpt 4, when Vivian responds toSean’s question by gave her rating of ‘three’,she is asked to justify her rating. Vivianresponds with silence, and though thisprompts Janice to assure her that she doesnot have to respond, she uses the conversa-tional device, ‘but’ (Jefferson, 1992), to voiceher disagreement to Vivian’s silence andreinforce her authority on what membersmay or may not choose to do, by prescribinga group norm that implies that Vivien wouldhave to respond eventually so that the groupcan remain cohesive.

Another form of prescription that servedto build Vivian’s resistance in this group wasimplicit in the conversational practice ofspeaking about group members as if they arenot present in the session, by using thirdperson pronouns such as ‘she’ or ‘they’(Farlex, 2013b), or by using the person’sname, instead of using personal pronounssuch as ‘You’ (Farlex, 2013a), to address theperson. This occurs when the group follows

the speaking style of the speaker who firstbroaches a topic or issue. For example, inExcerpt 1, Member John, having been vestedwith the authority to state his opinion andmake a prescription, starts to speak aboutVivian, Alice and Clarissa, as if they are notpresent (Lines 12 to 13). This conversationalpractice is subsequently adopted by Co-facil-itator Janice (Lines 16 to 20). Consequentlyother group members follow suit in thefollowing excerpts.

Excerpt 5 demonstrates how being talkedabout in the third person can be disturbingto the member who is being talked about.This is seen in Vivian’s response, where sheexpresses in relatively undisturbed speechher surprise at being ‘the center of atten-tion’ (Turn 25, Line 103), and being talkedabout by the group. However, her speechbecomes turbulent, as evidenced by expres-sive caution in the form of a hesitations(Turn 22, Line 100: ‘eh::’) when she starts to




Line Speaker Talk

129 Vivian °About three.°

130 About three? How you feelabout the big difference?

131 Sean (F) Generally it's about seven132 to eight, and then, the

lowest is three?

133 Vivan (50.1)

134 Janice (F) Let's not be pressurized on talking.

135 Sean (F) WE HAVE A 'PASS' RULE. ((all laugh))

136 Janice (F) Don't feel pressurized to share.

137 Sean (F) Anyone else?

I mean if you don't feel thatyou want to share, you

138 don't like to really talk139 Janice (F) about your feelings, it is140 alright to say ‘pass’. But (.)

ultimately, we need to be together as a group.

talk about her initial thoughts about othersfeeling the same way as she did. Her turbu-lent delivery pattern indicates that sheconsiders her opinions as potentially prob-lematic for the rest of the group members(Silverman, 2001).

DiscussionResistance in a group member can arisefrom the way co-facilitators use interactionalfeatures during group conversations to posi-tion power structures to create and useauthority in a group. This is represented inFigure 1.

Creation of authority. Group participants whotook on the role of co-facilitators were auto-matically vested with a higher level ofauthority and power than members, whileother participants complemented this roleby taking on the lower status membershiprole of docility, by following the co-facilita-tors’ and Member John’s prescriptions(Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984) and conversa-tional practices. This unequal status betweenthe two parties resulted in a smooth andproductive interaction between both parties,and is reminiscent of Tracey’s (2002) inter-personal perspective of power. The followingof conversational practices is supported byBandura’s modelling theory in which leadersshape group norms by modelling behavioursfor other members to adopt (Yalom &Leszcz, 2005).

The only person who deviated from thenorm of following the leaders was ResistantMember Vivian, who effectively placed




Line Speaker Talk

96 Sean (F) So what we are all saying97 here is that (.) it's very98 important for her to be

able to be in the group so99 that we can move forward

as a group. But at the same time, we can also acknowledge that the issue of trust (.) takes a while to build.

100 Vivian Eh:: I, I have a question actually.

101 Sean (F) Mhm::

102 Janice (F) Mhm::

I am quite ( ) surprised that103 I am the center of attention

Vivian now? Everybody's talking 104 about me, how we can help

me?

Figure 1: Misuse of authority and power in creating and maintaining resistance intherapeutic conversations.

Creation of Authorityand Power

l Investmentl Role-defined authority

l Self-selection of turnsl Invested authority

l Allocation of turns

l Legitimisationl Evidential support

l Accepting prescriptionsl Following conventional

practicesl Moral support

l Agreement with prescriptions

Usage of Authorityand Power

l Controll Turns of talkl Prescriptions

l Judgementl Declarations

Resistance

l Creationl Disagreement with

declarations and prescriptions

l Maintenancel Assertion of rightsl Objection to conversational

practices

herself at the same power level as the co-facil-itators and challenged their authority whenshe asserted her right to pass a question.Hence, there was a symmetrical interactionbetween the co-facilitators and resistantmember, which resulted in a tense interac-tion and increase in resistance (Tracey,2002). In other words, client resistance canarise from client rejection of the counsellor’sauthority.

Co-facilitator Sean also invested onemember, John, with authority, by using theturn taking process to allocate the next turnto him, and further strengthening hisauthority by agreeing with and legitimisinghis views. In doing so, Co-facilitator Sean alsostrengthened his own position of authorityon what direction the group should take. Co-facilitator Sean’s action is supported bythe literature on the theory of Social Influ-ence (Frank, 1961; Goldstein, Heller &Schrest, 1966; Strong, 1968), which contendsthat individuals tend to give interpersonalpower to those whom they perceive as havingthe resources to meet their needs. Whenviewed through this lens, Member John maybe seen as having been given the power toinfluence the group because his viewpointwas the resource that the co-facilitatorsneeded to move the group in the directionthat they wanted it to take, thus allowingthem to control the group process indirectly.

Usage of authority and power. The co-facilita-tors and Member John used the powerinherent in their authority, as well as theirposition as first speakers, to judge groupmembers’ behaviours (Bernard & Goodyear,2009) by making declarations aboutmembers (Lyotard, 1979/trans. 1984). Theyused interpersonal power to influence thegroup to view Vivian in the same negativeway (Strong, 1968). The authority figures’declarations of Vivian served to invest thegroup with the expert power or epistemicauthority to solve her problem for her(Heritage & Raymond, 2005), and theirconversational practice of indirect talkallowed group participants to criticise Vivian,

while strengthening their belief in theirauthority to solve her problems. Theseactions were unacceptable and possiblyoffensive to Vivian, as it neither gave herinformation on how her behaviour impactedothers, nor empowered her to make changesabout her interpersonal style (Stockton,Morran & Krieger, 2004).

While this practice of indirect talk is notuncommon amongst members, skilled andexperienced facilitators would alwaysinstruct speakers to look at and speakdirectly to the person they want to talkabout, as this would open up communica-tional channels among members andempower them to take responsibility forreaching their personal and group goals(Corey, Corey & Haynes, 2014). The litera-ture on interpersonal behaviour in the ther-apist-client relationship also posits thatcritical behaviour elicits distrustful behav-iours (Leary, 1957; Tracey, Sherry &Albright, 1999), which in turn serves to buildclient resistance towards the therapist(Shelton & Levy, 1981).

The co-facilitators also used theirauthority and power to control the groupprocesses by using prescriptions. This wasbecause the co-facilitators together withMember John, used the conversationaldevice ‘but’ to set the group norm that allmembers should talk about their differencesso that group cohesiveness can be achieved.According to Glasser (2000), the use ofexternal control psychology results indisconnecting the controlled from thecontroller. External control behaviourincludes punishment, which is seen in thisinstance when Vivian was asked to accountfor having a lower rating for belongingnessthan other members. It also accounts for whyVivian later reflected in her reflection paperthat she seldom felt safe in this group, andher lack of safety resulted in her increasedresistance to the group process.

Implications for counsellors. This study showsthat group counsellors need to be aware ofthe power which their roles bestow on them



and how accidental misuse of this powercould impact the group. Hence, they need tounderstand their motivations for wanting tocontrol group conversations and directions.They also need to understand how to useconversational devices and practices in waysthat allows the co-sharing of power and useof collaborative language (Sutherland &Strong, 2011).

