Lighting fires: On creating large group dialogue in organizations and society [CLGD]

Abstract

This paper describes the process of designing, setting up and conducting a pioneering series of workshops to introduce Patrick de Maré’s thinking and practice, often referred to as the ‘Large Group Course’. Although described in this way, the pattern of lectures, seminars and supervision alongside either therapy or experiential groups, in discrete sessions, usually associated with group analytic training is not followed. Instead, the workshops are conducted entirely as a Median Group in various forms including a seminar, two group consultations and several experiential sessions with the addition of two sessions of social dreaming each weekend. As the learning is intended to be experiential, apart from an extensive reading list, the curriculum is not specified in advance and there is a very limited didactic component.

The ‘course’ was designed with the ‘Matching Principle’ in mind: an approach I encountered and worked with on the MA in Therapeutic Child Care at the University of Reading, (Ward, 1998:77). Elements of practice are imported by participants, to reduce the usual gap between training and practice so that the role of the unconscious is more directly brought to light. As the intention is to encourage ‘outsight’ into the socio-cultural forces that have invisibly shaped us, as opposed to insight (de Maré, 2012: 129), participants are given the opportunity to embody connections between their personal experience and the socio-political context as a step towards visualizing and working experientially with the social processes they encounter every day: the ‘Larger Group in the mind’.

Always implicit in the work of the Larger Group is learning to notice and reveal hidden discourses, the voices of those with usually excluded histories: ‘subalterns’ or the indigenous and dispossessed in society, particularly people from or in colonized societies, who are excluded through hegemonic structures (Spivak, 1988). This is a key element of the work that needs to be experienced to be understood. As people join from across the world from many backgrounds and cultures, the inevitability of being faced with completely different perspectives and world views challenge those of us from the western world to question our privilege and thinking.

The light in my eye

The idea had been there in my mind for many years, but it was not until I was invited to be an honorary member of the London Institute of Group Analysis that it started to form itself more concretely. At the same time Marion Brown, the then chair of the Board of Trustees of the IGA London, witnessed my seminars on larger groups on the Oxford Foundation Course and encouraged me to develop a training. Despite her early backing, progress got stuck at various points along the way. It became a long and arduous process, daunting in its complexity and demanding a lot of perseverance.

From the beginning I was clear that these workshops would be a place where participants could learn about the purpose and functioning of larger groups from a de Maré perspective through a process of embodied experience. Instead of a traditional didactic approach, participants would engage in a reflective process in the Median Group used in a variety of ways. In this I was influenced by my own encounters with learning as well as what I continue to draw from my own psychoanalysis and Larger Group and Median Group experiences. I also had the joy of encountering the Chilean biologist and philosopher, Humberto Maturana (1987: 23–24) in person. He describes why reflection is central to learning.

The moment of reflection before a mirror is always a peculiar moment: it is the moment when we become aware of that part of ourselves which we cannot see in any other way—when we reveal the blind spot that shows us our own structure, as when we suppress the blindness that it entails, filling the blank space. Reflection is a process of knowing how we know.

The special situation of knowing how we know is traditionally elusive for our western culture. We are keyed to action and not to reflection, so that our personal life is generally blind to itself. It is as though a taboo tells us: ‘It is forbidden to know about knowing’.

As with all analytic work, reflection is central to knowing. Maturana again (1987: 25–26):

. . . the phenomenon of knowing cannot be taken as though there are ‘facts’ or objects out there that we grasp and store in our head. The experience of anything out there is validated in a special way by the human structure, which makes possible ‘the thing’ that arises in the description.

. . . this connection between action and experience, this inseparability between a particular way of being and how the world appears to us tells us that every act of knowing brings forth a world. [. . .] All doing is knowing, all knowing is doing.

De Maré’s approach to the Larger Group, is based on Foulkes’ approach to Small Groups, but it is different. It is not patient or therapy oriented, even though it can be very therapeutic. Instead, it ‘offers a structure . . . for linking inner world with cultural context’ where the pressing socio-political dilemmas of our time can be faced in a unique way (de Maré, 1991: xiii). In the Large Group, the aim is not to find direct relations between members as in the Small Group, where ‘dualogue’ characterizes the communication, but to discover through dialogue how the superordinate systems operating in everyday life and work are replayed in the group as well as uncovering each person’s positional value relative to those systems. The significance is in noticing ‘the pattern which connects’ (Bateson, 1980: 16), or what is ‘embedded in the matrix’ (von Foerster, 2010: 313).

Knowing how we know and allowing new knowledge to emerge in a Larger Group is crucial when looking for new angles to inform us about the social dilemmas we are facing. This is a different logical manipulation to that of the Small Group and corresponds to a psychologically different process of knowing. According to de Maré (1991: 7) it offers the possibility of working beyond Freud’s principles of pleasure and reality, to a third principle of meaning that comes through understanding, [verstehende Psychologi], a form of learning that emerges as each person connects their own experiences with a growing awareness of the social forces that formed that experience. This contrasts with [erklärend Psychologie], or explanation, which emerges in more didactic forms of learning and is the work of the Small Group (von Foerster quoted by Angyal,1976: 26).

Then there is what de Maré referred to as the Median Group. The benefit of that, due to its median size, is that it offers both perspectives thus enabling links between personal experience and the social context to be more easily found.

These workshops, while not intended as a clinical training, can be used in clinical settings by those trained clinically, or to ‘teach people’ how to conduct Larger Groups so they encourage creative responses to the forces one can expect to encounter in organizations or community groups—to develop the ‘Larger Group in the mind’. It is a contribution that many people who work in non-clinical settings find they value as it gives them the confidence to promote dialogue when it is needed.

My experience as a member of de Maré’s regular Larger Group and then taking on its convenorship, taught me how much this approach could contribute to innovative and appropriate ways of working in many settings. As an architect I also knew about Donald Schön’s work, who as a philosopher and Professor in Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a strong proponent of ‘learning by doing’, for example, learning to ride a bike. His was the concept of reflective practice that he initiated for training architects, which he saw it as an alternative to the prevailing attitude in most academic institutions, that he suggests are

committed, for the most part, to a particular epistemology . . . that fosters selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry instead of preparing people for real-life practice. (Schön, 1983: vii)

My architectural training taught me the benefit of ‘knowing by doing’ by designing under supervision in the studio, supplemented by tutorials to introduce much-needed technical aspects of construction. We were also strongly encouraged to learn how to find out what we needed to know to keep up with the rapid development of construction methods. I was well-prepared for joining the profession. As Schön (1987:17) suggested, ‘The student cannot be taught what [they] need to know, but [they] can be coached’ ¹ . It was similar when I studied mathematics, physics and chemistry as part of my pre-training, so I was surprised by the logical positivist methodology of social science education when I came across it later. It seems nothing has changed or maybe this is an approach that has intensified over the years as universities have consistently closed vocational courses.

