Abstract
This paper explores a key theme in the development of a group analytic psychotherapy conductor’s training group. It is a story about the importance of play for healthy development and more flexible adult relationships. Some dialogues from the group’s work are included and considered, illustrating the value of dreams, metaphoric work, and rough-and-tumble play for personal and relational growth. Connections between self-reliance/responsibility, playfulness and oedipal relating are also explored, highlighting the challenge of letting go of unconscious but ‘relentless’ seeking of recognition within the dyad in order to allow in the greater freedom of being one amongst many.
Keywords
Introduction
This is a story of my learning and development as a trainee group analytic conductor in the company of my training group 1 . It is one story of many that could have been told about our group, this particular tale picking up a weaving thread that is both light and strong, playful and serious, and that considers the ebb and flow of freedom and responsibility in the life of the group and its members, including the conductor. It is a story about developing freedom to play.
In play, we create an intermediate or transitional space between inner and outer reality, freer from strain and responsibility (Winnicott, 1971). Playfulness has also been described as ‘a state of mind in which an individual can think flexibly, take risks with ideas (or interactions), and allow creative thoughts to emerge’ (Youell, 2008: 122). And it is understood that ‘in a playful atmosphere one can often speak the truth’ (Civitarese, 2022: 42). Through my experience with my training group and in my own therapy group, I have also come to believe that developing freedom to play is connected to the challenge of facing and navigating the disillusionment, grief and potential that comes with oedipal relating. Wilke (2014) argued that there is a constant requirement for members of an analytic group to ‘accept the formation of an oedipal triangle . . . [and the] painful transition from the dyad to the triad’ (Wilke, 2014: 111). While oedipal relating involves a difficult and repeated letting go of primary narcissistic hopes of union and seamless attunement within a dyad, the movement from the dyad to the triad also enables a greater range and freedom of relating, with less need to hold onto control and responsibility for oneself and others . . . along with the potential for more play.
Starting the group: ‘What kind of family will this be?’
A Christmas party was on in adjacent rooms during our first group session. The group members kept wandering off to other rooms to sample the fare at the party and I worked to gently shepherd them back into our group circle, with little success—as I got one back in, another would wander out—we were in a loop of wandering and shepherding and I was anxious about not being able to control it . . .
This dream the night before starting my training group clearly expressed my anxiety about being able to hold and contain both the individuals and the group (my previous training and work having been individual psychotherapy). Later, I realized that it also presaged the futility of working too hard to ‘get it right’, and the need to loosen my sense of responsibility for the process, so that wandering and play could happen in the group as an essential part of development and growth.
In our first group session, I opened by inviting the five members to get to know each other, reminding them that it was up to each of them to decide how much or how little they talked. They shared about having psychiatric diagnoses, parents’ mental health issues, unhealthy relationships, and being either helped, neglected or harmed by psychiatrists or psychotherapists in the past. They wondered how they would work together, would they feel safe enough to talk about painful experiences, and would this group help them? There was a sense of energy, hope, cautious sharing and efforts to connect.
I was surprised at how little I spoke (only three times) or felt the need to do so, the group members mostly ignoring me and only looking at me if I spoke. I had a sense that they were being ‘good’, taking up responsibility to do the work as I had tasked them to do in our individual preparatory sessions. This compliance may have represented what Agmon and Schneider (1998) described as a typical regression to the oral-dependant stage in a new analytic group, involving a passive-dependent attitude to the conductor. This may occur even when the conductor is perceived as not satisfying needs, activating anxiety and loss. Nitsun (1989) also emphasized how a group’s initiation is ‘fraught with anxiety’ (Nitsun, 1989: 249), evocatively depicting the early group as a formless, unintegrated body, akin to Winnicott’s description of an infant. In light of this, Nitsun (1989) argued that the conductor’s primary task at this early stage is ‘tangible’ holding, their presence and active contribution being ‘vital’ for establishing safety while the group forms (Nitsun, 1989: 253). I realized later that I had been too inactive in this initial group, in part as I had believed that this was of value in establishing a group-analytic culture, but it is likely that I was also unconsciously placed there by the group members.