Limitations. This study was limited by thesmall number of participants, though meas-ures were taken to triangulate the findings byusing multiple sources of data, and byproviding sufficient information about thelearning context of the study so that readerswere able to draw their own conclusions. Itmust also be noted that the use of Conversa-tional Analysis also limited data collection toin-situ talk-in-interaction data, as it posits thatpost-conversation reflections are often inac-curate, as participants might not rememberexactly how they felt or what prompted themto speak in a certain manner, after the fact(ten Have, 2007). Hence, the researchersonly had limited information gathered fromthe participants’ written reflections fromwhich to understand how the participantsjustified or reinterpreted their actions in thegroup following its closure.

Implications for future research. Given theselimitations, it might, therefore, be helpful toconduct a quantitative study of the preva-lence of the key interactional features in thewielding of authority and power in creatingand maintaining resistance. Future qualita-tive studies in the area of resistance mightalso include semi-structured interviews thatcould be analysed for the meanings ascribedby group counsellors and members to theirexperiences of resistance, and how thismight affect their conceptualisations andsubsequent interventions. The study of livedexperiences can be conducted using otherqualitative methods such as InterpretativePhenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers& Larkin, 2009).

This research was supported by the RSAA GrantRS-AA 10/08, awarded by the National Instituteof Education, Nanyang Technological University.

The AuthorsPhey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong & Vilma D’RozarioPsychological Studies Academic Group,Nanyang Technological University.

Rhodas Myra BacsalEarly Childhood and Special EducationAcademic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.

CorrespondencePhey Ling KitPsychological Studies Academic Group,National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, NIE 2-03-101, Singapore 637616.Email: [email protected]



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ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversation analysis.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Watson, J.C. (2006). Addressing client resistance:Recognising and processing in-sessionoccurrences. VISTAS 2006 Online. Retrieved from:http://counselingoutfitters.com/ Watson.htm.

Yalom, I. & Leszcz, M. (2005). The theory and practice ofgroup psychotherapy (5th ed.). New York: BasicBooks.



OUR ATTENTION SO FAR has beenon transformative learning as itoccurs on an individual level;

however, given that group work is aninescapable reality in today’s day and age, itwould seem only natural that we make anattempt to understand how individuallearning and transformation unfold withinthe context of a small group. My own experi-ence of group work has thus far been inpsychodynamic ‘self-analytic’ settings wheremuch of the work is self-directed and experi-ential, with little or no direction or guidancefrom a group moderator. Drawing from theearly and contemporary work of theoristssuch as Lewin, Bion, Rice and others whohave extensively researched and contributedto a greater understanding of groupdynamics, it seems the group has a powerfulimpact on individual learning, both atconscious (manifest) and unconscious(tacit) levels.

Whilst the focus of human process facili-tators who work in the National TrainingLaboratories (NTL) tradition, seems to beon the ‘individual’ participant and how sherelates interpersonally to others within agroup setting, consultants that work in theTavistock/AKRI Group Relations traditions,are primarily concerned with ‘group-level’(covert, irrational, and unconscious)phenomena. Both traditions are deeply

embedded in social systems, of which theindividual, group, and institutions are anintegral part, but it does not seem very clearin either methodology, what if anything, hasundergone transformation within thesystem.

Perhaps, the difficulty arises from the factthat ‘what and how’ an individual learns inthese groups, is entirely left to that indi-vidual to figure out. This is not an easyprocess to understand, let alone internalise.For the novice, it presents an even greaterchallenge. On another note, the social,cultural, and personality systems in whichthis rich work progresses, seem to take aback seat. References are sporadically madeto the personality system in NTL work andthe social/cultural systems in the Tavistockmodel; however, the discussions barelyscratch the surface of what is clearly a muchdeeper and more complex phenomenon.

In order to address these perplexingconcerns, I decided to engage with thethinking of Boyd (1991) and associates, as itpertains to personal transformations in smallgroups (viewed through the Jungian lens).This means opening up an entirely new wayof looking at groups and understandingtransformations that seem to occur in thosesettings.

As I studied Boyd’s work, I felt bothexcited and a bit overwhelmed. My excite-


Individual transformations in groups: The role of focal person in periods ofarchetypal paradoxesAnil Behal

‘The notion of the “archetypal paradox” was advanced as the group context in which the “focal person”emerges. Within the period of the archetypal paradox, the focal person serves to crystallise and to name thesense of the entrenchment that members feel and the unconscious concerns that are at the core of the archetypalparadox, to challenge and to critique the present order of things, and/or to energise the group towardtransformation of the social order. Through these three key functions, the focal person facilitates a reframingof the group’s situation and movement through the paradox.’ (Dirkx, 1991, p.92)

ment stemmed from knowing that Jungianthinking had already made its way into indi-vidual transformation within groups, previ-ously thought of as the domain ofpsychodynamics. Depth psychology, for themost part, has centered on the individualrather than the group. Jungian analysts havetypically shied away from what is commonlyknown as group analysis in psychoanalyticsettings. I refer here to psychoanalysis asdistinct from Jungian (depth/analytical)psychology, even though there are manycommonalties between the two disciplines.

My feeling of being overwhelmed camefrom the realisation that there was a lot thatI did not know about transformation ingroups from a depth psychology standpoint.The literature is so vast that it simply wouldnot be possible to explore it all within thispaper. I therefore decided to focus on some-thing that is typically not addressed in main-stream transformative learning literature,that is, the emergence and role of a ‘focalperson’ in a group, especially at times ofemotional upheaval, conflict, and strifewhen the group is going through periods ofarchetypal paradoxes.

Based on my own experiences and groupstudy, I speculate that it is during periods of‘dialectical tension’ that we may witnessdramatic individual and group transforma-tion. This kind of tension always exists withingroups as an outcome of the paradox ofuncertainty, however, it seems as thoughthere is a tendency to somehow alleviate thetension and anxiety, rather than explore andwork with it. In trying to quickly restorecivility and normalcy to a group, we may beshortchanging the natural process of growthand evolution that all groups must gothrough as they progress through differentphases of development. In addition toBoyd’s work which is centre stage in thispaper, I will also draw from the work of othertheorists such as Nitsun (1996) who havemade a significant contribution to groupanalytic literature.

Boyd’s Matrix modelBoyd (1991) makes a compelling argumentthat in understanding and defining theleader’s role in a small group, it is importantfor the leader to clearly have in mind aconceptual metaphor/framework of thegroup and the assumptions on which thatmetaphor is based. The observer’s ‘Weltan-schauung,’ that is, worldview or philosophyof life (Boyd, 1991, p.15) dictates in part, thestructural aspects of the group that cometogether in a meaningful way and facilitatethe process of sense making. This is not tosuggest that a universally accepted paradigmmay help explain all the small groupcomplexities. It is conceivable that adifferent set of paradigms and worldviewsmay in fact converge and form a mentalpicture of what the group represents to theleader, who may then draw from differentperspectives as she makes sense of whatmight be happening in the group.

Any conceptual framework of the group,according to Boyd, must deal with thefollowing points of view: 1. Structural: Personality system, social

system, and cultural system2. Developmental/adaptive point of view

(each of the three systems in #1 above mustface the three primary tasks of defining thenature of its identity, establishing modes ofrelating (norms), and developing means torespond/relate to reality-adaptive demands(Boyd, 1991 p.15)

3. Transactional point of view states thatwhat is happening in one constituent partof the matrix, affects all other part as well.

4. Gestalt: Viewing the group-as-a-whole andusing a metaphor such as an ‘organism’ todescribe it is central to an understandingof what might be transpiring within it atany given point in time.

5. Content point of view: refers to the formsthe transactions take in the life of a group.These are not primarily the interactionsbetween members, but also between thepersonality, social, and cultural systems,which may or may not be readilyobservable, but are present nonetheless.


Individual transformations in groups

In summary, what Boyd seems to suggest isthat all three systems, that is, personality,social, and cultural will inevitably face thethree primary tasks of defining the nature ofthe identity, ways of relating (emotionality,norms, boundaries, etc.), and developingthe means to relate to reality-adaptivedemands. Using Erickson’s (1950) epige-netic theory as a basis, Boyd posits that thestages of group development may coincidewith stages of ego development. The struggleof the group around the issues oftrust/mistrust in the early stages of forma-tion, may often remind group members oftheir personal struggle with trust/mistrust.There will always be a dialectical tension inthe group, between intimacy and isolation;togetherness and separateness; love andhate; idealisation and devaluation. The smallgroup then is a microcosm of similartensions in the lives of group members. So isthe case with identity formation in thecultural system, which is but a reflection ofhuman nature.