At that time, 1970s and 1980s, Schön also pointed out that many professions were beginning to find themselves in the midst ‘of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy’ that meant they could no longer continue to occupy the ‘high ground’ of knowing for clients but had to learn to get into the ‘swamp’ alongside them to decide together what to do. Later, he (1987: 7) wrote,

Professionals themselves argue that it is impossible to meet heightened societal expectations for their performance in an environment that combines increasing turbulence with increasing regulation of professional activity. They emphasize their lack of control over the larger systems for which they are unfairly held responsible.

. . . public, radical, and professional critics voice a common complaint: that the most important areas of professional practice now lie beyond the conventional boundaries of professional competence.

Even now after so many years, it seems that few professionals have been able to move away from their more protected positions despite the apparent increase in so-called public consultation. I say ‘so-called’ since it is rare for the public to be encouraged to come forward with their experience and ideas. Mostly it is little more than a very hierarchical public relations exercise designed to encourage acceptance of a preferred way forward.

I have come across many managers, peace workers, organizational consultants and consultation specialists over the years and noticed that despite having some limited knowledge of Bion’s ‘basic assumptions’ and Tuckman’s (1965) ‘forming, storming, norming, and performing’ approach, most had never heard of Foulkes or group analysis let alone what de Maré’s work with Larger Groups can offer when managing or working with teams, departments or community groups. So, I hoped that these workshops would enable quite new perspectives and possibilities for people whose everyday occupations meant encountering Larger Groups.

The fire stoked in me

As an architect designing and repairing social housing in the public sector, I learnt that de Maré’s approach offers something unique and flexible that can be easily applied in almost any setting, organizational or societal, as it allows individuals to be heard enabling new and perhaps more appropriate responses to difficult situations to be found. At the time council tenants were notoriously ‘done to’ and excluded from the decision-making process on the basis that they were an apathetic lot and ‘wouldn’t know’. I decided to put that to the test and gathered the community together on one south London housing estate and began conversations with them about how they perceived their living conditions and what they thought needed to be done. Many of my colleagues expected my ‘crazy idea’ to fail but this work received the heartiest feedback from residents and councillors and led eventually to a change of approach (Franck and von Sommaruga Howard, 2010: 108).

Later as a director of another local authority building design department, which was threatened with closure, I managed a culture change within a year by starting regular meetings with all one hundred members of staff. We sat in a big circle, which provided a place to talk and think together about what needed to change to prevent the threatened ‘end’. Not only did a catalogue of difficulties emerge that were openly talked about for the first time, but there was also a shared a realization that their self-esteem as designers had been largely destroyed through the threat to their future. What occurred as if by osmosis, was a transformation into a flourishing workplace. The department continued to thrive for another 10 years winning awards, employing more than the usual number of people from usually excluded groups in senior positions, and moving from a grant-funded entity to one that became financially self-supporting.

All the while I would try these ideas out in my workplace and then return to talk about how they were going in the Median Group, then known as the Wednesday Large Group, conducted by de Maré. As he suggested, being a regular member of such a group provides a form of ‘ballast’ that enables members to take risks that would not otherwise be possible. Such a group becomes a much-needed place of support whether it be for conducting or convening actual groups or for developing a capacity for holding ‘the Large Group in the mind’ to manage with more confidence in organizations or community projects.

All these experiences in the world beyond the consulting room made me very aware of how little is understood generally about what is possible when a larger group of people is brought together to, ‘Just talk’ as de Maré often said.

Stoking the students’ fire

The question was how to encourage the development of skills and knowledge, necessary for students to begin to be able to open the space more confidently for dialogue in their own settings. My approach, directly related to that developed by de Maré, prefaced the many difficulties I encountered in getting ‘the course’ established. The first occurred immediately at the start. The then director of training thought I should work with someone from the Tavistock Clinic and include group relations ideas. As group relations is already well-provided for world-wide, I did not think another course was needed. I felt that although de Maré’s contribution is unique, and despite it being a direct development of Foulkes’ group analytic concepts, it is almost unknown and deserves to stand alone. Even within group analytic circles, it is not well-represented. I have often been told by students at the Institute of Group Analysis (London) [IGA] that they learn almost nothing about the Larger Group and even less about the work of de Maré. After I refused to take up the suggestion to include the Tavistock approach, planning for these workshops stalled.

When I enquired about progress, I was given another reason for the delay. I was informed that even though I had consistently explained that my intention was not to provide a clinical training but what many people might call an experience of ‘applied group analysis’, there was a repeated suggestion that nothing could progress until I got approval from the UKCP. Interestingly I needed to explain more than once that my intention was not to provide a clinical training. After that message could be taken in, it was plain sailing for a while. I got on with designing the structure, finding a venue and preparing a budget. I was then repeatedly told that the cost was too high even though the fees included full board residential costs and were lower than any other IGA course at the time. Central to the idea of a residential was that it would not just be for London-based people. They could come from anywhere and would not need to additionally look for accommodation and meals.

Having crossed these hurdles with some adjustments, and with a great deal of help from the then office manager, we were ready to start. Fifteen people had signed up and then suddenly, support was withdrawn. Even though I had already explained I was prepared to financially support the course, if necessary, it could not be heard, and I was informed that the IGA could not take the risk of supporting a loss if some people withdrew. As my father had recently left me a small legacy that I wanted to use creatively in his memory this was not a real risk. I also knew that to get any new initiative up and running one needed to be prepared to back it oneself. This after all was what Foulkes and de Maré did in the early days of group analysis by investing the fees they earned from their first groups to start the society.

With the ongoing difficulties I encountered with the IGA and this last-minute withdrawal of support, I began to understand Pat’s long-held view that the IGA was resistant to larger group ideas. Not to be put off and hearing a lot of concerned voices, I approached David Glyn and Linde Wotten in their roles as GASi President and Scientific Secretary to ask them whether the Group Analytic Society could offer support. They agreed providing I did not call it a course but instead a series of workshops and added, the word, ‘in association with the group analytic society’ on all my advertising and literature, which I do.