In this position, I initially felt enthralled by the freedom of witnessing the work unfolding without having to act, but I felt a growing tension in my head and between my shoulder blades over time. Afterwards, I wondered if there had been unexpressed anger in me and the group. I believe now that this was the beginning of the experience of neglect/lack of parental holding and premature self-holding/inhibition of needs developing in the dynamic matrix—a familiar experience for most of the group members, including me as the conductor. Furthermore, the lack of active engagement from me was apparently benign and well-intentioned and this may have made a lack of needed holding, or anger about this, difficult to consciously acknowledge and express. The vignette below from the second session seems to follow this thread.
I dreamt last night that I left my dog in doggy-care and his leg got bitten off.
Someone jokes,
Is that what’s going to happen here?, and everyone laughs.
I dream of fighting with my mother, shouting and raging at her, I don’t understand it.
My sister has cut our mother off, she’s so angry with her.
It’s the same with my sister and my mother.
Sometimes that’s all people can do, they’re so hurt.
It may be that we’re also wondering about what kind of family this group will be, and what kind of mothering there might be here?
Later, Emma speaks in a flat way about an early traumatic experience, and how the reactions of the adults in her life heightened her fear and distress, leaving her managing the impact alone. Anne and Beth are tearful, Deirdre is angry for Emma, and Ciaran feels disturbed and confused by how the adults acted, while Emma remains unemotional.
I’m sorry I’ve upset you all with this—I can’t feel it myself, I never do.
You were swallowing hard as you talked, so maybe in some way you were feeling it.
A few moments silence, and a feeling of strong emotions in the room . . .
It’s a lot to bear, such painful experiences, but you’re not alone in it Emma. We’ve all experienced our own shocks and pain, and we can bear this with Emma.
I just want to scoop you up and hold you (to Emma)—we’re here to look after each other.
I was more active in this session, and also felt more allowed in, compared to what had seemed a defensive exclusion of me on the first day. The group’s work in its first two sessions indicated anxiety, vigilance and anger regarding experiences of neglect and harm in close relationships, and a suppression of their own needs or feelings, focusing on caring for others. In my interventions in the second session, I focused on the need for care and overlooked the anger at the lack of it, and I also offered a caring response to Emma. This was of value at this early stage of developing safety and cohesion in the group, but it may also indicate that anger was harder to directly acknowledge and stay with (for me and other group members). And yet it was brought into the group matrix in a playful way through dreams.
The theme of neglect and inhibited anger also relates to some significant work in my own therapy group during my group analytic training. I was immersed in early, painful material one training weekend, and I felt acutely vulnerable and fearful in the group when the conductor was 15 minutes late to one session. Even after her arrival, I continued to feel a high level of inner distress which I was unable to let others know about. I later realized that my intense reaction to the conductor’s absence was a replaying of an experience of being hospitalized for a few weeks as a young child, particularly the initial shock of my parents leaving me alone with strangers. I shared this with the group the following day and also found the courage to protest to the conductor that I had needed her to take more care and to be present when I was feeling vulnerable. Despite its intensity, I had hidden my distress as a child, as I did initially in my therapy group but, within the ongoing holding and containment of the group, I became able to voice my disturbance and anger. A key element of this was being able to do so while also feeling love and respect for my conductor, and knowing that her lack of care was not intentional. This was an important corrective experience for me (Alexander and French, 1946), facilitating a progression in my own internal and relational dynamics that was also of value for my training group. Self-inhibition in relation to loved caretakers who meant well, or were believed unable to do any better, had a strong resonance for most of the group given significant parental mental health and addiction issues in their early lives.
