Existential group training june 2010

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EXISTENTIAL GROUP TRAINING

Digby Tantam Deputy Director, former NSPC Clinical Professor of Psychotherapy, University of Sheffield Jackie Lewis

Existential group training, June 2010

10-10.45 Theory 10.45-11.30 Exercise 12-12.45 Skills training 12.45-1 Feedback 14-14.45 Theory 14.45-15.30 Exercise 16-16.45 Skills training 16.45-17 Feedback


Why isn’t Emmy here? Where has NSPC gone? What will happen next term/ year? .



Why isn’t Emmy here? Where has NSPC gone? What will happen next term/ year?

There are 10 skills training sessions, and 16 of us: how do these fit together.

The skills training will be to co-conduct a group experience

I will conduct the first, Jackie Lewis, the last.


UMWELT: THE WORLD, THE ENVIRONMENT Experienced differently as a result of different perceptions (von Uexkull) or ‘Erschlossenheit or disclosure Experience via knowing ‘Verklärung”’ of Dilthey: present-at-hand or Vorhandenheit Afforded experience (J J Gibson): the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit)

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Existential group training, June 2010 www.existentialacademy.com 6

MITSEIN

In section 26 of Being and Time Heidegger states: "By reason of this with-like being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is being-with [Mitsein] others. Their being-in-themselves within-the-world is Dasein-with [Mitdasein]" (Macquarrie and Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962. p. 155,

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BOTH FACT

Sulphur bacteria taken from the sea bed Aarhus

Slime mould Physarum polycephalum metamorphosing in response to starvation to from plasmodium to sporangiophore in response to starvation

Hunyuan hanging temple, Mt. Hengshan, Shanxi

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Avatar, 2010, dir. James Cameron

RESONANCE

Thrown into Mitsein, finding there ‘Befindlichkeit’ a kind of Stimmung or attunement (more like resonance), a ‘mood’

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Tallinn Dimensions of personal world view in existential individual and group therapy 15

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(Outside) threat vs. security

Derived from the three dimensions of R. Freed Bales

Where is therapeutic group?


Structural dimensions and the three dimensions of R. Freed Bales

Open vs closed,

leader-centered vs.

permissive

EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE Consciousness

Individual (pour soi) or role (pour autrui)?

Intersubjectivity Fusion or aloneness

Absurdity Meaning taken from others or

created anew with others Inescapable social emotions (nausea) Lust, belongingness, shame, disgust, anxiety

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SARTRE: ETRE POUR-SOI Hegel Fürsich


EN-SOI Hegel: Ansich

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Focussing on groups today So we leave out the ‘intrapersonal’ and focus on the ‘interpersonal’

THE LOOK “…let us imagine that moved by

jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through the keyhole”, somewhat unrealistically given the difficulties of both putting one’s eye and one’s ear to a door, “….But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me… I shudder as a wave of shame sweeps over me” (B & N pp260-277).

Inaugural existential conference Doing to Being, Sydney

THE LOOK Feeling the look on one’s back Caught in a moment of private excitement

–  Jealousy, curiosity, vice The look is not returned The other is not a person with a particular

reaction e.g. a facial expression, but the Other, a totalization

The name of the father, the Master, the State, authority, grandfather Schweitzer


ETRE POUR AUTRUI: BEING FOR OTHERS “..I persevere in it [in looking through the key-hole],

I shall feel my heart beat fast, at the slightest creaking of the stairs. Far from disappearing with my first alarm, the Other is present everywhere, below me, above me, in the neighbouring rooms, and I continue to feel profoundly my being- for-others” (B & Np.277).


POUR-AUTRUI Hegel: Für-Andere Master-slave Dominance-submission Relations of power Sadism or masochism Seriality

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FORMATIVE SOCIAL CONDITIONS

Are we at the moment in question orientating ourselves to: – A small or a large group? – A consensus or a conflicted group? – A secure or a threatened group?

Where did this experience come from?



Think about your first group. Your family perhaps

What were its formative conditions, and how has it influenced you since?

Be prepared to discuss this with the group for a few minutes

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Security Threat

Small Freedom to explore, confidence in external relations

Enmeshment

Large Porous boundaries, fluid culture

Rigid boundaries, emphasis on suppression of deviance, and on cultural and other identity

LARGE GROUPS, SERIALITY

Could be quite a small number of people who are merely associated, for example in a waiting room or, to use Sartre’s example, at a bus stop

They are a group because they share some identifying feature which might simply be that there are co-located

People in this kind of group are identified by some extrinsic characteristic: their job, their ‘role’ or part, a number


‘I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the fiends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes’.

