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Abstract

Decolonizing group analysis is not about group analysis analysing colonialism, but about addressing colonial dynamics in group analysis. The evaluative findings of the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis Project’ Report Nayak, 2023 call for critical reflection on existing frameworks leading to a thoroughgoing evaluation and re-design of practice. Five principles emerged as recurrent themes in the research data and anchor the recommendations. These principles offer a blueprint for decolonial re-design of group-analytic training and practice including a decolonial lexicon for decolonizing. Material shifts in power, privilege and position in the constitution of group-analytic knowledge mean questioning the who, what and why of knowledge production. Structures, mechanisms and decision-making processes are integral to the apparatus of knowledge production, including economies of money, ideology and representation. Approaches relying on the disproportionate labour of those with intersectional subjugated identities to drive decolonization do not represent an embedded systemic institutional commitment. Sustaining the shared task of decolonization requires reciprocity, sitting with discomfort and spaces for decolonial dialogue. Power, privilege and position shape different journeys in understanding and applying intersectional decolonization. The strategic future of the IGA, the viability of group-analytic trainings and the creative potential of group analysis will stand or fall on transforming inevitable intersectional racist colonial power relations

Keywords

decolonization intersectionality cross-fertilization trauma racism learning knowledge

The Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) Power, Privilege and Position (‘PPP’) group instigated the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis Project’ (2022–2024). Summarised, the evaluative findings are: ‘The strategic future of the IGA, the viability of national trainings in group analysis and the creative potential of group analysis will stand or fall on transforming inevitable intersectional racist colonial power relations’. Emphasizing intersectionality is pivotal because white supremacy relies on interlocking oppressive social constructions.

The social unconscious is implicated within historical social forces of colonization (Treacher, 2005; Blackwell, 2023, 2002). Just as everyone is formed within a historical collective social unconscious, so is the practice and theory of group analysis. This unveils the political nature of group analysis, and that it is inevitably implicated in colonial dynamics.

Colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 7). Sustaining decolonization requires reciprocity, sitting with discomfort and spaces for decolonial dialogue. Power, privilege and position shape different journeys in understanding and applying intersectional decolonization.

The project findings sit alongside other significant moves from within the IGA to explicitly name IGA structures, behaviours and attitudes that are oppressive, discriminatory and othering. Examples, include:

- the ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023: PPP Training and Governance Subgroup);

- the special issue on racism (Group Analysis, Volume 54 Issue 3, 2021;

- the experiences of the IGA Diaspora and People of Colour Group;

- the work of the IGA PPP Group;

- the Group Analysis Associate Trainee Group (GAATS);

- the work of the IGA Whiteness Group;

- the work of the IGA Race, Racism and Supervision Group;

- the work on group analysis and climate justice (GASi Contexts, Issue 99, 2023).

Moving beyond scrutiny and review, decolonization involves critical reflection on existing frameworks leading to a thoroughgoing evaluation and re-design of practice. Decolonization requires sustained material and emotional resourced commitment. Approaches relying on the disproportionate labour of those with intersectional subjugated identities to drive decolonization do not represent an embedded systemic institutional commitment.

Material shifts in power, privilege and position in the constitution of group-analytic knowledge mean questioning the who, what and why of knowledge production. Structures, mechanisms and decision-making processes are integral apparatuses of knowledge production, including economies of money, ideology and representation. Fanon states,

Decolonization . . . cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. . . it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. (1963: 36)

What it means to decolonize

Decolonizing is not a metaphor for widening participation or inclusion (Tuck, 2012). Decolonizing does not mean diversifying or increasing variety. Bhanot (2015) explains, ‘the concept of diversity only exists if there is an assumed neutral point from which “others” are “diverse”’. Diversification can happen without tackling power, privilege and position, because ‘a white, Eurocentric ideology does not convert to an intersectional black version by having black faces in the literature, conferences, or institutions . . . force for change, does not become black by increasing the representation of a particular pigmentation’ (Nayak, 2015: 52). Strategies of presumptions, dismissals, and skewing are usually at play. Andreotti et al. argue,

it is presumed that difference can and should be neatly incorporated on the terms of those doing the including, without any social conflict or significant change in structure, subjectivities, or power relations. It is also assumed that any disagreements that do arise can be addressed through . . . predefined consensus . . . debate is skewed from the outset on the side of those who determine the terms of . . . who speaks, when, and what is intelligible, comfortable, and desirable. Efforts to disrupt these structures of power . . . are dismissed as violent, unproductive, and uncivil. (Andreotti et al., 2015: 26)

Decolonizing the curriculum is the redesign of legitimacy and dominance in the production and dissemination of knowledge to redress practices that reproduce coloniality. Decolonizing group analysis is not about group analysis analysing colonialism, but about addressing colonial dynamics in group analysis. Mohanty states,

I am trying to uncover how ethnocentric universalism is produced in certain analyses. . . my argument holds for any discourse that sets up its own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, that is, the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural others. It is in this move that power is exercised in discourse. (Mohanty, 2003: 21)

Fear that decolonizing group analysis equates to a takeover mirrors discourses of threat to national identity, borders, and resources, that are reminiscent of Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Aiyegbusi’s (2021a, b) exposition of the white mirror offers a cogent frame for the colonial mirror in group analysis.