Object relations theorists’ conceptualizations of early psychic development in response to unmet relational needs are also useful to consider here. Fairbairn (1952) described parts of the ego being repressed into libidinal and anti-libidinal egos, where the ‘bad’ parts of the primary caregiver are split off and internalized (i.e., splitting the desired/exciting and unsatisfying/depriving parts), in order to maintain overt security with a needed ‘good’ caregiver. The greater the extent of unmet relational needs in early childhood, the higher the level of ongoing internal conflict and repressed needs. Fairbairn (1952) believed that the strongest resistance to change was our loyalty to our bad internal objects, as part of a deeply embedded and protective psychic structure. He proposed that only the experience of a real and secure therapeutic relationship (as opposed to the transference relationship) would enable an individual to risk abandoning their persecutory internal objects. Through this trusted relationship, there could be movement towards reintegrating, owning and expressing previously split-off needs, and anger at unmet needs, so as to experience freer and more authentic relationships. Heimann (1942) also wrote of the work needed to move on from being dominated by split-off, repressed internal objects so that they became more assimilated into the self and experienced as ‘more human, less like monsters, less like saints’ (Heimann, 1942; quoted in Perlow, 1995: 53).
Once more secure relationships have been established, the group analytic context offers a particularly valuable forum for its members to become aware of internal conflicts and restrictions, and to play with new ways of being and relating. Indeed, in the development of group analytic psychotherapy, Foulkes’ primary focus was on creating conditions for maturation and interdependence (the oedipal situation), rather than for regression and dependence in a dyadic, pre-oedipal situation. He argued that: ‘group-analysis is not so much concerned with the question of how people have become what they are than with the question: “What changes them or prevents them from changing?”’ (Foulkes, 1964: 141–144). The group analytic concept of location is also relevant here, as it relates to Foulkes’ foregrounding of the social nature of humankind, such that individual ‘disturbances’ are also located in the group, providing opportunities for psychic growth for all members (Barwick and Weegmann, 2018).
Playing and ‘seeping in’ of the group
As the group progressed through its first year, some significant themes recurred, including parental neglect/incapacity, working hard to get it right, being disappointed/disappointing, loss of feeling special, being responsible/reasonable/strong feelings being dangerous or pointless, distress being hidden in plain sight, and embodied distress/perpetuation of neglect . . . these themes resonating for me too. There was also a growing sense of cohesion and of group members’ investment in and care for each other. This was enhanced by the group having been set up in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, and being regularly referred to as a valued source of stability for group members at such an unstable time (the group started in person with social distancing and masks, moved to online sessions in the second half of its first year, and returned to in-person work since then).
The group members often shared their dreams, and metaphors also became a regular feature in the group discourse. Both dreams and metaphors were typically engaged with in the group in a playful way, at times there being a rapid flow of often humorous associations and exchanges, contrasting with (and often following) serious and slower work regarding past trauma or current concerns. This can be seen in the following vignette from an online session in the second half of group’s first year, where there was a particularly long engagement in metaphoric/associative play. I did not understand the importance of this playful work at the time but fortunately the group members ignored my efforts to shepherd them back to ‘serious work’ (as in my early group dream).
The session just before this had involved sharing sadness and anger about painful experiences, including parental death, illness and limitations, and about not being known but also fearing being fully known (and rejected). At the end of the session, following one group member’s expression of hopelessness about talking and therapy (‘What difference does it make!’), I had strongly articulated the importance of difficult experiences being spoken about and heard, and how this work needed time. Dreams were brought in by three members at the beginning of this subsequent session, with a common theme of not being prepared for school or exams (a shared reaction to the pressure of my emphasis on the value of speaking and doing the work?). Following this, the group spent time exploring difficult family dynamics over the past week for two of the members (Anne and Deirdre). Then the group started to play:
Sometimes I feel like I’m shouting in a vacuum.
It’s like being in a muppet show, responsible Kermit and Miss Piggy beating everyone up!
It would be freeing to be a muppet!
It makes me think of Fraggle Rock.
Or Speedy Gonzalez. (all laughing)
I see the fun in playing with ideas but cartoons usually have good and bad guys, and a lot of violence—I’m wondering what else might be stirring in this?
I loved books, they brought me to a different world, the Faraway Tree was my favourite.
Yes, the tree was safe . . . but Enid Blyton was criticized for racism and colonialism.
I loved Mallory Towers.
Yes, great fun . . . and Little House on the Prairie.
And the Waltons.
All idyllic families who stuck together and sorted out their problems.