(Sartre, 1964, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, which has the subtitle (in the English translation): the theory of practical groups).


Serial seducers: Simone de Beauvoir and lover Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writing paved the way for our Godless permissive times, lived private lives of utter depravity Read more Daily Mail, October 2008

LARGE VS. SMALL CITIZENSHIP VS. INTIMACY PRAXIS VS. PRACTICO-INERT SERIALITY VS. RECIPROCITY I-THOU VS. I-IT The eternal struggle:

Consciousness and interbrain (God vs. animal/ ontological vs. ontic/ selfish vs. altruistic/ resistance vs. transference/ Reflexive processing vs. explicit processing/ Ego vs. Id)


Bernard Mandeville, 1705. Born in Rotterdam, died of ‘flu in Hackney, London. Society prospers from vice and not virtue i.e from individualism and not mergence

Small –  Reciprocity –  Negativity counteracted by

intimacy –  Emotional loneliness –  Shared emotions –  Aggression and conflict

resolved, if they are, by forgiveness


Large Justice: Sartre’s examples of seriality Negativity contained by power or authority Social loneliness Shared tasks Aggression and conflict resolved by negotiation, avoidance or war

SARTRE’S CRITERIA OF RECIPROCITY that the Other be a means to the exact degree that

I am a means myself that I recognize the Other as praxis that I recognize his movement toward his own

ends in the very movement by which I project myself toward mine

that I discover myself as an object and instrument of his ends by the same act which makes him an object and instrument of mine


THE THIRD PARTY/MEDIATING OTHER

Linking individual and group praxis

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SARTRE ON SMALL GROUPS

The fused group – When each becomes the third party for the

other What creates the small group?

– Cooperative action – Terror management – The fear of death or annihilation


KEY IDEAS OF GROUP THERAPY HISTORY ARE

the other is a mirror… one can discover oneself through group

participation.. Based on the social relations school of psychology,

and the notion of interpersonal learning. Adherents of this position include Cooley and the

Chicago school of social relations, Jung, Sullivan, Lewin, encounter groups, and humanistic psychology.


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What is the connection between the ball and the square?

KEY IDEAS OF GROUP THERAPY HISTORY ARE the other is a mirror… one can discover oneself through group

participation.. Based on the social relations school of psychology,

and the notion of interpersonal learning. Adherents of this position include Cooley and the

Chicago school of social relations, Jung, Sullivan, Lewin, encounter groups, and humanistic psychology.


LINKS BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP

Identification



Networks (of exchange)

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Narrative

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Jacob Levy Moreno (born Iacob Levy) Born May 18, 1889 Bucharest, Romania Sephardic family: Spain, Istanbul, Bulgaria, Romania, Vienna, New York Died May 14, 1974 (aged 84) Residence New York, USA Fields Theory, education, psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis Institutions University of Vienna Known for Sociometry, Psychodrama, social

network theory


"I attended one of Freud’s lectures. He had just finished an analysis of a telepathic dream. As the students filed out, he singled me out from the crowd and asked me what I was doing. I responded, 'Well, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off. You meet people in the artificial setting of your office. I meet them on the street and in their homes, in their natural surroundings. You analyze their dreams. I give them the courage to dream again. You analyze and tear them apart. I let them act out their conflicting roles and help them to put the parts back together again.’ Jacob Moreno, Autobiography

SOCIOGRAM



‘There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth, and that in truth itself there is need of having the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth, so that (to consider for a moment the extreme case), even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd - a crowd to which any decisive significance is attributed, a voting, noisy, audible crowd - untruth would at once be in evidence’ (Kierkegaard, 1846; Dedication).


‘We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.’ On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense. Nietzsche, 1873, Nachlass, trans. W. Kaufman

INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES

Large and conflicted group: – Tribal loyalty, stereotyping, identification (cf.