Ethical duty

Failure to decolonize fails the principles of the UKCP Code of Ethics and Professional Practice and the IGA Code of Professional Conduct. Failure to thoughtfully decolonize the curriculum, pedagogy, environment and experience of group analysis fails trustworthiness, fairness, self-knowledge or humility, causing harm and detriment to well-being. The re-traumatization of intersectional global majority group-analytic trainees is well documented (Dalal, 2022; Special Issue of Group Analysis Volume 54(3) 2021; Stevenson, 2020; Kinouani, 2020). Aiyegbusi states ‘There is an inevitability to the way personal and ancestral histories of racialized trauma, whether as victim or perpetrator, will (and must) enter into the group narrative in conflictual ways’ (2021b: 424).

The ‘UKCP Code of Ethics and Professional Practice (2019) on Social Responsibility’ (sections 29–31: 4), binds group analysis to:

- Actively consider issues of diversity and equalities as these affect all aspects of your work and acknowledge the need for a continuing process of self-enquiry and professional development.

- Not allow prejudice about a client’s sex, age, colour, race, disability, communication skills, sexuality, lifestyle, religious, cultural or political beliefs, social economic or immigration status to adversely affect the way you relate to them.

- Avoid behaviour that can be perceived as abusive or detrimental to any client or colleague based on the above factors.

The public-facing mission of the IGA positions itself as ‘one of the leading national and international psychotherapy training organizations’ striving for ‘the highest standards in all IGA courses, trainings and in clinical practice’. The IGA’s public-facing mission encompasses internal ‘structures and policies for sound governance’; ‘transparency of decision-making’; ‘accountability of officers and others with delegated authority’ and responding to the ‘changing social, political, legal and regulatory environment’. The IGA’s public-facing mission refers to the relief of ‘mental distress’, increasing ‘well-being’, valuing ‘difference and creativity’, opposing ‘unjust discrimination’ and commitment to ‘democratic principles’.

The findings of the ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ (2023) catalyse the following questions:

- How do the IGA’s training and practices relieve the mental distress and increase the wellbeing of people with intersectional subjugated identities?

- In the context of intersectional racism, what does the IGA do to ensure that democratic principles operate at all levels within the organization?

- How is the IGA acting to respond to the fact that

black group members will have at the very least experienced accumulative racist trauma by repeated othering, micro aggressions, casual abuses and identification with the historic and real-time assaults and murders of black people shown on repeated loops of celluloid footage. Most likely though, severe incidents of racist trauma will have been personally experienced and/or generationally transmitted. Feelings associated with those experiences will inevitably be stirred up by membership of an analytic group encultured as white. (Aiyegbusi, 2021a: 405)

Findings

The following principles, which are inherently group analytic, emerged as recurrent themes in the research data and anchor the findings and recommendations.

- Decolonizing is fundamental to the reach and relevance of group analysis.

- Exclusion cannot be solved by inclusion within an already established analytical structure (Crenshaw, 1989: 140).

- Experience and environment.

- Intersectionality.

- Cross-fertilization and co-production.

Themes

This section provides the findings of the scoping exercise of the IGA Decolonizing the Curriculum project. They are presented thematically with a short introduction followed by a list of key points. The findings are interconnected and interdependent; as a whole they are greater than their sum. In short, whilst each finding speaks to the specificity of different dimensions of decolonizing the curriculum, none of the findings exist in isolation or can be viewed through a single-issue lens (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Their interlocking and mutually reinforcing (Nash, 2008: 3) content points to the intersectional experience of global majority trainees and colleagues. The findings expose compound injuries (Nayak, 2022) sustained by being positioned at the intersection of colonial epistemologies, pedagogies and clinical practices.

The evidence for decolonizing group analysis is ubiquitous and abounds from the scoping consultation exercise, including:

- published literature in Group Analysis and beyond;

- the membership of the IGA’s ‘PPP’ Curricula Subgroup;

- the ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023);

- the membership and curricula of the IGA’s Whiteness Group;

- meetings of Group Analysis Associates, Trainees and Students (GAATS);

- the membership of the IGA PPP Diaspora Group.