We finally started in January 2019 and surprisingly given the previous history, the then new Director of Training contacted me and explained that as the course had been approved by the IGA as an IGA Short Course, I could use the IGA Logo and advertise it on their website and newsletter.

Finding a home to keep the fires burning

I see providing an environment appropriate for any Larger Group as central. Too often dynamic administration for larger groups is overlooked. Habitually they are squeezed into spaces that are too small or have inadequate acoustics, so I was keen not to normalize such dynamic administrative disasters. As an architect I know how vital it is for the environment to be ‘syntonic’ with its proposed use. I also felt it was important for these workshops to be accessible to people who are not based in London or the UK, so I looked for a venue with good transport links to enable people from faraway places to join without too much difficulty.

After many false starts and a lot of searching around the country looking for a venue where the same workroom could be guaranteed every time we met, I found Roffey Park Institute, a purpose-built management college, in Horsham within 15 minutes of Gatwick Airport and several train stations ² .

Roffey Park understood our requirements immediately. It signalled a more than appropriate choice that proved pivotal especially during and after the pandemic. I later discovered that its origins linked very closely to the early days of group analysis and to the thinking prevalent during the early 1940s that gave birth to the National Health Service, the Tavistock and Northfield. Roffey began life after a council of industrial and commercial companies decided to set up a rehabilitation centre to care for people in industry who were suffering from overwork, strain and depression in 1943. This council included representatives from the Bank of England, Courtaulds, Reckitt and Colman and Rowntree. They envisaged the centre as a place with congenial surroundings away from the workplace that could help people to return to productive roles in industry.

The centre took a holistic approach and combined medical treatment, dietary supervision, physical education and occupational therapy. In the first two years after opening, the centre treated 1,700 people. Later the Council also set up a Research and Training Institute. In the late 1940s the Institute’s work became more focused on well-being in the workplace and the Rehabilitation Centre became part of the St Thomas’s Group of hospitals and was absorbed into the new National Health Service (NHS). In the 1950s it ran bespoke development programmes and international programmes becoming an educational charity in 1967. It now has a distinctive philosophy in all its management development that encourages ‘delegates’ to speak about their personal experiences and to learn from each other. So, we fitted into the context like a hand into a well-worn glove.

Roffey Park is a containing place that ‘walks its talk’. Nothing is ever too difficult. It is beautiful, as is the food and accommodation. Extensive grounds with forest, grass and birds, an indoor swimming pool and small gym. Staff are flexible. Dynamic administration just happens. Students often refer to feeling nurtured both inside and out. The importance of such a context cannot be underestimated when working with larger groups.

The journey to Roffey Park itself too became an important part of the experience of the workshops for many people. Those from overseas flew into Gatwick Airport and waited for each other at one of the coffee shops there to share a taxi for the last part of their journey together, while others from the UK, met at nearby Horsham Station. These sometimes-long journeys gave additional space for reflection and digestion. As Fiore Bello who describes, the journey from Rome to Roffey Park became an important part of the whole experience before lockdown.

One aspect I miss so much is the physical presence of the group. In fact, leaving home and moving towards a destination—as well as returning, even if we consider them as ‘automatic behaviours’, contribute to creating the necessary mental state to plunge into a new task. At the end of the live meetings, I would enjoy the taxi ride to the airport and after the boarding formalities, I would look for a quiet place and start writing a report. Writing in the waiting lounge—a transitional space that suspends the before from the after—soothed my travel anxiety and laid the groundwork for returning to everyday life. Writing also allowed my mind to begin a digestive process to metabolize and process those raw emotional data or beta elements (Bion, 1962, 1967a) generated from the sensory and emotional experience.

Finding colleagues to accompany me

Initially I invited Göran Ahlin of Sweden to join me as we had co-conducted various on-going Median Groups in Sweden and the Large Group at the Dublin Symposium. He had also initiated a very creative group analytic psychotherapy training in Stockholm that included students from all over Sweden. As time went on, he increasingly felt unable to be closely involved and so I asked Michael Tait to join me. We knew each other well having worked in the Shadow Workshops together and with his therapeutic community background, felt we could make a good team. Dick Blackwell was also there supporting what felt like a big undertaking. When Göran realized that he could not join us every weekend, he suggested we ask different colleagues to join us in his stead as the third or fourth ‘staff’ member to take part. These people have all worked previously with either Mike Tait or me and expressed an on-going interest in the project.

Adding additional staff to witness and take part in the process has turned out to be an inspired idea as it immediately raised key differences with Small Group therapy where boundaries are fixed and personnel constant. Each weekend we are joined by one or two additional members of staff to take part in every activity. They do not just turn up to give a lecture or seminar and disappear but are present for everything including breakfast, lunch and dinner. Usually, they would also be invited to send a paper in advance for the group to read, think about and discuss over the weekend.

Who joins?

The group is self-selecting. This usually means that people are attracted by the ethos that is clearly stated in the information brochure sent to everyone who expresses interest. Before joining, each person is asked to complete a short questionnaire to give us some idea what they bring and what they hope for. People join from a variety of life experiences and bring diverse theoretical approaches. Each is invited to contribute their thinking to the different situations that group members bring with them—potentially leading to cross-fertilization but also to inevitable frustrations when those ideas appear not to be easily integrated. So far, we have an ex-teacher, several psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists and academics, two of whom taught in schools of management, as well as an organizational consultant join us. Some but not all have had some previous group analytic experience.

Fiona Parker describes her beginning.

The warm welcome in January 2019 into this international Median Group at Roffey Park was such a relief for me. Learning to think with feelings and feel with thoughts is not an easy task especially when I often feel overwhelmed with the darker aspects of hate, in myself, with others, in communities and in society. As time has progressed, I have become quieter and more silent. Sometimes in the weekly Alternative Large Group my silence is peppered with tears and occasional outbursts where I want to tell men (mostly) off for their individual arrogance as I hate the power of patriarchy in society. The personal is political, the personal and the professional are intertwined, family and trans-generational histories must be spoken about with care within the context of culture and society.