Sherif and Sherif) Small and secure group

–  Identification vs. identity

THEORIES OF THE INTERACTION OF INDIVIDUALS AND SMALL GROUPS

Moreno: -- network

S H Foulkes: –  plexus and nexus (relationships outside the group, relationships

in the group) –  vertical vs. horizontal dimension (internal vs. external object) –  for conductor, analysing the individual in the group, or analysis

the group –  matrix

Lewin --- field theory


KURT LEWIN Theory of conflict and threat Protagonist of field theory Founder of of research center on Group Dynamics at MIT Developer of Bethel Institute

from which T groups developed

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LEWIN’S RESEARCH PRIORITIES AT RESEARCH CENTRE ON GROUP DYNAMICS AT MIT   "The conditions which improve the effectiveness of

community leaders who are attempting to better intergroup relations”

  "The effect of the conditions under which contact between persons from different groups takes place”

  "The influences which are most effective in producing in minority-group members and increased sense of belongingness, and improved personal adjustment, and better relations with individuals of other groups" (Marrow, 1969, p.192)


FIELD THEORY human behaviour should be seen as part of a continuum individual variations from the norm being a function of

tensions between perceptions of the self and of the environment

the whole psychological field, or "lifespace," within which the person acted had to be viewed

the totality of events in this lifespace determined behaviour at any one time. used topological systems (maplike representations) to graphically depict psychological forces


LEWIN’S CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR DIAGNOSIS

clients (individuals, groups, and organizations) become "frozen" or stuck in their current, metastable or quasi-equilibrium state.

Change requires"unfreezing" or create movement in the client system moving it towards the desired state and then

"re-freezing" the system in the new state. The new state may be determined by identification with a

person or a group, or by an individual’s response to the driving and restraining forces in the social field.


UNFREEZING METHODS   Burning platform: Expose or create a crisis.   Challenge: Inspire them to achieve remarkable things.   Command: Just tell them to move!   Evidence: Cold, hard data is difficult to ignore.   Destabilizing: Shaking people of their comfort zone.   Education: Learn them to change.   Management by Objectives (MBO): Tell people what to do, but not

how.   Restructuring: Redesign the organization to force behaviour

change.   Rites of passage: Hold a wake to help let go of the past.   Setting goals: Give them a formal objective.   Visioning: Done well, visions work to create change.   Whole-system Planning: Everyone planning together.


AGAZARIAN AND SYSTEMS CENTERED THEORY

Influence of general systems theory and Durkins Traceable back to Lewin Bit simplistic but one good idea: Siding with the sub-group

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S H (‘MICHAEL’) FOULKES Born Fuchs in Germany Studied with Goldstein, trained

as psycho-analyst Captain in charge at Northfield

during WW2 Co-founder, Institute of Group

Analysis, London Consultant Psychotherapist,

Maudsley Hospital Died conducting a group

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KEY CONCEPTS OF FOULKES Plexus and nexus Matrix Location of a problem in the group Resonance of a group theme Condenser phenomenon Dynamic administration of the conductor Interpretation by the group


A SIMPLIFYING HYPOTHESIS:!  1. anxiety, depression, and dissatisfaction stem from a

failure to make or maintain satisfactory social relationships"

  2. the failure to make or maintain social relationships is due to:" a. use of abnormal defences (Freud)" b. projective identification and splitting (Klein)" c. parataxic distortion (Sullivan)"

  3. distorted social relationships and normal group (e.g. family development) are antithetical"


“To man the world is twofold in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words. The one primary word is the combination I-Thou. The other primary word is the combination I-It wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace it” (Buber, 2003: 53)


UNADDRESSED PROBLEMS

A group may not be a microcosm of society

Society may turn on the deviant

Morality and the problem of evil

Inherent qualities of the individual, esp. shame

The fundamental opposition of individual and group

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BION’S BASIC ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GROUP TRANSFERENCE  Groups deviate from

their tasks when they become preoccupied with their own survival."

 Groups make one of three basic assumptions about surviving:" 1. To Pair" 2. To fight or flee

(flight)" 3. To submit

(dependence)


Missing members portfolioJackie Feedback exercise

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FOCAL CONFLICT THEORY (AFTER WHITAKER AND EZRIEL)!DISTURBING ! !REACTIVE !MOTIVE ! ! !MOTIVE!(Avoided ! ! !(Calamitous !relationship) ! ! !relationship)!Desire, wish, or " "Fear, guilt, or "impulse" " " "shame"

!!!!DISPLACEMENT!!(Required relationship)!

"Symptom, ambivalence, double-bind"



we are, either individuals who discover the social world (Freud), or social beings who have to learn to be individual (Jung, Foulkes)

So either being an individual or losing oneself in a group are problematized

May be a cultural dimension to this



Resistance to change is a sine qua non of being a person Resistance to change is therefore reinforced by social

factors Cf. cognitive dissonance resistance may be differently attributed to:

–  an irrational distrust of the kindliness of groups. or –  a realistic appraisal of the negative and anti-individual

forces in groups, such as shaming, jealousy, and hatred of the other.