Different to Shameless—the child’s terror in that family!
I need positivity on TV, I don’t watch Eastenders, too many difficult stories.
I wonder about the difficult stories shared in this group too, and other stories not yet shared.
A few moments silence . . . Deirdre yawns.
With TV you can be certain things will be okay.
In the Faraway Tree, the children had misadventures and were afraid but once they came back to the tree they were safe.
I liked stories with danger where you knew they were going to be okay, like Flowers in the Attic.
And they continued playing like this until the end of the group, talking about horror films they saw as children, and fantasy books they read to their children. I felt helpless and ineffective and could not enjoy the play. I felt the tension of what was not being said or connected to—I felt sadness, fear, anger. I later realized that this had a personal resonance to unspoken parental depression and anger in my childhood, often masked by humour. However, the group was undeterred by me and may have needed to ‘kill off’ the controlling parent in me so that they could connect with their own agency, creativity and sense of choice. Also, while there was vitality and fun in this play, there was a serious undercurrent regarding danger and fear in families and groups. Intimacy and understanding of each other was also being developed through their metaphoric play (playing with being more fully known).
Winnicott (1971) asserted that times like this are needed in a trusted environment to communicate what may seem like nonsense, this being ‘a resting state out of which a creative reaching-out can take place’, offering some relief from the ongoing strain of relating inner and outer reality (Winnicott, 1971: 55). He proposed that ‘cohesion of ideas is a defence organization’, and an opportunity to rest can be missed ‘because of the therapist’s need to find sense where nonsense is . . . The patient’s creativity can be only too easily stolen by a therapist who knows too much’ (Winnicott, 1971: 56–57). Wise and liberating words.
Garland (1982) also highlighted the creative tension engendered in boundaried ‘stranger’ groups, where members can engage in serious, productive play, with no external, real-world consequences, allowing the individual to ‘negotiate and renegotiate change—as well as exchange—between the inner world and outer realities, within himself, between himself and the group, and between the group and the outside world’ (Garland, 1982: 14). Barwick and Weegmann (2018) further proposed that the ‘shared, overlapping experience of play . . . allows transference-based experience to be ‘played out’—that is, not simply re-enacted but elaborated, challenged and reparatively transformed’ (Barwick and Weegmann, 2018: 87).
The value of metaphor in therapeutic work has also been championed, word play being understood to extend the reach and depth of language, allowing important discoveries to be made (Rossel, 1977). It has also been suggested that the use of metaphor promotes deep changes without disturbing the surface (Cox and Thielgaard, 1987). Schlapobersky (2016) proposed that metaphors and dreams arise from the primordial or archaic domain of the group’s life, where he believes reparative work occurs, and that they provide an arena for containment and exploration. There is some debate as to whether the conductor should offer interpretations and help to translate metaphors, Schlapobersky (2016) suggesting that doing so ensures that the unconscious imagery of the primordial can be reflected on, allowing a ‘developmental harvest of the group’s self-generated metaphors, making them mutative through interpretation’ (Schlapobersky, 2016: 444). However, others have argued that the group should first be allowed to play with and elaborate a metaphor, waiting until they feel at home with it before translating it (Konig, 1991).
The creation of the metaphor itself may also be enough, its verbalisation offering an undoing of the wordless, embodied autistic symptom (Foulkes, 1964). Thus, interpretation or translation by the conductor may not be necessary as ‘it remains to be integrated into the personality and metabolised by the group, with words or not’ (Levens, 2011: 30; quoted in Schlapobersky, 2016). Over time, I have come to better understand the importance of playful and metaphoric exchanges in the work, and to more fully trust how they can help to revise or recondition ‘the boundaries’ of the ego and superego, loosening internalized parental and social inhibitions, and helping individuals to ‘find’ their own selves in the less authoritarian social context of the analytic group (Foulkes, 1948: 168–170). As a result, I have become better able to hold back from pushing for ‘serious work’ to be done or offering premature reflections or interpretations. I have also become freer to enjoy witnessing the play, to join in at times, and also initiate metaphoric play, my own psychic structure loosening in tandem with the group.