I have found the Median Group a much safer space than the Small Group as I can keep hold of my personhood yet reflect with care on who I am in society. The social dreaming matrix has been a place where I can feel more connected with others even though I have not dreamed for many years. CLGD has been a strong ballast during the extremely challenging times of the pandemic, the refugee crisis, structural racism and the rise of fascism around the world.

As it turned out, students arrived from all over Europe and the UK as well as Canada and Australia and later from India.

Anando Chatterji, who is from India, writes,

I joined the CLGD at a time of a major transition in my role as the exiting CEO. The unusual part was that I was not leaving the organization I co-founded, I was stepping aside, giving the space for someone else to fill, someone who had for some years reported to me.

My project was about navigating this changing landscape and the various tectonic murmurs that came with it. All this in an organization that is counter-cultural in the Indian context where the hostility of the world outside permeates our atmosphere and our individual psyches. So, being in the CLGD has become a wayside tea shop that I stumbled upon when I was wandering about feeling deeply depressed about my loss of position, power, authority and identity. I feared things crumbling and felt the guilt of leaving the burden I once carried to a new leadership, all at a time when suppression of speech and manipulation of thought is at its height in the larger political scene.

This tea shop became my new haunt where I could meet people from so many different cultures and identities and have interesting and intense conversations. It is a space where I can bring this psychosomatic turmoil and over the 18 months, I am slowly learning that there is a voice inside me which is not all lost. I have moved from screams to words for my rage . . .

I leave these thoughts abruptly here. I am learning to stay with the incomplete without falling apart . . .

With many colleagues in the group not speaking English as a first language, a discussion soon emerged about whether they would be able to understand each other. Although symbolic, the conversation also held a reality. Amparo Jimenez, whose first language is Spanish explains another angle, that many of us only speaking English hardly realize.

At each meeting, those of us who come from distant lands that include Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Austria, Germany, prepare ourselves for the difficult challenge of communicating in English, our second or third language. This will be the occasion to break the borders of a single group identity and to build a new social network. When we speak in our English, we also express the manners, gestures, expressions, meanings of our reference groups from our countries of origin. Although we have not yet talked much about how English colleagues perceive us when we work hard to find our voice in English, I always find that I am listened to with care, with respect, with admiration. It is perhaps this way of feeling listened to that, without my realizing it, has allowed me to break through the curtain of doubt when I speak of my identity as a Colombian.

Ethos

The particular focus is on how hidden processes in the socio-political context influence the capacity to think, make decisions, develop policy and form strategy whether it is to include the public in decision-making, encourage consultation processes, bridge racial, cultural, political and religious divides, or to tackle current local and global challenges. The workshops are intended to provide participants with the opportunity to find the courage to embrace and mobilize the inspired potential of larger groups to face these awesome problems through sharing their experiences.

Fiore Bello discovered that it helped him to change his time-honoured way of thinking and working.

The CLGD experience is teaching me to think collectively, to appreciate the multiplicity of feelings and to tolerate suspension of action and diversity, aspects that I am trying to transfer into my professional practice. I’m in charge of a psychiatric day centre coordinating two groups of operators coming from different backgrounds who often quarrel, generating conflicts and acting out. Having GLGD in mind, I try every day to pursue the goal of collaboration and negotiation with the aim of strengthening common ground through dialogue.

Kevin Flinn found that his teaching practice changed.

Since embarking on CLGD, my alertness to the dynamics of power at play in the groups that I am part of has considerably grown—along with my awareness of my own power and privilege.

It is not the size of the group, but the focus of attention that matters. Noticing episodes of equivalence from the cultural and/or socio-political perspective rather than the familial. The role of the conductor is to participate, not to act as a ‘blank screen’ or detached interpreter of events, but rather to participate, share and role-model what it is possible to speak about in the Larger Group. Larger groups, and/or working from the larger group perspective facilitates the collective exploration of what it means to be human. The Larger Group is a space that encourages the development of ‘reflexive curiosity’. (Flinn, 2018)

Finding one’s voice in the Larger Group prepares us for speaking out when we witness a misuse of power and/or the unchecked application of privilege by members of dominant groups in our workplaces and communities. Not with a view to censuring others or closing down the conversation, but rather with the intention of sharing our experiences, encouraging dialogue, recognizing each other, enhancing mutual understanding, negotiating difference and developing a culture of Koinonia. My involvement in CLGD has influenced my practice/way of being with students, colleagues, friends and family members.

As there is no set curriculum, students are encouraged to bring questions and their own experiences to the group to co-construct what they feel they need to know. Just as in any group analytic group, it takes time for members to begin to be able to take their own authority and to initiate conversations. Central to this thinking is a willingness to learn through experience—sometimes a painful and gradual process—in which the use of more didactic forms of learning, play almost no role in the traditional sense, but matching learning with practice generates its own set of difficulties and frustrations as Katy Mason describes.

It’s really easy to say why I don’t like this work. Working together in a Median Group is fraught with difficulties. How do we use our time? What do we prioritise? How do we make decisions? It is always impossible to accommodate everyone’s needs, leading to frustration, exclusion, disagreement and irritatingly low levels of productivity.

However, I have not yet missed a weekend. I feel more able to understand and empathize with intense feelings of frustration and exclusion. To understand how in a group, small things can have immense impacts on my emotional state. I notice that I am more able to predict disagreement and to engage with it. This makes me a more compassionate colleague, and someone more able to facilitate dialogue.

Mixed feelings are really hard. Every weekend that we meet I lament the loss of my social life, the financial cost and the emotional burden. I resent it but would feel the loss keenly were I to leave. I would miss the rest of the group, who can be the most unique and interesting hall of people and mirrors. I hope that this ambivalence will eventually shift and reshape into something which is as easy to value as it is to resent.

Tim Johnson-Newell from Australia also describes his ambivalence about the process.

I now feel that I want and don’t want to belong to CLGD. If I said I’m not coming back, I would feel bereft and that I had lost something very important to me and people who are important to me. Before the weekends I have this feeling of dread, a dread of wasting my time and not wanting the frustration, can’t keep my eyes open tiredness and boredom.

At school in order to survive I learnt to fit in, feel the currents of a group but also lead, take charge. It’s odd for me therefore to feel what I feel and then write it as I sit within CLGD. Do I belong, am I part of it, am I part of the in crowd, am I leader? In the last three years all of these questions have slipped away as concerns, and I’m left in the place I’ve tried to describe which is so unfamiliar to me and leaves me somewhat confounded.