At the level of emotionality (ways ofrelating), Bion’s basic assumptions (BaG)group is contrasted with the more visible(manifest) WG (work group) and provides aunique framework for understanding theunconscious tensions that are mobilisedwhen group members come together for anystated purpose. Building on Bion’s populartheory of group dynamics, that is, basicassumptions dependency (BaD), basicassumptions fight/flight (BaF/F), and basicassumptions pairing (BaP), Boyd proposesanother framework to understand theemotionality expressions of the personalitysystem. Drawing on the research work of theChicago group, he discusses six types ofemotionality that small group members typically express:1. Dependency; 2. Counter-dependency;3. Fight; 4. Flight;5. Pairing;6. Counter-pairing.

Depending upon the effect that each ofthese six valencies of emotionality has ongroup transactions, they are classified asnegative, positive, or neutral. This provides amore complete picture of the tensions thatexist in the group. It is not uncommon toconcurrently observe the social and culturalemotionality mobilised at the same time, butwith entirely different dynamics. Forinstance, at the social system level, the groupmay be struggling with basic assumptions‘dependency’ (BaD), while the culturalsystem may tell a different story. At thecultural level, there may be a basic assump-tions ‘pairing’ (BaP) being enacted betweenmembers.

Boyd’s model is a departure from tradi-tional psychodynamic group theory and it isinteresting to observe how different systemsmay be operative at the same time. A trainedobserver can often make sense of thesesystems and feed the observations back togroup members as needed. Skill and timingare critical factors to be considered, forthere is always a judgment involved inwhether or not to intervene in the smallgroup process. The timing of an interven-tion may be a critical factor.

The third and final primary task faced byall three systems is the reality-adaptive taskthat needs to be defined and understood inthe context of analytical psychology, particu-larly with reference to the Gestalt, develop-ment, and transactional points of view. Theunconscious content of this task is examinedat the symbolic level (archetypes). In theinitial phase, the small group is consideredto be at the ‘Uroboric Stage’ or Great Roundand the group members feel they are in acircle that contains and defines. This oftencatalyses anxiety in some and a feeling ofsecurity in others.

Once these issues are worked through,the group moves into the next phase ofexpansion of consciousness, the ‘GreatMother.’ This too is a phase that is charac-terised by dialectical tensions and paradoxessuch as feeding and devouring, nurturingand denying, and caring and abandoning


Anil Behal

(Boyd, 1991 p.36). Members realise thatsomething is happening within the groupthat is comforting and painful; exciting andanxiety producing; good and bad; however,the archetypal content and images are, forthe most part, unconscious and reveal them-selves to the group matrix in mysteriousways. Members who are prepared for thechallenges that lie ahead (as the groupprogresses through successive stages) areoften the ones that will experience the mosttransformation.

According to Boyd, groups in which themoderator typically assumes a silent, non-directive role and/or chooses not to identifythe images and archetypes of the GreatMother, Great Father, etc., will experiencethe greatest turmoil, but also significantopportunities for transformation.

Group transformation through the focalperson conceptHaving completed a brief overview of Boyd’sMatrix model, we can now move ahead anddiscuss the concept of the ‘focal person’.

Dirkx (1991) writes, ‘It is a common obser-vation that certain individuals in small, face-to-face groups develop considerable influence with therest of the members. Despite the fact that these indi-viduals are usually not in designated positions ofleadership, they become the centre of the group’sattention during critical periods. It is as if theentity of the group has developed a certain rela-tionship with these individuals’ (Dirkx, 1991,p.65).

Also referred to as ‘influential member,’this unique dynamic can be observed inmany small groups with strikingly similarundertones. In particular, self-analytic expe-riential groups with no fixed agenda ordirective leadership will invariably see theemergence of one or more focal personswho initially self-authorise and show up inthe group to take charge, challenge, or prodmembers to engage or not engage in certainbehaviours. They seem to have the courageto ‘stand in the fire’ and face the conse-quences of their deviant behaviour. Throughtheir very act of stepping up, asserting, chal-

lenging, or confronting they may be ipsofacto leaders of the group, albeittemporarily. Whether this is unconsciouslyenabled by the group-as-a-whole through aprocess of collusion with the focal person, orat the behest of that individual, the differ-ences and confusion that ensue can seriouslyfactionalise or polarise the group members.

Dirkx (1991) cites an example from hisown work, of a small group that has beengiven few directions and no curriculum bythe moderator. The group is having aconversation around when to schedulebreaks during the day, with no clearconsensus developing. At this time, one ofthe group members, Barbara shares how sheloves being part of such a group that is sounlike her other groups at work. She feelsthat she could take the liberty of walking outand taking bathroom breaks, as and whenshe needed them.

Suddenly there is silence in the groupand the group’s attention is now centred onBarbara. The group members find it ratherodd that she should take things in her ownhands without consulting the othermembers. Barbara remains defiant, but cour-teous, which further raises the group’sanxiety. They insist that the matter of breaksshould be decided by consensus, rather thanthe free will of a member. Barbara does notfeel obliged to go along, given that therewere no previously agreed upon guidelinescommunicated by the moderator as thesmall group began to meet.

Tensions begin to run high, with somemembers in favor of Barbara, while othersadmonishing her for what they consideredto be a transgression. Soon thereafter, thediscussion in the group shifts from emotion-ally laden conversations to intellectualisa-tion, and concludes with no decision takenon the issue of the breaks. From this briefcase scenario it is apparent that Barbaraemerged as the ‘focal person’ in the smallgroup, as evidenced by the group’scontinued attention on her.

Some questions that arise have to do withthe circumstances or situations under which



focal persons seem to emerge in groups. Issomething occurring in the group at thattime, consciously or unconsciously, whichseems to draw certain individuals to thatrole? What are these individuals holdingonto for the group-as-a-whole? How are thedifferences resolved, one way or another?From a sociological perspective, role differ-entiation, distribution of power, andmembers’ expectations of peers, may all playa role (Dirkx, 1991, p.67). The functionalroles of energiser, encourager, evaluator-critic, and group harmoniser may be kept inmind from an archetypal standpoint. Thepsychodynamics approach on the otherhand, offers a more covert, irrational, andtacit dimension. Examples include basicassumptions leaders (Bion, 1961), rolespecialists (Dunphy, 1974), emotionalleaders (Beck, 1974), and scapegoats (Eagle& Newton, 1981; Toker, 1972).

For the purpose of this paper, I will makean attempt to explore the role of focalperson from a psychodynamics standpoint.In particular, I am intrigued by the role ofscapegoat and how this individual may bethe desideratum for group development andexpansion of consciousness. I have experi-enced deep and profound transformation attimes when I have knowingly or unknowinglyassumed that role in small groups, hence myinterest in exploring it further.

When the individual meets the groupColman (1995) challenges Jungian scholarsto think beyond the traditional primacy ofthe ‘individual’ over the ‘group’ (collective),a problem associated with one of Jung’s mostfundamental concepts. He reasons that intrue individuation there needs to be a with-drawal of projections; a desideratum for thedevelopment of consciousness, that requiresa ‘person’ who is a member of a group orcollective, on whom these projections havebeen deposited. Colman views this ‘person’as the scapegoat, who becomes an importantlink between the individual and groupconsciousness, for without the scapegoat, the projections would have no repository.

He conceptualises the scapegoat as an‘ancient archetype and scapegoating anancient activity, so ancient that there are fewprimitive societies where evidence of thepractice has not been found’ (Colman 1995,pp.7–8). The scapegoat for Colman is thus, ‘a critical intersection’ (p.2), ‘juxtaposition’(p.5) through which both the person andthe collective may individuate. The latter isone of the most important highlights ofColman’s thinking. In a sense then, Colmanattempts to go beyond the Western obsessionof mentally-driven individualism and individ-ualistic thinking, as it relates to personaltransformation, and instead brings to thefore, the powerful influence of the ‘collec-tive unconscious’ on individual and groupconsciousness.