There was also evidence of the group benefitting from connecting through metaphoric play (without translation), with enhanced trust and openness in the sessions following the vignette above. About a month later, Emma spoke about a repetitive and painful unconscious somatic symptom she had (an embodied, unsymbolized symptom: Foulkes and Anthony, 1957), sharing how this had started following a traumatic family event in her adolescence. Emma told the story of this event slowly and with feeling, the emotional processing of this experience being more clearly shared and held between Emma and the group rather than projected into other group members as in the early months (as in the first vignette above). Two others disclosed about similar repetitive somatic symptoms when distressed, there being a shared recognition of the trauma held in their bodies. Emma told us that she had not had this symptom for some weeks, something which had never happened before. She talked movingly of feeling the ‘seeping in of the group’, experiencing a consistency of presence and care in the group that was new to her and that was settling in her body. It also seemed that something less persecutory and freer was developing in Emma’s internal structure, formed within the relational experience of the group.
Developing capacity for rough-and-tumble play
Our group had a stable membership for over a year, but during the first half of its second year, three of the five founding members left and two new members joined. The reasons for leaving differed but the return to in-person work nearly half-way through the second year (after five months online) had a significant impact on group membership, attendance and dynamics. There were repeated themes in the group of feeling displaced, anxieties about sibling dynamics, feeling misunderstood or not known, and shared experiences of anger, fear, vulnerability and loss. There was also more conflict and anxiety being experienced and expressed between group members. The communication in the group typically involved warm, collaborative exploration and gentle challenge, but three tense altercations happened in the second year of the group (each one shortly after a change in group membership). All involved protests at not feeling heard or understood, or expressed needs being overlooked or neglected. While this was challenging for the group, it showed a developing capacity to express differences, and there was the potential for greater growth and creativity in the group if these anti-group dynamics could be contained and worked through (Nitsun, 1996).
Alongside this, I was (slowly) learning when I needed to act with more or less agency as the conductor. During the first significant altercation in the group, Ciaran challenged Emma, feeling judged and misunderstood by her, and the other group members became involved, mainly trying to reason with and placate Ciaran (forming a split between Ciaran and the rest of the group, as I later realized). I remained quietly attentive, thinking that I needed to trust the group to work through this and I did not help them to navigate the conflict or to think about what was happening (to triangulate out from the split). I gave an affirmative, group-level intervention as the group ended, saying that expressing and navigating differences was a sign of maturity in the group, but I felt ineffective and overly distant as I did so. Not surprisingly given the splitting and lack of containment from me, Ciaran did not attend the next session.
Leading into the second conflict a few months later, Ciaran had mentioned a past long-term relationship, which Fia started asking questions about. Ciaran answered briefly each time but was clearly uncomfortable, shifting in his seat:
You seem agitated.
I don’t like talking about it, I was struggling with my mental health at the time and seeing a counsellor hadn’t helped—she was worse off than me.
What do you mean the counsellor was worse off?
There was a depressed feeling off her.
Really? I’m confused, how did you read this into how she was?
(more agitated, raising his voice) Please stop questioning me, it’s aggressive, can you not just accept what I said and understand!
(looking shocked and distressed) I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.
This is a difficult moment for both of you and it’s important that you’re both able to take time to speak and listen to each other about this. It can be challenging for any of us to be the focus of attention in a group and well-intentioned questioning can feel like too much. It’s also hard when we get difficult feedback and realize that we got something wrong for someone else.