Elements of the workshops

On joining, each student is invited to bring a ‘project’ or preoccupation to work with as a way of applying the learning as they go along. Some have a clear idea about what they want to do, others not and some think of themselves as their project. Mostly as time goes by, they develop completely new ideas about what might be possible in their work and lives. Also, the early and clearly defined projects iterate over time to new formulations just like well-designed building projects.

All sessions are held in the Median Group setting, which is used in various forms to enable students to plan and make sense of our own work, learning and experience.

Francesca Bascialla who also values the international membership of the group, describes her experience of the different elements.

I joined CLGD workshop in 2020 before the pandemic, searching for an international space where I could explore and expand my knowledge. The workshop’s structure offers different group settings in which dreams, feelings, phantasies and thoughts can be processed. Theoretical issues are discussed during the group consultation sessions, . . . enhancing learning from experience.

CLGD offers a common space to explore different cultural backgrounds, which is not the equivalent of knowing historical events. It is hard to stay in the position of continuous quest, exploring personal and social foundation matrices, being aware of our human fragility, embracing other realities. This common space, developed and created by the members of the workshop, is the transitional space of dialogue in which dealing with trauma is possible ³ .

Each weekend starts on Friday late afternoon or evening with experiential groups. Saturday and Sunday morning both begin with social dreaming followed by a period of reflection, which takes many forms including drama therapy, artistic representation, Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed or open reflection (2006). The rest of both days includes a seminar and ‘group consultation’ sessions where students are invited to reflect on how they put their learning into practice. Sunday also includes the Alternative Large Group and both days end with an experiential Median group ⁴ .

Between the formal weekends, ad hoc small groups are also encouraged so that students with similar concerns can get together to work through difficulties with their ‘projects’. They are then encouraged to share their learning with the whole Median Group. Sometimes it does not work out like that. One group that met monthly over a year and even gave itself a name ‘The Breakfast Group’ found themselves with a difficulty that often makes itself felt when a Larger Group is accompanied by Small Groups. Inevitably as the Larger Group becomes more difficult, the Small Group becomes a ‘familiar’, preferred place to talk, like a retreat, which in this case had the effect of draining energy from the Median Group. A strange ‘as-if’ atmosphere began to make itself felt. It took a while to discover that some members of the ‘Breakfast Group’ could not find a way to bring their Small Group conversations to the Median Group: the capacity to speak freely had drained away.

This dilemma took a while to surface and when it did, the Small Group arranged a ‘fishbowl’ in one of the Median Groups. It then took many months of talking to make sense of why it had happened and its impact. It is an ongoing process but interestingly, there have been no more Small Groups but many one-on-one ‘supportive’ initiatives.

As a way of keeping each other in mind, a ‘Slack’ workspace, which the group named Canto Hondo, Spanish for ‘Deep Song’ was started soon after lockdown. Slack is a closed email system that is more reliable than traditional email and enables easy uploading of papers, music, videos and images that often accompany on-going thinking. It is also used to send administrative information out to everybody.

Each participant is also expected to keep a reflective diary and from time to time to present a short reflection to the group about their learning, their life and work.

As this is not a course in the usual sense, there is no pass or fail assessment. Instead, participants decide when they are ready to finish and a certificate of attendance with a description of their project is then awarded.

Impact of the pandemic

Initially the intention was to meet for a residential weekend every two months five times a year. During the second year this pattern changed after March when the pandemic fell upon us. As we were no longer able to meet face-to-face, we began meeting online, which forced some people to withdraw citing that working online did not suit them or that they were unable to manage the technology. The intention was that they would continue when things ‘got back to normal’. Some have returned others not.

As Francesca Bascialla explains,

The unexpected and unpredictable Covid-19 pandemic ruined the time schedule of our face-to-face meetings. For two years there was no place available. Zoom monthly meetings were added and became a safe space, holding us through this long period of fear and death.

Initially we continued online on the same long weekends as before but discovered that we needed to rearrange the programme to deal with the different time zones across the world. From July on we introduced shorter ‘Zoom Sunday’ median groups in between the ‘main weekends’ to try to deal with both ‘Zoom fatigue’ and to make up for the limits of available time that everybody could access.

The advent of the pandemic made planning for the future difficult, forcing us to work with more uncertainty than most of us are comfortable with. This means arrangements change from time to time to fit with what can be made possible. Managing this uncertainty is becoming part of our work.

As it is important that anyone hoping to conduct or engage with larger groups in whatever form has on-going experiences of being in a Larger Group, everyone is encouraged to join one from time to time. By taking part in a Large Group and having a place in our ongoing Median Group to explore their experiences further helps to embody learning. The pandemic brought with it a completely new opportunity that is increasingly valued, the Alternative Large Group [ALG], which is offered on Zoom every Sunday without a break. As the ALG provides a unique experience, that includes anybody who wishes to join from anywhere in the world, we built it into our programme. Inevitably, it includes many diverse life experiences and theoretical approaches that are challenging and mind-expanding, but participants in CLGD do learn that by ‘hating and staying’ something shifts both within them and in the group. A new thoughtfulness begins to emerge. As Anna-Maija Karjalainen wrote,

I’ve been in most of the ALG meetings. I haven’t talked a lot. I have very often felt lonely, dismissed, frustrated and angry in the group and after the group. I have been tempted to give up. Now, more than a year since I started in the group, I have seen some positive signs in myself: flashes of hope, sudden surprising feelings of belonging to ALG. Even though I would not speak up, I no longer feel dumb and speechless as if the Large Group had sucked my thoughts away. I think I hear comments of the other members in the new way, as if my way to listen had slightly changed. I have become more open to the world, more interested in history and politics. I have started to explore my country and my nationality from a new perspective. I know all this will take time. I have a long way to go. I’m curious to see where it takes me. Dreaming of having Koinonia some day. To allow things to develop rather than trying to control them . . .

Another encounter with learning-through-doing (Schön, 1983) in the ALG comes from Sally Mitchison:

This experience of really being in a Larger Group and coming to tolerate the uncertainty, confusion and discomfort of swirling feelings and thoughts is something I’ve been coming to understand in the three years I’ve been on this course. I think of this to-and-fro process of active listening, feeling and reflecting on both ‘hovering’. So, in a way, you could say that this course has enabled me to grow wings and practise this hovering-business.

