‘Defacing the Currency?’: A Group-Analytic Appreciation of Homelessness,Dangerousness,Disorder and Other Inarticulate Speech of the Heart

Abstract

In their work with the homeless, the dangerous and the disordered, helping agencies and the workers they deploy are faced, on a daily basis, with the task of engaging people whose essentially anti-social stance is, or is construed to be, one of a refusal to join in. The premise of our discussion is that, despite considerable attention over recent years having apparently being addressed to the problems of the socially excluded, there remains, and will most likely always be, a group of people who refuse to be engaged. It is our contention that even if the best efforts of our most experienced workers were channelled into addressing these problems—and this, in our experience, is rarely actually the case—there would always remain a group of people who refuse to play the game and resist all efforts to bring them ‘in from the cold’. We argue that mental health and social policy directives that optimistically, or cynically, envisage a future when all such people will be ‘socially included’ involve an equally stubborn and dangerous societal refusal to face up to the reality of these problems: a denial of their essential complexity and the part that society itself plays in perpetuating the very problems they seek to alleviate. We will contend that this systemic refusal is dangerous because, no matter how ‘politically correct’ the policy, or how sophisticated the needs assessment tools, such belief systems are setting up socially excluded people, and the workers charged with trying to reach out to them, to fail. We will then share our perspectives on how this experience of failure exacerbates a sense of exclusion in the excluded and increases, sometimes to breaking point, a pervasive sense of disaffection and demoralization in the workers. The central problem which we therefore face is how to relate to the refusal that is at the heart of these difficulties—how to relate to offensiveness without becoming offended—and how to do this without the egalitarian ‘we’ quickly collapsing into an us and a them. In making our case we would like also to suggest that we need to side-step ‘old-fashioned’ allegiances to one or another particular school of thought or practice that includes/excludes others’ contributions on the basis of dogma or prejudice and to join with others to dare to tell the truth and if necessary, to deface the falsely discriminating currency of our times.