This time, I realized that containment was needed at an early point, and I also felt more able to offer it, given growing experience as a conductor. I aimed to provide a steady presence and offer attention to both, and to allow both to take a breath. I think this facilitated a movement from what had quickly become an intense, enmeshed dyad (with some malignant mirroring: Zinkin, 1983) into a more spacious triad, where my presence was felt. While initially both were still distressed, they became calmer and able to talk about what they had been struggling with during this exchange, and to recognize each other’s distress. This was followed by about ten minutes of metaphoric play and processing of the experience by all the group through Alice in Wonderland, Bosco, Wanderley Wagon, Dr. Who, Wurzel Gummidge and more (and I also laughed along with the group as they played). In this way, the group were now also able to create a more expansive relational space, in contrast to the dyadic splitting of the group in the first conflict above. Fia and Ciaran initiated more processing of the conflict in the following session (which had not happened after the first conflict), also using metaphoric play to do so (describing themselves as taking turns to be the piercing sun and the vulnerable ozone layer). The third incident (between Anne and Fia over expressed and forgotten chair preferences), while still tense and challenging, was not as strongly charged as the previous two events. This time, the group also had some experience in navigating conflict to draw on. In response, my (triangulating) presence was largely non-verbal (attentive eye-contact and nods), the two activated group members doing well to articulate and hear each other’s experiences of feeling neglected or misunderstood. When the group members joined in, they offered both support and challenge, showing a developing capacity for coherence, or reflective engagement with difference, as well as cohesion (Barwick and Weegmann, 2018).
Over this time, a capacity for rough-and-tumble play was slowly developing in the group, and some triangulation was needed at times, offered by me or another group member, to help to navigate the potential for reactive dyadic splitting. Developmentally, Pines (1982) noted the importance of triangulation for a child, the ‘father’ providing experience of being excluded from dyadic mirroring with ‘mother’, thus facilitating the child’s mind to enter a symbolic realm where reflection can begin to replace reaction. Barwick and Weegmann (2018) described this as a ‘witness training programme’ (Barwick and Weegmann, 2016: 44), the child developing ‘psychic muscle’ (Barwick and Weegmann 2016: 84) through tolerating exclusion from the dyad, as well as learning to observe and be observed. In the social context of the analytic group, the importance of further ‘ego training in action’ was emphasized by Foulkes (1964: 84), helping each person to ‘outgrow earlier, restrictive solutions’ to relational conflicts (Schlapobersky, 2016: 94).
Playing with love, neglect, resilience and longing: The Little Match Girl
The group continued to work and develop through the second half of our second year. Recurrent themes during this time included being parentified children; feeling loved but also neglected, with unmet needs; yearning for care/being angry at lack of care; feeling the burden of responsibility, enduring hardship and feeling disillusioned; and wanting to be ‘fixed’, with life being easier. Dreams and metaphoric play were less frequent during this period, and it seemed that we had circled back to retread ground from our early lives where play was more difficult, for the group members and me.
My mind was with the group as I drove to work one morning towards the end of the group’s second year, and I felt a strong sense of poignancy, suddenly remembering a fairytale that had been important to me as a child. I later shared this with the group:
I was thinking of the group this morning and Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘Little Match Girl’ came to my mind. I think the story connects to what we’ve been exploring in the group lately regarding neglect and unmet needs.
Beth looks at me wide-eyed, and Fia and Gavin say they don’t know the story, so I briefly tell the tale (there were just three group members that day).
(tearful) That was my favourite book, I read it over and over as a child!
I can’t imagine letting my children read that story, I’d want to protect them from such hardship.
(also tearful) It’s so sad, the neglect is awful—why did no-one help her!
But there’s much more to it than that—I loved how resilient the little match girl was! And she was surrounded by her grandmother’s love when she died.
The group members started to share some poignant and some treasured stories from their own childhoods, connecting with the themes in the little match girl’s story of love, neglect, resilience and longing, also playing with this at times. My initiation of metaphoric play through sharing this fairytale was a new development for me as the group conductor. I had allowed an ‘indwelling’ of a poignant longing in the group to unfold in me and come to light through suddenly and strongly remembering the little match girl’s tale. Also, as I gained experience in the conductor role, I was becoming more at ease with resonances between me and my training group, understanding the importance of the therapeutic work being done ‘by the group, of the group, including its conductor’ (Foulkes, 1986: 3). Schlapobersky (2016) observed how conductors’ ‘own undeclared dynamics will inevitably come to life and be reflected to them by the group’ (Schlapobersky, 2016: 302). He further guided us to work with our countertransference responses and emotions, showing our availability to ‘play’ with the group’s experience and our ‘use of self’, this being a key part of facilitating spontaneous exchange, reflection and reparative experience in group analysis (Schlapobersky, 2016: 310).
