This paper argues that productive and co-operative thinking best happens in the context of spatial, rather than linear relations. The latter is characterized by illusions of merger and polarity, the former by a capacity to tolerate similarity and difference. This capacity is manifested in the activity of ‘bearing witness’; an activity vital to the mature psychological development of the individual and the development and maintenance of a just society. The author seeks to develop Foulkes’s ‘model of three’ with insights gained from contemporary group-analytic and post-Kleinian thinking. The paper concludes that the witness, in bearing and being the bearer of difference, is key in the development of a mature, thinking group.
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