Decolonizing curriculum, environment and experience: Curriculum as dynamic context

Curriculum is beyond content: it is a context with its own matrix of dynamic processes of power, privilege and position. Moving beyond alterations to reading lists is essential. Decolonial lenses amplify the need for emancipatory pedagogical principles and techniques in keeping with the praxis of group analysis. This enables the explicit naming and addressing of intersectional colonial dynamics.

Findings

- The curriculum is as a dynamic context.

- Study materials and assessments must be inclusive of Global South emancipatory conceptual frameworks like black feminism, decolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, queer and critical race theories.

- To enable all students to belong to and inhabit the emotional, cognitive and embodied space of the concepts, study materials and assessments, learning spaces must proactively and explicitly address ‘how diverse technologies of power work pedagogically within governing institutions to produce, regulate and legitimate particular forms of knowing, belonging, feeling and desiring’ (Giroux, 2012: 163).

- Such a curriculum, as a location of transference and projection, and as integral to the shifting figure and ground within the matrix of the learning group, enables intersectional curiosity in communication networks engaged (or alienated) within it.

- The curriculum as a dynamic context ‘provides the very horizon and perspectival point which places me in the world and makes relations between me, other objects and other subjects possible’ (Grosz, 1995: 86).

- Emancipatory critical pedagogical praxis inculcates reciprocal knowledge production, the foregrounding of situated knowledge, and allyship as pedagogy. Examples include Freirean praxis for critical consciousness (Giroux, 2010; Shih, 2018; Shor, 2002: 24–35), and bell hooks’ ‘education as the practice of freedom’ (hooks, 1994).

- Being qualified in psychoanalytic and group-analytic practice does not equate to effective skills, knowledge and experience in designing, delivering and assessing a decolonized curriculum. Dalal (2015: 365) argues that ‘trainings with deeply conservative and authoritarian attitudes towards their trainees produce group analysts who are deeply conservative and authoritarian in relation to their patients and colleagues’.

- Mechanisms that hold those responsible for group-analytic learning accountable for how they apply emancipatory critical pedagogy are imperative.

Decolonizing the conceptual framework of group analysis

There is persistent misconception that the theoretical framework and ethos of group analysis inevitably enable us to relate across differences as equals. During the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis Project’ (2022–2024) scoping exercise, the idea that group-analytic concepts are inadequate on their own to address coloniality was met with confusion, disbelief and staunch defences of the canon. Kent (2021: 364) argues

There is the reassuring promise of a ‘greater good’ at work, almost religious in its conviction: ‘Trust in the group and the group will provide!’ . . . I could not have formulated this trio of anti-racist approaches without harnessing theory from beyond our modality . . . If we are to accept that the social permeates our groups at every level, then the same must be true of our theoretical framework.

Findings

- Emancipatory critical pedagogical praxis requires emancipatory critical concepts.

- Group analysis has an anxious ambivalent attachment to a group-analytic ‘order of discourse’ (Foucault, 1981: 48–78) because ‘theorizing destabilizes us and offers no certainties; it makes us vulnerable’ (Burman, 2011: 468). The anxious ambivalence of colonisation heightens fear of destabilising vulnerability. Bion’s (1959) ‘attacks on linking’ is relevant to understanding the attack on liberatory theory.

- Group analysis must ‘allow outsider ideas in’ (Nayak, 2021a: 337). Decolonial disruption of ‘the established and the outsiders’ (Elias and Scotson, 1994) includes the conceptual established and the conceptual outsiders of group analysis.

- Stevenson (2022: 230) states

For group analysis to remain relevant . . . Our theories and techniques require a greater understanding of racism and its impact . . . on individuals and communities in order to. . . enable the eradication of the barriers in psychotherapy faced by black and brown people, in their roles as both group analysts and group members.

- Central to decolonizing the conceptual framework of group analysis lies the question: if success within the group-analytic curricula ‘is conditional on acceptance into and compliance with an existing framework, what is erased, left out, and with what consequences?’ (Nayak, 2021a: 341). The consequences for global majority people is the erasure of their intersectional situated knowledge. Stevenson (2022: 220) explains, ‘racist erasure is an essential and practical method for the colonizer to negate evidence of the trauma they have inflicted on people that have been colonized’.

- This concurs with Blackwell’s statement that

prevailing group-analytic attitude towards racism is somewhat relaxed. There is little sense of urgency amongst most group analysts that this is a major problem that we must confront as soon as possible. Where then might that leave any black person contemplating becoming a group analyst? . . . what might it be like for a prospective or current student to enter, or contemplate entering, a discourse where such a substantial part of her/his life and experience is likely to be of so little concern or interest to the teachers or to the other students? (Blackwell, 2021: 333)

- According to the ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023), almost half of the responses about support ‘identified further training . . . for members to be better-equipped and more confident in working with othering in the future. This included integrating relevant theoretical and experiential training into the curriculum of IGA courses, dedicated workshops, and instruction in techniques and strategies to challenge prejudice and address othering’.