An interesting question is, how could my remembering and sharing this fairytale shed light on what reparative experience might have been needed for me and my training group at this time? The little match girl’s overt resilience in the face of neglect, and her hopeful-but-hopeless fantasizing of warmth, nourishment and love, reminded me of Stark’s (1999) description of the ‘defence of relentless hope’ (Stark, 1999: 310). According to Stark, this defence represents our refusal to face the disillusionment and grief of fully realizing our caregivers’ limitations and failures in care, leading us to continue to strive to obtain the yearned-for care and attunement. For the most part, the group members and I maintained an overly self-reliant way of being, and felt the burden of too much responsibility and inner strain, with difficulty expressing or accessing needed support and care from others. I wonder if, behind our self-reliance, we were nurturing a ‘relentless hope’, believing that if we have been ‘good enough, tried hard enough, and suffered long enough’, the desired love would be forthcoming (Stark, 1999: 323).
Tying in with this, in a previous group session Fia had used the metaphor of working to be a ‘shiny pebble’ on a beach and feeling valued as a child for being consistently good, hardworking and responsible. She expressed her fear of losing her shine and the potential for being loved if she let go of this way of being and relaxed into the rough and tumble with the ordinary stones. However, Freud (1905) proposed that it is going through the experience of ‘painful disappointments’ that initiates the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, bringing about an inevitable and needed turning away from ‘hopeless longing’ for the primary caregiver towards other object choices, opening up options for more creative living (Freud, 1905: 315). And yet, the relentless hope was also there in the fairytale, in the poignant longing, and in the group matrix.
Over time, the group (and I, in my own process) continued to work on themes of self-reliance, burden, and increasingly developing our capacity to express our needs and our pain at unmet needs, in past and current relationships. The ‘painful disappointments’ were more often acknowledged and shared, and the grief of what was lacking more fully engaged with. The ongoing warp and weft of the group has provided ongoing experiences of navigating movement between desired dyadic attunement, and the more challenging but freer triadic, oedipal relating in the group. Metaphoric play also started to occur more frequently again in the group (although dreams remained rare compared to the group’s first year), at times initiated by a group member and at times by me. There was also a growing freedom in me to move between holding responsibility for the group and enjoying playing alongside the individuals and the group (from dyad to triad), and this continued to develop in the dynamic matrix of the group as a whole.
Concluding reflections
In this paper, I have foregrounded the importance and challenge of finding freedom to play, both I and most of my training group members having learned to be overly self-reliant and responsible in the face of times of parental inability or neglect, inhibiting more spontaneous expression of needs. Some key psychoanalytic theories have helped to illuminate likely internal dynamics at play, including the internal conflict from repressed libidinal and anti-libidinal egos (Fairbairn, 1952), the defence of relentless hope (Stark, 1999), and the difficult facing the grief and pain involved in moving from the dyad to the triad (Freud, 1905). Yet, ongoing work to develop freedom and capacity in triadic, oedipal relating and experiencing in the group has benefitted me and my group members. Play through engaging with metaphors, dreams and stories has also provided valuable and creative symbolisation of conflicts and needs that were hard to access or express directly (Schlapobersky, 2016). In addition, play has offered a crucial resting place from the responsibilities of life, the group often engaging in playful exchanges after facing and navigating some painful realities or conflicts (Winnicott, 1971). The group has also played with more spontaneous, free flowing, triadic relating through metaphoric story-telling and rapid exchanges of associations, as illustrated in the vignettes shared in this paper. As Perlow (1995) asserted, the ‘intermediate area’ and the ‘potential space of play’ are not merely transitional or developmental stages, ‘they are what life, creative living is all about’ (Perlow, 1995: 117). I, and the group members, continue to develop our ability to enjoy being one of the ‘ordinary stones’, being one among many, and increasingly leaning into the freedom to live and play that this offers.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is based on my clinical paper as the final part of my training as a group analyst. With grateful thanks to my training group participants and my clinical paper group tutor and peers for the privilege of learning and growing together.