As Colman takes us on his personalodyssey, he boldly challenges the dominanceof a primarily Western culture. Conscious-ness, for Colman, is ‘more than individual’(p.21); it exists in a variety of ‘non-individualconsciousness states’ on a continuum fromlower to higher, ‘from individual conscious-ness to ecstatic merger states of groupconsciousness’ (p.22). According to thismodel, the ecstatic merger states that occurin group consciousness are an adult versionof infant ‘pre-relational consciousness,’ itselforiginating in four ‘epigenetic ecstaticmerger states’ (p.28), starting with the totalmerger of the fetus with the mother,through a true symbiotic dyad at six to sevenmonths in which boundaries begin to beperceived, onto merger in the family group(p.30), and, finally, the largesse of ‘shiftinggroup consciousness’ (p.31), within andbeyond the family confines.

Colman writes, ‘Ecstasy literally meansstanding outside of one’s person. Ecstaticconsciousness can be looked at as a state in whichone’s personal boundary, one’s “I” is diminishedor lost through merger with something or someoneelse. If ecstasy can be thought of as a merger expe-rience in which the personal identity is diminishedor lost, then … the dynamics of ecstasy reflect andinvert the developmental dynamics of infant andchild consciousness’ (Colman, 1995, p.22).


Anil Behal

As I juxtapose the provocative ideas ofColman (with regards to the scapegoat) withthe ‘focal person’ construct developed byDirkx, it seems to make sense that the focalperson (scapegoat) should emerge in thesmall group as it goes through differentstages of development, consequently shiftinggroup consciousness. Before we get into adiscussion about the archetypal ‘state of thegroup’ that most attracts a focal person, it isimportant to understand the dynamics of thescapegoat.

Whilst the small group literature doesnot attribute the quality of charisma to thescapegoat, it is usually an influential personwho comes to assume that role in groups.Among the various forms of ‘symbolic influ-ential members’ (Dirkx, 1991), such asprophet (Brueggemann, 1978), charismaticindividual (Weber, 1946), central person(Redl, 1942), covert role (Gemmill & Straus,1988), and hero (Hartman & Gibbard, 1974)it is the scapegoat that stands apart fromeveryone else (Dunphy, 1974). As a centralperson, the scapegoat become the carrier ofthe group’s anxieties and emotionality, sothat the group members can unconsciouslysatisfy and/or get rid of undesirable drivesand impulses, thereby avoiding feelings ofguilt and shame (Redl, 1942).

Hartman and Gibbard (1974) write, ‘Thescapegoat symbolises the social system’s reaction todistress and an attempt to locate or identify thesources of distress. The perceived source of thedistress is experienced as responsible for producinganxiety in the group or is viewed as abandoning,depressing, or potentially destroying the socialsystem. The social system then seeks to psychologi-cally extrude the source of distress from the group.The source of distress is unconsciously perceived asa “bad object” to be somehow eliminated so that thegroup ideal in which the scapegoat resides, may bereplaced by a “good object”.’

In my previous work, I discussed in somedetail the dynamics surrounding the scape-goat and how these forces are intensifiedwhen a small group is in the throes of basicassumptions (dependency, fight/flight, andpairing). Ironically, the scapegoat seems to

emerge at moments when the group is grap-pling with psychotic anxieties; which is alsoto suggest that periods of distress may be anoutcome of the group’s struggle withholding archetypal paradoxes; an anxietythat is defended against by enlisting thesupport of a carrier. It is typical for smallgroup members at this stage, to feelpolarised and unconsciously see the scape-goat as a convenient repository for theirprojections. The scapegoat’s response tothese projections is that of a ‘social critic’with an urgent calling that challenges thestatus-quo (present way of seeing things),prodding the group to look for alternatestrategies. The groups’ refusal to do so,either as an act of defiance or denial, furtherintensifies the paradox and keeps membersdeadlocked. It is as though the scapegoat hassuddenly become the center of theiruniverse.

Paradoxically, for the group, projectingonto the scapegoat is also a means of riddingthemselves of the anxieties and movingthrough subsequent stages of group devel-opment. The scapegoat therefore becomes adesideratum for the group’s progress. Asconsciousness develops within the group, itseems to release its hold on and obsession ofthe scapegoat. Ironically, the scapegoat’sdefensive function in the group also pavesthe way for transformation. This is a keyconcept in the idea of the focal person. Whatstarts as a singular voice of transformationled by the focal person, must inevitably takehold in the group-as-a-whole.

The focal person is a symbolic represen-tative of the fundamentally archetypalnature of the paradox that exists in thegroup. Christ (1989) describes symbols asunconscious content, expressing much morethan can be put into mere words. While theunconscious content is largely out of aware-ness and inaccessible, the behaviour, interac-tions, emotions, and feelings present in thegroup are a manifestation of what is other-wise hidden. Symbolic representations in thegroup may also involve archetypal images ofthe Good Mother and Good Father. What



may otherwise seem to be a rather insignifi-cant, even miniscule issue in a small group,such as deciding when to schedule breaks,may assume the form of what Boyd and asso-ciates refer to as an ‘archetypal paradox’ orstate of conflicting and contradictorydialectic tension in a group, that is strug-gling to make sense and find meaning intheir social and cultural milieu.

The archetypal paradoxThe idea of the archetypal paradox is basedon the theoretical framework of Neumann(1954) in analytical psychology. Smith andBerg (1987) suggest that the ‘paradoxicalperspective is concerned with the observa-tion that groups are pervaded by a widerange of emotions, thoughts, and actionsthat their members experience as contradic-tory, and that the attempts to unravel thesecontradictory forces create a circular processthat is paralysing to groups.’

Neumann talks about the struggle withcontradictory and opposing ideas as ‘arche-typal’ in nature and manifests as universalmythological motifs or symbols which markthe gradual stage-like emergence ofconsciousness within the social group(Neumann, 1954). Birth of the Hero, GreatMother, Separation of World Parents,Slaying of the Mother and Father, are allmythological motifs according to Neumannand represent the paradoxical strugglewhich gives rise to the term ‘archetypalparadox,’ the fundamental, primordial, andcontradictory forces that groups face as theystruggle for increasing consciousness.

The paradox is not something that thegroup is able to resolve on its own, despite itsstruggle to find meaning; therefore, a focalperson often emerges during this stage andhelps crystallise and bring clarity to thesystem’s own feelings toward the archetype.As an example, a group working in a domi-nant culture of patriarchy may be uncon-sciously struggling to give expression to itsfeminine side, as symbolised by the GreatMother. The members are not consciouslyaware of this struggle, which may surface for

them in the person of the scapegoat (in thiscase a man) with a dominant feminine trait(anima). At first, the group memberssuppress the softness, compassion, andtouchy-feely demeanor of the scapegoat. Inthe act of suppression, they may be denyingtheir own feminine side and the relationshipthat they hold with their wives and mothers.

The more the group members try tofocus their attention away from the arche-type of the Great Mother, the greater thedialectical tension that exists in the systembetween the mother and the father. Untilthe group is able to internalise the feelingthat the father too can have a good and badside, and possibly find a way to hold thepatriarchy and matriarchy together, thescapegoat will continue to play a pivotal rolein the group’s struggle for identity. As aresult of the scapegoat’s behaviour, themembers are more able to mobilise theirefforts in the direction of the archetypalparadox. Without the focal person present,the group can potentially remain direction-less and undifferentiated.

Viewed through the psychodynamic lensof collective ‘projective identification’ thefocal person (scapegoat) can also be seen asa repository for the system’s collectiveprojections; feelings, emotions, and affectthat are painful to hold together and there-fore unconsciously stuffed into the scape-goat, who seems to have a hook on which thegroup members can hang their collectiveprojections. In doing so, the group is moreable to identify with and talk about their feel-ings. In our situation, the group might stuffthe denied feelings of motherhood into thescapegoat who already has a valency formatriarchy and is able to contain those feel-ings for the group, but not without a greatdeal of virulent anxiety, emotionality, andpossibly even conflict. If the scapegoatsuccumbs under this pressure, the groupmay seriously regress and even implode. Thefocal person must therefore have a certaindegree of congruency between her ownemotional needs and those felt, but deniedby the group.


Anil Behal

In summary then, the focal person musthave a propensity for representing the uncon-scious concerns of the social and culturalsystems, the ability to critique/reframe thepresent order, and add a powerful voice forchange and transformation.