More recently with the advent and after-effects of the pandemic to deal with, the decision to use Roffey Park has proved to be even more fortuitous than I had originally thought. Since the pandemic restrictions for meetings have been lifted in the UK, we have been able to return there. The entire environment has been modified to make it as safe as possible and with the help of leading technology, we are now able to offer the workshops in hybrid form facilitating meeting face-to-face alongside Zoom. This has enabled us to continue with those who were originally residential participants alongside those from other parts of the world who joined during the pandemic and are unable to attend in person. So far, we have met for four weekends using this ‘hybrid approach’ where about half of us were at Roffey Park and the other half online with the help of various innovations. Initially we used ‘Kubi’ robots as extensively reported on in a recent edition of Contexts (Parker et al., 2021). Since this first meeting, we have continued to develop and improve this experience.

One complication with international hybrid workshops is dealing with very different time zones around the world. After adjusting our timetable as much as we could to accommodate mealtimes at the venue, we decided to accept that as there would be time periods that could not be made to work for everybody, some people may not be able to be present at every session. It is this ‘lack of continuity in attendance’ that is often a characteristic of community and organizational groups, so it was one way of learning to manage that. It also gives a lived experience for those of us based in Europe of what it means for those in the global south to manage with sleeplessness to attend events in the global north. It continues as a form of colonization that usually expects the global south just to fit in.

We also missed the loss of ‘café’ and ‘pub’ space where we could get together between sessions and in the evenings, UK time. Undaunted, several UK-based colleagues have carried on with a Zoom conversation with a laptop while sipping whisky together in the evenings. I am sure we could think more about this possibility as time goes by.

Consistent themes

Although this approach encourages what Donald Schön (1983) refers to as, ‘reflection-in-action’ through ‘learning by doing’ and equips practitioners with the skills they are likely to need to deal with what they may encounter in the real world, putting this kind of learning into practice is not uncomplicated. Although extensively described in the handbook, students are often surprised and disoriented when they discover that what happens in this programme is not based on the assumption that learning means being told what to do or how to do it, but on a willingness to engage in a co-creative process reminiscent of being in a Larger Group. It relies on each person actively taking responsibility for their own development, which can feel depriving and confusing as it often takes a long time to notice how the learning is happening. Inevitably the experience tends to evoke early life experiences leading to many ‘hands needing to be held’ but gradually there is a dawning recognition that a ‘fire is being lit inside’.

As I write this, I keep remembering Pat’s often stated concept of the cultural clash when unconscious assumptions bump up against each other and often cause a great of deal of hurt. This takes many forms in these workshops, the most obvious is discovering that learning is not prescribed in the usual way. Despite a carefully written handbook where this difference is explained in some detail, it is rarely taken in and leads to a consistent theme of feeling lost, untethered or ‘at sea’, wondering, ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What are we doing?’ These themes often emerge directly in seminars and group consultation sessions and then indirectly in the social dreaming sessions, which provide a place to thinking at a deeper associative level.

Sally Mitchison wrote a piece entitled, Active Listening.

Becoming attached to the ever-changing CLGD Median Group has introduced me to a new kind of active, engaged, open listening. The semi-safety of a Small Group is missing but after a while members come to feel empathically connected to each other. Attachment means that my capacity to stand back, judge and critically evaluate becomes partially suspended. Emotional responses, unprompted judgments and presumptions crowd in. This feels turbulent and demanding and I try to make sense of what is happening. Like others, I oscillate between engagement and reflection in a continuous interactive cycle.

The experience of really being in a Median or Large Group and listening like this is tiring. The staff model how to hang on in. And my capacity to tolerate the uncertainty, confusion and discomfort of swirling feelings and thoughts has grown over the past three years. Really listening to what others say—without rehearsing a response—means allowing myself to be buffeted around by connectedness. I have become more able to listen actively in other group settings: in the Median Group I set up for our local Community Refugee Group and in the Quarterly Large Group I conduct for Scottish group analysts and colleagues. It is personal development in real time.

A Median Group inevitably involves a lot more people in the room than many are used to. In these workshops it also means encountering people from many different parts of the world with many different experiences and attitudes. It is confusing and frustrating to suddenly discover that something you thought could be taken for granted is met with incredulity or even rage. For most people learning about what to expect from groups comes from an experience of being in a Small Group and for those who have completed a group analytic training even more so. The expectation is one of feeling relatively comfortable but finding themselves often thrown into a state of confusion when confronted with the less regulated experience of being in a Median Group, arouse powerful feelings that often resonate loudly with long-forgotten preverbal experiences. These often lead to a deep fear of the Larger Group and even though these resonances occur in any Larger Group, they are rarely attended to.

Not surprisingly given the power of the feelings that are having to be coped with, As the ‘mother convenor’ in the group, I am often the focus of enormous rage. Just as in a community or organizational setting, these dynamics cannot be directly interpreted but only withstood, taking on Winnicott’s idea that it is important for mother to survive attack without retaliation, and wait for these moments to pass as individuals begin to make sense of their unexpectedly turbulent experience.

As is usual in any group, participants have very different experiences of encountering not only their personal unconscious but the social unconscious as well (Hopper and Weinberg, 2003). Both are at play in these groups. People with more formal backgrounds such as academia, who tend to have less experience of thinking about what role the unconscious might play, expect explicit definitions and directions, and feel uncomfortable when personal experiences or thoughts are shared. The social dreaming each morning usually helps in this work since it lets the whole group know that what is not easily accessible to the conscious mind is often driving the process. When dreams are told in the dreaming matrix, unexpressed fears and nightmares not only become part of their shared experience but are made more visible and available for conscious discussion.

As Sally Mitchison writes

A big part of the learning for me has been recognizing the way in which issues in the wider world can be enacted in the microcosm of a Median Group and how easily the enactment of political/social situations often dominate exchanges and yet appear to go unnoticed.

To illustrate she describes a fictitious vignette that combines many of the issues we have encountered.

