Witnessing—a group-specific factor and its importance in times when facts and truths are challenged

Abstract

‘Facts matter’, stated Miriam Berger in her Foulkes Lecture (Berger, 2023). They matter because, in the human world, they happen to somebody. So if they do not matter, somebody does not matter.

I postulate that witnessing, as it is defined by Miriam Berger, is a group-specific factor whose value lies in allowing the emergence of ‘moments of meetings’—moments in psychotherapy changing the intersubjective architecture of the relation.

The capacity to validate somebody’s experience seems to be more crucial nowadays when disregarding facts and truth has reached such an extent that it has a name: the ‘post-truth’ era.

But, ‘witnessing is not a given’, says Miriam Berger. Whether this emergent property of the group will be used for ‘re-humanization in therapy and beyond’ (Berger, 2023) depends on how the conductor handles the facts: Do they matter to her/him or not? I will also reflect on what shapes the attitude of the conductors toward the facts.