I want to briefly dedicate the finalsegment of this paper to three freestanding,but not necessarily unrelated theoreticalconstructs that are a gift to us from the fieldof psychodynamics. These are particularlygermane to a deeper understanding of theparadoxes and tensions that exist in groups,especially those that are self-analytic innature, with no well-defined structure orprimary task other than for members toexamine their own processes.

The dependent group and hatred oflearning by experience Bion (1961) writes, ‘The problem of a leaderseems to be how to mobilise emotions associatedwith the basic assumptions without endangeringthe sophisticated structure that appears to secure tothe individual his freedom to be an individualwhile remaining a member of the group.’

Dependency groups often find them-selves in the midst of an archetypal paradoxand therefore often give rise to a focalperson, who may or may not be the groupmoderator. The discomfort of being in sucha group, Bion (1961) writes, ‘Is that they ariseprecisely from the nature of group itself, and thispoint should always be demonstrated.’

Such groups are gripped by a sense offear and paranoia (persecutory anxiety) andthe group structures itself such that it canavoid an emotional experience peculiar tobasic assumptions pairing and flight/flight.Members abdicate their personal authorityand responsibility, with a feeling that thegroup leader will take care of their needs.Working on your ‘self’ involves a form oflearning which a dependency group seemsto avoid. The group members seem to have atendency to focus their attention away fromfeelings and emotions to intellectualisingand theorising (a defense mechanism).

The focal member (scapegoat) emergesin such groups to remind members of theirown need for autonomy. This may take theform of challenging an autocratic and highlydirective leader to allow space in the groupfor members to do their work. Membersresent the scapegoat because the individualcalls attention to something that they findunpleasant. It takes them out of theircomfort zones. The leader may also secretlyresent the focal person because she may notbe unconsciously ready or willing to give upcontrol to that person.

Formation of social defenses in groupsand institutionsGibbard (1978) discuss how groups andinstitutions are used by the their members toreinforce individual mechanisms of defenseagainst anxiety, and in particular againstrecurrence of the early paranoid and depres-sive anxieties first described by Klein. Inhighly bureaucratic social systems, includingsmall groups, the archetypal paradoxdevelops as a result of the enormous tensionbetween the paranoid schizoid and depres-sive states (see Klein). The balance thusstruck as a result of dialectical tension,contributes to the formation of ‘socialdefenses.’ It is beyond the scope of thispaper to go into an in-depth exploration ofsocial defenses; however, I introduce theconcept here to further explicate howgroups unconsciously collude to defendagainst the anxiety that may stem from thetension between the gratification and frus-tration of libidinal impulses. When theseimpulses do not find expression, they aresublimated to other pursuits.

The Anti-Group: Destructive forces andtheir creative potentialIt is to the credit of Nitsun (1996) for devel-oping the construct pertaining to the pres-ence of destructive forces in groups and howtheir creative potential may be deployed andharnessed. In groups undergoing a lot ofturmoil for instance, more active interven-tion by the group conductor is generally



called for. The conflict and anxiety in suchgroups is thought of as something that needsto be eliminated or fixed. This can be a tech-nical error on the part of a moderator. Anastute moderator will choose not to inter-vene prematurely because she knows that theexpression of hostility is perhaps one of themost important vehicles in groups that areundergoing change and transformation. It isto be seen as hope rather than despair, anopportunity for venting out anger and frus-tration, which are often followed, by forgive-ness and reparation.

The paradox faced by the group moder-ator is to allow members to fight and annihi-late each other or use her authority tointervene and do damage control. Themembers too face a paradox of their own.Should they engage in the fight, withdrawfrom it or take a neutral position? The ‘lifeand death instincts’ are very often mobilisedin such groups and conjure up archetypalimages of the gladiator, executioner, saviour,messiah, and peacemaker. The hostility andaggression in the group, if left unmanaged,can disintegrate the group. On the otherhand, if managed too quickly, it can destroyany opportunities for closeness and intimacyto develop. After all, aggression and hostilitydo serve a defensive function, a defenseagainst the anxiety of exposure and intimacywith peers. Experienced group moderatorsknow the value of ‘containment’. To theextent that they are able to contain the anxieties that are projected onto them bymembers, the group is able to work with its own.

I would like to close here by stating thatself-analytic groups can be important vehi-cles for individual and group transformationif one has the capacity to hold and work withdifferences without prematurely succumbingto the need for resolution. The work is by nomeans easy and should not be undertaken bysomeone who is not aware of her own coun-tertransference. There are plenty of othersettings more conducive to our tempera-ment and disposition that can provideequally worthwhile opportunities forlearning and transformation.

Dr Anil BehalDr Behal holds a PhD in Human and Organ-isational Development and a Master’s degreein Human and Organisational Systems fromthe Fielding Graduate University, California,USA. His areas of expertise include appliedcommunication theory, phenomenology,and the psychodynamics of organisations.He is the managing director and founder ofORGDYNE Training and Consulting, LLC(http://www.orgdyne.com).

CorrespondenceEmail: [email protected]


Anil Behal

Beck, A.P. (1974). Phases in the development ofstructure in therapy and encounter groups. In D.A. Wexler & L.N. Rice (Eds.), Innovations inclient-centred therapy.New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in groups. New York:Routledge.

Boyd, R.D. (1991). Personal transformations in smallgroups. New York: Routledge.

Brueggemann, W. (1978). The prophetic imagination.Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press

Christ, C.P. (1989). Symbols of goddess and god infeminist theology. In C. Colson (Ed.), The book ofgoddess past and present: An introduction to herreligion. New York: Crossroad.

Colman, A.D. (1995). Up from scapegoating: Awakeningconsciousness in groups. Wilmette, IL: ChironPublications.

Dirkx, J.M. (1987). The self-analytical group and the greatmother. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dirkx, J.M. (1991). Understanding group transforma-tion through the focal person concept. In R. Boyd(Ed.). Personal transformations in small groups.New York: Routledge

Dunphy, D.C. (1974). Phases, roles, and myths in self-analytic groups. In G.S. Gibbard (Ed.), Analysis ofgroups. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Eagle, J. & Newton, P.M. (1981). Scapegoating insmall groups: An organisational approach, HumanRelations, 34, 283–301.

Erickson, E.H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York:W.W. Norton & Co.

Gemmill, G. & Kraus, G. (1988). Dynamics of covertrole analysis: Small groups. Small Group Behavior,19, 299–311.

Gibbard, G.S. (1978). Social systems as a defenceagainst persecutory and depressive anxiety. In G. Gibbard, J. Hartman & R. Mann (Eds.),Analysis of groups. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hartman, J. & Gibbard, G. (1974). Anxiety, boundaryevolution, and social change. In G. Gibbard, J. Hartman & R. Mann (Eds.), Analysis of groups.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Neumann, E. (1954). The origins and history ofconsciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.

Nitsun, M. (1996). The anti-group. New York:Routledge.

Redl, F. (1942). Group emotion and leadership.Psychiatry, 5, 573–596

Smith, K.K. & Berg, D.N. (1987). Paradoxes of group life.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Toker, E. (1972). The scapegoat as an essential groupphenomenon, International Journal of GroupPsychotherapy, 22, 320–331.

Weber, M. (1946). The sociology of charismaticauthority. In H.H. Gerth & C.W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York:Oxford University Press.



References

Ahonen, H. & Mongillo Desideri, A. (2014).Heroines’ journey – emerging story byrefugee women during group analytic musictherapy. Voices: A World Forum for MusicTherapy, 14(1), 1504–1611.There has been some evidence of the bene-fits of participating in group analytic musictherapy with traumatised people. This pilotclinical project investigates the impact of acombination of narrative therapy and groupanalytic music therapy on refugee/newcomer women in Canada. An ongoingtherapy group met for a period of eightsessions, to share stories and feelings of pastexperiences and of resettlement. The focusof this group was emotional expression(verbal and musical). Musical listening,improvisation, art, writing, clay-work, andrelaxation techniques were used. Severalconsistent themes re-emerged, includingfeelings around loneliness, fear guilt, andloss. The analysis of the therapy processshowed many commonalities among thesewomen and the process they were goingthrough to deal with their feelings.