Vignette

A member from the global south attends hybrid sessions online because it is too difficult to meet in person, not only for financial reasons but also the difficulty obtaining a UK visa. The solution of meeting online turns out to be frustrating as connectivity is also inadequate from where she lives. In her family, there is only one desk-top computer in the much-used living room, so she uses her sister’s iPad, which limits the number of people she can see on her screen at one time. Despite very much wanting to be a part of the group, she often feels not fully connected, which she experiences as silencing and disabling. Everyone else seems so fluent in English. Before she says anything, she needs to plan how to say things but then often finds the conversation moves on before she is ready. The time difference and the fact that she is expected to work on Saturdays, makes regular attendance almost impossible. The others all seem free to attend, but she misses some sessions. There are times when she feels like giving up. Keeping up is so hard. At other times she feels angry with the group but how can she say that when they are making such efforts to include her? She finds herself focusing on the conductor whom she thinks will surely understand just how frustrating and difficult it is for her.

After a while, she wonders whether being part of the group is good for her; she had such high hopes when she joined but now, she hates how miserable it is making her feel. Sometimes she finds herself criticized for not showing enough commitment. She knows she is very committed but feels blocked by the social and political structures that make it all so difficult just to be present and at times feel impossible to overcome.

This kind of exchange is a simplified example of an enactment. Although these are recurrent and reflect forces in the social unconscious, they are usually fleeting and mistaken for a difference of opinion or an argument. The tell-tale sign is often the unexpected strength of arousal arising from a personal valency to deprivation or abandonment. These usually arise out of traumatic early experiences in that dimly recalled period before words. Even though those of us caught up in an enactment may not understand or even be aware of our personal valency, we are inclined to understand all too well the various factors contributing to our own and others less privileged status, even though often overlooked.

In this illustration of a social re-enactment, things have been simplified to a situation involving only one person in relation to the rest of the group. We have learnt that enactments are often multifaceted and shift from those in one kind of less-favourable position to another, illustrating inequality, deprivation and trauma in the wider world. Superficially, a re-enactment usually seems and feels personal. It has taken time for us to understand and recognize this as a recurring phenomenon.

It is staying with these often very painful experiences probably more than any other that eventually enables people to work in or with a Larger Group. As my colleague and co-convenor Mike Tait explains,

‘Hating and staying’ alongside the idea that frustration can be transformed through dialogue not into love, agreement or friendship, but into impersonal fellowship have been important, and difficult ideas for me to struggle to get my head and heart, around. I have come to understand that although, in the context of variable attendance, it is difficult to tease out communication breakdowns in an ongoing way—this is also a social and international dynamic and a potential source of learning. Staying with the tension for long enough to deepen dialogue in the Large Group [rather than relieving tension structurally or rhetorically] albeit in relation to differences, theory or discussing projects feels like a journey I am still learning about. Balancing: the written (Slack) and spoken word, the technological (Zoom) and face-to-face, the individual (longing for an immediate response) and the social (involving a delayed and variable response)—in a way that integrates experience, deepens understanding and sustains communication often feels impossible. Learning about the multi-faceted inter-connectedness of things (most recently, the link between poor internet audibility and previous social trauma) has been a relentless and continuous process. This does feel like hating and staying.

It is keeping these two parts in mind, the hating infant and the staying adult learner that are evoked together, that make it very difficult for participants to take responsibility for their learning and to initiate questions of each other. It is a ‘to and fro’ process over time that gradually changes as personal awareness increases and individuals become more confident.

Being in a Median Group for people with little experience of working in groups is also not so easy as Anna-Maija Karjalainen explains.

In the beginning of CLGD I was very excited. I had hesitations and feelings of inferiority, my experience with group work was limited. The other members around me were so much more experienced. I said to myself: If this gets too difficult, I do not come next time. But I wanted to come. I enjoyed the course. I got convinced about the importance of dialogue. I wanted to learn it. I understood that in the individual psychotherapy/psychoanalysis I couldn’t learn dialogue, not enough in the Small Group either. I needed a Median Group. Little by little I’ve been able to trust the CLGD group more. I am grateful to have been in this group. It has been a safe foundation for me in this life situation.

But something transformative can also happen as Andrea Bloom, a community activist from Australia, who also works individually as an art therapist, discovered.

And then came my private practice. I’m not sure how it happened but people started to call me to help them to care for their children. And they referred their friends and then they wanted to bring the siblings and pretty soon I was working with a community. [. . .] Though I see them individually, I hold them in my mind in a Large Group that contains histories, ancestors, politics and families.

Recently participants discovered a new idea, that these workshops are like a journey into unknown territory that emerges as it is encountered. The place we arrive at is a new and previously unknown place. For each person the destination is different and what they take from the experience is what they need to take.

Dealing with colonial legacies

Since the pandemic, the composition of the group has changed. Zoom has made it possible for more international participants to join us, which has been an extremely enriching yet challenging experience. Although we found it enabled us to continue meeting and brought us the joy of including people from countries that until then could not conceive of joining us, it also faced us with the inbuilt structural imbalance that privileges the global north that is the legacy of colonization.

Finding a way of working across time zones was the first difficulty. We discovered that it is impossible to devise a programme that ensures that everybody can attend every session unless some people are prepared to work through the night. This faced us with our first assumption that the rest of the world should fit in with Europe. We tried something different by adjusting the start and end times by rescheduling our first session of our day, social dreaming, to start before breakfast at 6am GMT and creating a long break in the middle of the day. As a result, there were protests from some European-based people who just did not get up to attend.

Even if this time problem could be solved by some sort of magic, travelling to Europe is also difficult, almost impossible for some people. The cost is one issue that we dealt with by students generously contributing to a bursary fund while staff waived fees. Even with financial support getting a visa to the UK from some countries is almost insurmountable. The world really is full of injustice.

Within the group the long-term influence of colonialism and the capacity to hear the ‘other’ and so enable what might be hidden in the discourse has increasingly become an ongoing theme. Learning to recognize how our dominant global north mindset sets the agenda and tends to silence the voices of the global south is ongoing. So often in community or organizational meetings, there are people who do not speak. The reasons are not obvious. One explanation is that the agenda that first emerges creates a dominant culture making it difficult for another point of view, or more importantly for a subaltern’s agenda, to be heard. As Spivak (1988) asks, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Recognizing the ‘subaltern’ is crucial. It is not enough to just include the ‘subaltern’ in the room. Their position demands constant attention to the subtle silencing that those of us who have never been in this position can so easily fail to notice.