CONDUCTOR'S ROLE UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES: TO THE GROUP ITSELF!

Selection and composition"Dynamic administration"Boundary management"Be reliable "

–  Personally"–  Time, day, place of group"

Ensure privacy and lack of distraction"Respect values of group"

–  autonomy, confidentiality"Have a palatable flavour"


CONDUCTOR'S ROLE UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES!

Use sub-groups effectively"–  Agazarian’s ‘system-centered therapy’ and exploratory rather

than rigid subgrouping "Be a culture bearer"Translate (into language and cultural symbols)"Locate and alter focus from individual to group, or vice

versa: the advantage rule"Attempt to regulate anxiety via structure/ attend to the

primary task"Attempt to regulate social involvement by switching group/

individual focus (www.ormont.org)"


LOOKING OUTSIDE GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY: TRANSFORMATIONAL (VS. TRANSACTIONAL) LEADERSHIP BASS, B. M. AND STEIDLMEIER, P. (1998). ETHICS, CHARACTER AND AUTHENTIC TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP, AT: HTTP://CLS.BINGHAMTON.EDU/BASSSTEID.HTML

Increasing their awareness of task importance and value.

Getting them to focus first on team or organizational goals, rather than their own interests.

Activating their higher-order needs. Charisma necessary, but not sufficient, for example


WHAT IS CHARISMA?

Evoking strong emotions Promoting identification of others with them


INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF ‘AUTHENTIC’ TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Individualized Consideration – the degree to which the leader attends to each follower's needs, acts as a mentor or coach to the follower and listens to the follower's concerns and needs. The leader gives empathy and support, keeps communication open and places challenges before the followers. This also encompasses the need for respect and celebrates the individual contribution that each follower can make to the team. The followers have a will and aspirations for self development and have intrinsic motivation for their tasks.

Intellectual Stimulation – the degree to which the leader challenges assumptions, takes risks and solicits followers' ideas. Leaders with this style stimulate and encourage creativity in their followers. They nurture and develop people who think independently. For such a leader, learning is a value and unexpected situations are seen as opportunities to learn. The followers ask questions, think deeply about things and figure out better ways to execute their tasks.

Inspirational Motivation –have a strong sense of purpose if they are to be motivated to act. Purpose and meaning provide the energy that drives a group forward. The visionary aspects of leadership are supported by communication skills that make the vision understandable, precise, powerful and engaging. The followers are willing to invest more effort in their tasks, they are encouraged and optimistic about the future and believe in the degree to which the leader articulates a vision that is appealing and inspiring to followers. Leaders with inspirational motivation challenge followers with high standards, communicate optimism about future goals, and provide meaning for the task at hand. Followers need to believe in their abilities.

Idealized Influence – Provides a role model for high ethical behavior, instills pride, gains respect and trust.


MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF ‘AUTHENTIC’ TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

The moral character of the leader. The ethical values embedded in the leader’s vision,

articulation, and program (which followers either embrace or reject).

The morality of the processes of social ethical choice and action that leaders and followers engage in and collectively pursue.

This is in contrast with pseudo-transformational leadership, where, for example, in-group/out-group 'us and them' games are used to bond followers to the leader.


WHAT WILL YOU REMEMBER?

What are the implications for psychotherapy? Work with a companion for 5 minute on this.


SARTRE’S CRITERIA OF RECIPROCITY

that the Other be a means to the exact degree that I am a means myself

that I recognize the Other as praxis that I recognize his movement toward his own

ends in the very movement by which I project myself toward mine

that I discover myself as an object and instrument of his ends by the same act which makes him an object and instrument of mine


CONDUCTOR'S ROLE IN A CRISIS!Consider transference and counter-transference:

falling into unreality"

Interpret"


LEADERSHIP TOWARDS THE DEFINED TASK What it’s not

–  Not fallenness •  Not therefore, idle talk •  Curiosity •  Ambiguity/ equivocation

An increase in freedom, in the free fling of the soul: may mean an increased awareness of particular being in the world—’resoluteness’

Some relation to ethical reflection, to transcendental or spiritual concerns, to well-being, to acceptance

Something that’s good to do but nice to stop, like listening to Bruckner


Technology

Existential group training june 2010