Ashuach, S. (2012). Am I my brother’skeeper? The analytic group as a space for re-enacting and treating sibling trauma.Group Analysis, 45(2), 155–167.The thesis of this article, is that the analyticgroup is a place for a reliving and re-enact-ment of sibling relations. Psychoanalytic andgroup analytic writings about the issue ofsiblings will be surveyed. Juliet Mitchell’stheory of ‘sibling trauma’ and how it isreflected in the group analytic group will bebriefly presented. It will be argued that thegroup is a place in which ‘sibling trauma’ isre-enacted and can effectively be treated. Mythesis will be supported with clinicalexamples.

Balsam, R.H. (2013). Sibling interaction. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 67, 35–36.Sibling interactions traditionally wereconceived psychoanalytically in ‘vertical’ andparentified oedipal terms and overlooked intheir own right, for complicated reasons.Important work has been done to right this,from the 1980s and onward, with confer-ences and writings. Juliet Mitchell’s 2000and, in particular, her 2003 books, forexample, have brought ‘lateral’ sibling rela-tions forcefully to the forefront of insights,especially about sex and violence, with theadded interdisciplinary impact of illumi-nating upheaval in global community inter-actions as well as having implications forclinicians.

A clinical example from the analysis of anadult woman with a 10 years younger sisterwill show here how we need both concepts tohelp us understand complex individualpsychic life. The newer ‘lateral’ siblingemphasis, including Mitchell’s ‘Law of theMother’ and ‘seriality’, can be used toinform the older ‘vertical’ take, to enrich thefull dimensions of intersubjective oedipaland preoedipal reciprocities that have beenfoundational in shaping that particularanalysand’s inner landscape. Some technicalrecommendations for heightening sensitivityto the import of these dynamics will beoffered along the way here, by invokingHans Loewald’s useful metaphor of theanalytic situation as theatre.

Dieckmann, H (1997). Fairy-tales inpsychotherapy. The Journal of AnalyticalPsychology, 42(2), 253–268.Fairy-tales, like mythologies, can be found allover the world containing the same motifand chains of motifs. In this paper I havepresented some theories on the occurrenceof this archetypal phenomenon ranging


Citations and abstracts from other journalsTerry Birchmore

from the old migration theory to Sheldrake’stheory of morphogenetic fields. I have thentried to show how fairy-tale-motifs canappear in various ways in analytical therapy,often in hidden forms. We find them inpatients’ dreams as well as in their fantasiesand associations. If the therapist is open tothem they will also appear in his or heramplifications. He or she might then takenote of the fairy-tale or point it out to thepatient; in the latter case it might providebetter access to the patient’s problems andcomplexes as fairy-tales have an emotionalcompleteness because of their pictorial char-acter. Finally I have described the favouritefairy-tale of one of my patients and related itto his symptoms, his central complex and hispersonal ways of experiencing and behaving.This survey of how fairy-tales can be used intherapy with children and with adults farfrom exhaustive.

Edward, J. (2013). Sibling discord: A forcefor growth and conflict. Clinical Social WorkJournal, 41(1), 77–83.Drawing on research findings and clinicalexperience, this paper considers the contri-butions that sibling envy, jealousy, andrivalry can make to healthy development aswell as the way in which sibling discord maycompromise development and in some caseslead to pathology. An account of the treat-ment of a depressed and anxious woman,Marcia, whose pain and rage at beingdisplaced by her four years younger brothercontributed to her pathology, is offered.Through attention to sibling transferences,countertransferences, and the enactmentsthat occurred during the treatment, thepaper demonstrates how an individual maymisperceive and misrespond to her childrenas well as her therapist as if they were asibling rival or the mother who they experi-enced as rejecting them in favour of abrother or sister. The paper attests to theimportance of recognising siblings aspersons in their own right who hold animportant place in each other’s minds,rather than as simply displacement objects

for parents, as they were often regarded inthe past.

Freeman, M. (2007). Psychoanalysis, narra-tive psychology, and the meaning of‘science’. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 27(5),583–601.Drawing especially on an important essay byMartin Heidegger, entitled ‘Science andReflection’ (1977), this article argues thatcase reports can, and should, be written forscientific use. This issue was brought to thefore early on in Freud’s career, upon his real-isation that his own case studies read likeshort stories and that they lacked ‘the seriousstamp of science.’ Consoled by the fact that‘the nature of the subject’ was responsiblefor this and that more traditional scientificprocedures ‘[led] nowhere,’ he wouldcontinue with such writing and, through it,continue to fashion and refashion psychoan-alytic theory. Freud, therefore, arrived atsomething of a paradox: even though bytraditional standards-including, on somelevel, his own-his case studies seemed ques-tionable in regard to their scientific utility, itwas precisely these studies that yielded thedesired insight. Knowingly or not, Freudabided by what is, arguably, the first andmost fundamental responsibility of the scien-tific enterprise: fidelity to the phenomena.Given the clear and obvious value of casereports, it follows that the meaning of‘science,’ as customarily conceived, is prob-lematically restrictive and that it ought to bereconceived in such a way as to include,rather than exclude, the kinds of literarypursuits that psychoanalysts and narrativepsychologists more generally have found tobe so central to their efforts to understandand explain the movement of human lives.

Freud, A. & Dann, S. (1951). An experimentin group upbringing. Psychoanalytic Study ofthe Child, 6, 127–168.The behaviour of the six children in thisstudy confounded all expectations; rescuedfrom the Tereszin concentration camp bythe Russians and sent to England with other


Citations and abstracts from other journals

rescued children, they were destined to befostered in the US but funding was providedfrom the US for a year’s rehabilitation in theUK. Accommodation in England was loanedto the project and the staff were drawn fromthe Hampstead Nursery run by Anna Freudand the English reception camp to which thechildren had been sent. Thanks to the dedi-cation of the staff and the careful recordingof the children’s behaviour, we have aunique account of development in theabsence of adult attachment and recoveryfrom severe deprivation.

Giannini, A.J. (2001). Use of fiction intherapy. Psychiatric Times, July, 2001.Article available online at this address:http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/use-fiction-therapy

Jennings, L. et al. (2003). Multiple factors inthe development of the expert counsellorand therapist. Journal of Career Development,30(1), 59–72.Expertise in counselling and therapy is bothdesirable and elusive. Increasing our knowl-edge about expertise in counseling andtherapy enhances understanding of the roleit plays in our profession. This under-standing has the potential to improve thetraining of counsellors and therapists. Yetexpertise in counseling and therapy appearsto be a multifaceted and dynamic conceptneeding further definition and description.In this article, we outline challenges facedtrying to describe expertise in counselingand therapy and present research-basedfactors that contribute to developingexpertise in counselling and therapy. Impor-tant factors include: experience, personalcharacteristics of the counsellor and thera-pist, cultural competence, and comfort withambiguity.

Nauta, R. (2009). Cain and Abel: Violence,shame and jealousy. Pastoral Psychology,58(1), 65–71.In discussing the murder of Abel by hisbrother Cain the dynamics of shame and

guilt are explored. An analysis of the psycho-logical drama, more than the brutal factitself, may help to understand the conse-quences of negation and love for thecontemporary occurrences of familyviolence. In exploring the separate positionsof Cain and Abel the differential effects andconsequences of jealousy and envy areanalysed as well.

Richert, A.J. (2006). Narrative psychologyand psychotherapy integration. Journal ofPsychotherapy Integration, 16(1), 84–110.Bruner (1986) and Sarbin (1986) haveargued that people make sense of living byactively constructing stories containing char-acters moving toward goals through time.Both content and structure in these narra-tives are understood as promoting eitherflexible, adaptive functioning or psycho-logical distress. Theories of psychotherapycan also be seen as stories about humanfunction and dysfunction that incorporatemany of the same ideas about reality, humannature and change that are found in clients’personal narratives. This narrative perspec-tive, then, suggests that the therapeuticalliance might be improved and an integra-tive use of different theories might be madeby selecting therapeutic approaches andinterventions based on the degree of simi-larity between the nature of the client’s lifestory and the story of human functioningincorporated in the theory. A classificationof theories, examples of classification ofclient stories and some issues of implemen-tation of this integrative proposal arediscussed.