It is a complicated process but crucial for anybody wishing to encourage dialogue. Spivak’s focus is on epistemic violence, which she defines as violence inflicted through thought, speech and writing and points to historical accounts that leave out the history of the poor and the oppressed erasing their place in the world, as an example (Riach, 2017: 11). She also points out how often the subaltern is spoken for, rather than being able to speak for themselves but then for that to be successful, the message needs to be transmitted and heard.

Inevitably a question is emerging about how to integrate online participants into our learning community in an ongoing way.

A culture takes time to form

It takes some years to establish a culture that passes itself on to future students. In the first cohort on the MA in Therapeutic Child Care, I was asked, ‘What is the unconscious?’ This question resonated through the next two years but was never asked again. Something similar seems to be occurring on these workshops. The early difficulties with the ‘flexible’ structure have become less difficult as we go on.

Amparo Jimenez, who joined in 2019 and travelled for each weekend from Montreal arrived with a very clear project in mind; to set up and work with a group of people who would collect testimony from Colombian exiles. At the end of the first weekend, there was a key moment, when Göran Ahlin spontaneously sang her a Swedish folk song. It later led her to an ‘outsight’ about how much her own history of having to leave Colombia had given birth to her project. Remembering this moment later led her to allow her testimony-taking group to form itself into a choir that developed a life of its own and gave much-needed succour to their work. As she describes next.

When I look back at the road I have travelled since I started training with the CLGD, I never imagined the impact this decision would have on this stage of my life. In these three years, the presence of this group has been like a mirror that names the issues that ‘haunt’ me and encourages me to talk about them. For a long time, I preferred not to reflect on my identity as a Colombian. It made me uncomfortable and sad to admit that the country where I was born and raised is a violent society where people are discriminated against based on their social class. I had to accept that this had marked me. So, keeping silent so as not to feel ashamed of having access to legitimate rights that other compatriots do not have (to study, to travel, to work happily) guided my internal struggles.

Thus, being part of the Median Group allowed me to talk about these struggles that I was covering up about myself and then I was able to learn to sing with a group of exiles in Montreal. Adjusting the lyrics of the songs that hurt us so that they seemed closer to our stories was the way to learn to talk about hidden and difficult issues as Colombians.

Thanks to the Median Group in Roffey Park with which I have felt deeply connected to be able in my context in Montreal to alleviate nostalgia and feel stronger to recognize the individual and collective traumas that in the period of pandemic and social conflict could fester.

Bjarne Nielsen joined the following year from Denmark where he lives in a co-operative community of 22 households. There he was increasingly feeling that his voice was being shut down and excluded. His project was learning how to find his voice and to take care of himself in the community. After two years he told us about the journey. It is a story of gaining ‘outsight’.

Participating in CLGD has inspired me to keep listening to the unspoken and to speak out at meetings and try to begin a dialogue in the midst of intense negative responses. The experience of being hated for ‘going my own way’ made me look into my ancestors. The mythology of my mother’s family, the mother line, is that we descend from ‘Tatere’ (Romas). Most of these people were not Romas, but people who had fallen out of their communities and then wandered around the moors or across the moors and I started looking at family back in time, 300 years ago and found some really poor people and this one man who in 1798 got married late at the age of 45. I guess he could be the mythological ‘Tater’ of my mother’s line of the family. Back then they made campaigns where they caught the wanderers of the moors and re-socialized them. That’s what they called it.

When I lit a bomb in the drawing after a social dreaming it connected me with the mine explosion that killed my great grandfather while he was fishing in the North Sea, and it set me on track with my father’s line of the family and the effect it had on the following generation and the claustrophobic feeling I get when I experience a group closing around itself, becoming a cult.

This leads me back to my project of taking care of myself in my community and then finding out how to feel like a member. Just after I started eating a plant-based diet five years ago in a small country of six million, high cholesterol and 51% of all land being used for producing food for 130 million animals a year in the farming industry, I found out how big a challenge this is to the conformity connected with ‘this is what we eat’.

Now, things have changed. In our community, we now have more dialogue about climate change, the farming industry, food production and the carbon dioxide emissions. There still is some tension around this subject but it is easier now.

I did carry on with it thanks to the CLGD group that I bring with me in my mind and my heart, and it is a feeling of being one. So, thank you for the space in this group. Compared to my first meeting at Roffey where I was too generous, I have since then given myself space to listen to what’s going on inside myself where I feel connected and engaged with the group.

I have occasionally joined the ALG and when I first did, a line from a song came to me. It’s called, Slow Emotion Replay by the band, The The, and it goes like this:

Everybody knows what’s going wrong with the world

I don’t even know what’s going on in myself.

The flickering flames

On reading this account, several students asked about my experience of convening these workshops. Regina Klein wrote the following allegory, which it was suggested may have been a way of seeking to understand my experience.

‘What do you think hate is?’, the Mole asks while digging smaller and bigger holes into the porous matrixial rocks, on which him and her and all of them gather around, weekend after weekend.

Suddenly an overture swell. Black Beatle’s, Guinea Pig’s, Tree Fog’s and Blue Tit’s voices mix with those of the Earthworm, the Moose, the Lobster, the Shark, the Ant, the Ladybug and some others in all around and ever-changing specie-garments to a polyphonic sound, soaring to hitherto unheard-of heights, abruptly hitting the glass-ceiling. Then crashing down in the weather light of the world’s turmoil, pursued by digital bomb squadrons, again and again gating for an eccentric secure cloud-space. After repeated caprioles, curvy roller coaster rides, risky ups and downs, it finally comes to an atonal rest on the matrixial solid rock, breaks into silent ‘peaces’.

In the midst, the inconspicuous Eastern Whipbird stretches its feathers. Its unmistakable wakening call, depending on not-silenced Other, escapes tentatively from its beak. Surprisingly outside the weather-confronting thundering screams a Snow Goose appears, draws its circles, jazzily takes the Eastern Whipbird and the Mole on its shoulder: ‘We have such a long way to fly, look how far we’ve come’.

It has been both exciting and tough to enable the ‘flickering fires’ to burn more consistently. As a pioneering initiative, it meant literally putting both my money and my energy where my mouth was, which is exhausting as anyone who has started a new venture will know. I also needed to find the words to explain what I had in mind, something I have never found easy. But, as time has gone by, we have found that we have the freedom to develop our thinking without institutional constraints. We are discovering together that a form of deep learning does occur when encouraging ‘knowing-in-action’: By ‘Learning to talk to each other’ in a Larger Group.