Rogers, R. (2012). Storied selves: A criticaldiscourse analysis of young children’sliterate identifications. Journal of Early Child-hood Literacy, 12(3), 259–292.A wealth of research demonstrates that asyoung children acquire literacy they alsoapproximate literate roles and relationships.Such literate identifications, or storiedselves, are complex, sometimes contradic-tory and under construction for young


Terry Birchmore

people. Less research has focused on howyoung children’s storied selves are discur-sively constituted across domains of practice.Given this gap in the literature, we ask: Howdo young children author themselves asliterate in the domains of school and home?What social languages, cultural models,discourses, relationships and situated identi-ties do they enact? To answer these ques-tions, we drew on interviews conducted withfirst and second grade students who partici-pated in a literacy clinic at an urban schoolsite. The children were asked to report ontheir literacy lives in different domains ofpractice. Using the tools of critical discourseanalysis, we examined the discursivecontours of children’s literate identities indifferent domains. Through cross-caseanalyses and ‘telling cases’, our findingssuggest that young children call on a hybridmix of discourse patterns to author them-selves as literate beings. The students remainpositive and enthusiastic about reading andthemselves as readers, despite needing addi-tional literacy support. However, the exis-tence of alignment and conflict between thediscourses of the home and school domainscreates reasons for attending to students’literate identities in closer detail.

Rønnestad, M.H. & Skovholt, T.M. (2003).The journey of the counsellor and therapist:Research findings and perspectives onprofessional development. Journal of CareerDevelopment, 30, 5–44.This article summarises a reformulation ofthe main findings and perspectives from across-sectional and longitudinal qualitativestudy of the development of 100 counsellorsand therapists. The results are presented as aphase model and as a formulation of 14themes of counsellor/therapist develop-ment.

The following six phases are described:The phases of the lay helper, the beginningstudent, the advanced student, the noviceprofessional, the experienced professional,and the senior professional. The themesdescribe central processes of counsellor/

therapist development. The themes areaddressing different issues such as shifts inattentional focus and emotional functioning,the importance of continuous reflection for professional growth, and a lifelongpersonal/profession integration process.Sources of influence for professional func-tioning and development are described. Theresults show consistently that interpersonalexperiences in the personal life domain(early family life and adult personal life) andthe professional life domain (interactingwith clients, professional elders, and peers)are significant sources of influence forprofessional development.

Rustin, M. (2009). Taking account ofsiblings – a view from child psychotherapy 1.Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 33(1), 21–35.This paper argues that siblinghood has hadan important place in child psychotherapythinking for many decades. Both psychoana-lytic observation of young children andclinical experience have contributed to this.It discusses some reasons for the renewedinterest in siblings in the wider psychoana-lytic field and emphasises the existentialthreat to identity posed by the birth of a newbaby to the displaced child in the family. Therole of siblings as friends as well as rivals isexplored and a link is proposed between thedevelopment of symbolic thinking and thecapacity to give space to siblings in the innerworld.

Segun, O.D. (2013). The interface of litera-ture and psychotherapy. IFE Psychologia,21(3), 121–127.The connection between literature andpsychotherapy has received wide criticalattention in the past but the eclectic natureof their interdependence and the need for apsychotherapist to acquire literary skill hasnot been adequately established. This studyestablishes the need to include literature inthe training of a psychotherapist by delvinginto an exploration of the multifarious influ-ence of literature on psychotherapy and viceversa. This is in order to project the healing


Citations and abstracts from other journals

virtues of literary creativity and its significantimpact on the psychological practices of thepsychotherapist. Sociological approach isused to explore the relationship between thepsychotherapist and his patient in this study.It provides a framework for the explanationof the operation of human mind and howliterature and psychotherapy have handledits manifestations. An eclectic analysis isdeployed to explore and establish the useful-ness of literature to psychotherapy. Thisstudy is a comment on the humanity ofpsychotherapy as a bi-dimensional practicethat must be unified in order to achieveeffectiveness and efficiency. The interface ofliterature and psychotherapy projects asymbiotic interdependence. Literature aidsthe performance of psychotherapy in diverseways and psychotherapy provides thecreative artist with material and inspirationfor the depiction of the state of mentalhealth care. Psychotherapy professionalshave moved from the status of quacks toheroes but the true test of their education incontemporary time as all times will be theirability to provide humane care. The literaiyintervention in psychotherapy cannot berelegated; it is the centrepiece for the meas-urement of the effectiveness of the profes-sion. We have been able to explore theeclectic interdependence of literature andpsychotherapy. A consciousness of the rele-vance of these two fields to each other willhelp future scholarly endeavour and psychi-atric practices, whether formally or infor-mally.

Wilke, G. (1998). Oedipal and siblingdynamics in organisations. Group Analysis,31(3), 269–281.In a context of rapid change, outbreaks ofsibling rivalry in organisations act as adefence against the inability to mourn andfeel remorse. When changes are imposed onwork-teams, sibling preoccupations surfaceto prevent the working through of the break-down of relations between the institutionalparents and their dependants. Siblings alsoadopt envy-preventing strategies, engagingin collective self-idealisation by formingsisterhoods or brotherhoods to protectthemselves from disillusionment and individ-uation. Each succeeding generation has toface the fact that a primus inter pares willhave to be chosen to inherit the mantle ofpower from the parental generation andrestore the world to its ‘normal’ state ofinequality. In the context of recent structuralchanges in organisations the new managershave acted like borderline parents andfostered sibling rivalry. This dynamic hasfunctioned to deny the guilt and the fear ofretaliation associated with fratricide andmatricide committed during the ‘re-engi-neering’ process, when the youngsters senttheir parents into early retirement. I want toexplore the central importance of authority,disillusionment and mourning and showthat the outbreak and suppression of siblingrivalry is connected with the problem of tran-sition and succession in organisations.


Terry Birchmore

A Guide to Treatments That WorkPeter E. Nathan & Jack M. Gorman (Eds.)Oxford University Press, 2015.

Phenomenology in Action in PsychotherapyIan Rory OwenSpringer, 2015.

Psychotherapy: A Very Short Introduction.Tom BurnsOxford University Press, 2015.

Beyond the Anti-Group: Survival and transformationMorris NitsunRoutledge, 2015.

Please contact Terry Birchmore ([email protected]) if you would like toreview any of these books.

Guidelines for book reviews1. Please include, at the beginning of the

review, in plain text: The title, author,city of publication, publisher, year ofpublication, number of pages, price,ISBN.

2. You may like to start the review with abrief overall description of the book.

3. You may like to consider:l An introduction to the subject

matter.l A discussion of contents.l The strengths and weaknesses of

the book.l Comments on author's style and

presentation.l Whether the author's aims have

been met.l Errors (typographical or other)

and usefulness of index.l Is it worth purchasing or

recommending to a library?


Books available for reviewTerry Birchmore

The titles listed below are currently available for reviewing. There is no fee for carrying out areview, but the reviewer may retain the book.


Current Committee Membership, 2015

Chair (Co-opted): Ho LawTreasurer: Neringa KislerSecretary: (Co-opted) Zara RahemtullaEditor of Psychotherapy Section Review: Terry Birchmore

Ordinary Members (Co-opted): Steven HeighamPeter KellyErica Brostoff

Student Representative (PsyPAG): Abbie Darlington

Professional biographies of Committee MembersDr Ho LawBSc (Hons, Worcester College, 1985), BA (Hons, Open, 1990) PhD (Leicester University,2000) Post Grad. Cert. (Intercultural therapy, Goldsmith, 2004), Post Grad. Cert. (Learning &Teaching in Higher Education, UEL, 2010). C. Psychol (1991–). C.Occ.Psy (1999–).Ho Law has been actively engaged in the working of the BPS via various Member NetworkCommittees for more than 15 years – some highlights include being the vice chair of theStanding Committee of Promotion of Equal Opportunity in 2001; founding member andChair (2010) of the Special Group in Coaching Psychology; founder Committee member andtreasurer of the Community Psychology Section. For the Psychotherapy Section, Ho was theSection’s Treasurer in 2007 for five years before he became the Chair of the Section in 2014with aspirations to make psychotherapy more relevant in meeting the challenges we face withinthe society and the wider community. Ho is also a member of the Transpersonal PsychologySection; and a member of Divisions of Occupational Psychology, Counselling Psychology andSport & Exercise Psychology (founder member).

Ho is a Registered Psychologist, Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Chartered Scientist,and an Associate Fellow of the Society. He has more than 25 years’ experience in private prac-tices and central government – was one of the first equality advisors to the Assistant PermanentUnder Secretary of State in the Home Office. Currently, Ho is a Senior Lecturer at the Univer-sity of East London and the Director of Empowerment Psychology (Empsy Ltd). Ho’s interestin psychotherapy is rooted in his longstanding engagement in the business of empowermentin the areas of implementing the government diversity agenda, the community arts and theprofessional practice in personal development and inter-cultural therapy. He receivednumerous outstanding achievement awards including: Local Promoters for Cultural DiversityProject (2003); Positive Image (2004); the first Student Led Teaching Award – Best Supervisor(UEL 2013); and was a nominee for the Division of Occupational Psychology’s AcademicContribution to Practice Award in 2014.



Neringa KislerAn Integrated Psychotherapist with experience of working with adult individuals and couples,working in an Independent Practice in the UK. Working with people with variety of issues,however her main interests are in human development, relationships/attachments, eatingdisorders and addictions. Neringa has achieved a BSc in Human Psychology and holds anAdvanced Diploma in Integrated Counselling and Psychotherapy as well as clinicalhypnotherapy. Neringa is a graduate member of the BPS since 2007, and an active committeemember of the BPS Psychotherapy Section since 2013.

Zara RahemtullaCurrently in my second year of the Clinical Psychology Doctorate at the University of Essex. My previous clinical experience has mostly revolved around working with vulnerable youngpeople and their families, within a drug and alcohol setting. I have completed a Diploma inSystemic Family Therapy and I still have interests in this area, as my DClinPsy Thesis will beinvestigating childhood sibling bullying and its’ potential effects on adult identity develop-ment.

I have more recently been interested in more transpersonal psychology, compassionfocussed therapy and mindfulness practise. In more general terms, I am very interested in thefunction of bodily experiences and accessing bodily memories within psychotherapy to helpwith processing certain types of distress.

Terry BirchmoreI worked in the NHS as a Clinical Psychologist for 35 years before I retired at the end of 2013.I qualified as a Group Analyst in the mid-1990s. I currently teach on the Psychoanalytic Obser-vational Studies Course in Newcastle and I teach ethics, professional development and grouptherapy on the Teeside Clinical Psychology Training Course. I also conduct a weekly experi-ential group on the Institute of Group Analysis Foundation Course in Sunderland. I editedGroup Analytic Contexts for the Group Analytic Society, International, for eight years before I retired from that position in December 2014. I have been a member of the PsychotherapySection since 1985.

Steve HeighamBed; Bsc (Hons) Psychology; Msc Evolutionary Psychology; Postgrad adv Dip Integrative Psychotherapy.Originally I trained as a teacher, and spent 20 years in Special schools and special needs depart-ments in mainstream school, working a lot with disturbed teenagers and students with learningdifficulties. This background in applied psychology led me to develop a greater interest in thesubject which I then went on to study with the Open University, where my interest in cognitiveand evolutionary psychology was first sparked.

I went on to teach various different aspects of psychology in further education, and trainedin Integrative psychotherapy at the Iron Mill Institute. As part of this training I became a volun-teer counsellor at Help counselling which I still maintain, as it gives a good balance to myworking life, alongside teaching and private practice.

Having been involved in partnership work with local government some years ago, I becameinterested in diagnosis and classification of mental health disorders, and how they are treatedin the public domain. I have continued this interest, particularly in relating this to crosscultural psychology, and I now teach these topics alonside my role as first year tutor on thefoundation degree course at Weston College.

Most recently I have had the opportunity to follow up my passion and studied a taughtMaster’s course in Evolutionary Psychology at Brunel university, finishing with a dissertationinvestigating the relationship between empathy and self-awareness, which is still ongoing. I amsteadily integrating this into my therapeutic work, and into my teaching and freelance trainingwork.

Peter KellyI joined the BPS in the early 1980s, and I am currently an Associate Fellow (in addition toenjoying Chartered status both as a Psychologist and a Scientist). I am a member of the Divi-sion of Educational and Child Psychology, the Psychotherapy Section, the Group for Inde-pendent Psychologists, and I am a BPS Registered Applied Psychology Practice Supervisor.

I worked for many years as a Developmental and Educational Psychologist based in ChildGuidance Clinics/Child and Family Consultation Services, and in various Local Authorityoffices in East Anglia, although I am currently employed in private practice based in southLondon.

Erica Brostoff, MScErica worked for a period on a fixed term contract at Guy’s Hospital, Psychiatric Department.She was employed as a psychologist and researcher as assistant to Consultant Psychotherapist,Dr Tony Ryle. The project tracked patients who were in a pilot trial of 16 and eight sessions ofCognitive Analytic Therapy. Subsequently she was Research Associate and first author of an ECstudy of telemedicine, involving video consultations between psychiatrists and patients at sepa-rate venues within the Guy’s and Lewisham hospital group.

She belonged to the Society for Psychotherapy Research and proposed an annual prize forpublishable articles on ethics, which was liked but not actioned at that time. This was beforethe importance of attachment was understood, and she had become aware of some marginallyethical practices in private psychotherapy practice.

She previously worked in three leading advertising agencies as researcher concerned withinterpreting and conducting studies based on qualitative interviewing. Currently she is regis-tered for an MPhil at the University of Greenwich Psychology and Counselling Department on‘The Psychology of Premonitions’. This combines psychotherapy, psychoanalytic and psycho-logical concepts, using qualitative interviews. She has given a paper on this topic to an ImageryConference hosted by the BPS some years ago and to a recent postgraduate seminar at theLondon and Home Counties Section, in the BPS London office. She believes that working withboth psychiatrists and psychotherapists as both colleague and client, has given her a fairly wideperspective on issues important to both clients and therapists.

Abbie DarlingtonBsc Psychology, Bangor University, Master’s student of Foundations of Clinical Psychology.Abbie has been a BPS student member since October 2010, completing a BPS accreditedundergraduate degree at Bangor University. Since becoming a postgraduate student atBangor, Abbie has become involved with PsyPAG as the Psychotherapy section representative.Abbie is currently undertaking a Master’s degree in the Foundations of Clinical Psychology atBangor University. Research to date includes progressive relaxation training in treatment ofanxiety, and the effects of alcohol attentional bias on memory recall in social drinkers.



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‘Easy to access and free, and a mine of useful information for my work: what more could I want? I only wish I’d found this years ago!’Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry

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© The British Psychological Society 2015Incorporated by Royal Charter Registered Charity No 229642

1 Letter from the EditorTerry Birchmore

2 Letter from the ChairHo Law

3 Looking ahead at future plans for CPDSteve Heigham

5 Obituary:David Smail: Exponent of a social-materialist psychology and clinical psychology's VoltaireThe Midlands Psychology Group, with Julia Faulconbridge & Jim Meikle

9 Changing the Self: The affective plot in literary narratives David Smail

18 The fictional nature of introspection Simon King-Spooner

26 Siblings: An explorationShort reviews of a Psychotherapy Section WorkshopTerry Birchmore, Erica Brostoff, Zara Rahemtulla & Steve Heigham

30 Listen to the Group! Group music therapy – a part of the music therapy students’ trainingat Aalborg UniversityCharlotte Lindvang

34 Negative capability: A phenomenological study of lived experiences at the edge ofcertitude and incertitude Anil Behal

50 The language of resistance in a counselling group: Dynamics of authority and power Phey Ling Kit, Shyh Shin Wong, Vilma D’Rozario & Rhodas Myra Bacsal

Individual transformations in groups: The role of focal person in periods of archetypal paradoxesAnil Behal

72 Citations and abstracts from other journals Terry Birchmore

77 Books available for reviewTerry Birchmore

78 Current Committee Membership, 2015

Contents

Documents

Psychotherapy Section Review - Orgdyne Training and ... · H ELLO AGAIN ! Welcome to the Spring 2015 edition of the Psychotherapy Section Review.You may be surprised to read this