Decolonizing group-analytic experiential spaces of dynamic exploration

There is a misconception within group-analytic trainings that experiential spaces of dynamic exploration (therapy, supervision, seminars, experiential spaces) inevitably facilitate decolonial experience and thinking. Marginalized people testify that these spaces, which require vulnerability, often amplify unequal power dynamics. One tactic of marginalization is silencing (Kinouani, 2020; Bacha, 2025: 184–185). The ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023) highlight that ‘70% of a total of 62 respondents reported feeling ‘very much or to some extent’ silenced or inhibited in addressing othering in an IGA role . . . The frequency of these responses suggests that some may have been silenced or inhibited by feeling expected to conform to the dominant culture in the institute’. Aiyegbusi asks:

Surely opening up spaces to support group members of different ethnicities to engage at a level of full and mutual humanity and respect must be a core task of group analysis? How else might sufficient security be promulgated to explore dependency needs and establish intimacy required to embark upon the emotional labour required for what Schlapobersky (2016) posits as accessing and repairing the painful, shameful and traumatic inner injury beneath personal defensive structures? ( Aiyegbusi, 2021b: 426)

Whilst dialogue is central to group analysis, Bacha (2025: 2) states, ‘dialogue in the group dimension requires ever more precise ideas around the question of who is included in “we” identities . . . time and effort needed to be able not to know, to see things differently and to think new thoughts’. The ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023) recommends (1) that all colleagues delivering training ‘receive CPD and supervision regarding intersectionality and decolonization to inform their practices (i.e. therapy, teaching, supervision, experiential groups, and reflective practice)’; (2) that group-analytic curricula ‘introduce more experiential/reflective groups during study days to help identify and process institutional dynamics and trauma.

Findings

- Blackwell cautions against beliefs that

group analysis, by virtue of its good intentions, recognition of the ‘social nature of persons’, attention to culture and context etc., not to mention the social unconscious, is in some way immune to the racism that pervades other organizations where it can be more comfortably recognized. (Blackwell, 2021: 320)

Using examples from group-analytic experiential spaces of dynamic exploration, Aiyegbusi (2021b: 434) states ‘It is to be expected and in the absence of clear theory and practice frameworks, racist scenes can seem to emerge in sudden and unexpected ways, precipitating explosive conflict and exclusion by premature exits’.

- Group-analytic supervision is central to the curricula and proceeding to the qualifying clinical paper to graduate as a group analyst. Supervision can hold a gatekeeping power. Effective supervision encourages supervisee vulnerability, for example in exploring countertransference and the dynamic role of identity. Accordingly, attending to power, privilege and position is essential.

- The IGA Race, Racism and Supervision Group reports: ‘[We] are a small diverse group of IGA training supervisors, past and present, from the London and Manchester trainings, meeting regularly since 2020. We have built up confidence and trust in each other through sharing our dilemmas from supervision, particularly in how our complex personal identities interact with the trainees’ when occupying the position of power, position and privilege arising from the legitimate authority of the supervisor. Kinouani’s research reveals a lack of confidence and competence in IGA trainers and clinicians in acknowledging issues of racism in supervision, which have been borne out in our experience of convening the National Supervisors’ Forum. Our recommendations would be:

- Continuing funding of the National Supervisors’ Forum for continued improvement in confidence and competence of IGA supervisors,

- Considering what might be the mandatory competencies required for the role,

- Developing a training and support strategy for supervisors working on the IGA trainings’.

- To decolonize psychoanalytic experiential learning spaces of dynamic exploration, Sheehi (2021) identifies non-negotiable starting points of intersecting fault lines of oppression that must be named because ‘it is not a fair game. And, if it’s not fair it is a discriminatory game’. Sheehi is referring to the inequitable context of power, privilege and position.

- Sheehi states that ‘we are beyond notions of unconscious racial enactments’. The ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023) points to the fact ‘that enslavement and colonisation underlie colossal transgenerational transmissions of social trauma . . . dynamics associated with these traumas emerge within the amplified space of analytic groups’, which, as Dalal (2015: 361–2) argues, cannot be reduced to the ‘tendency to interpret people’s experiences of existing oppressive social structures, as manifestations of projection, rather than take them at face value and challenge them’.

- The group-analytic curricula must provide better preparation and support about the function and process of large groups. The ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023) states that ‘unprepared exposure can lead to a position whereby. . . flooding, terror, or re-traumatization eclipse potential learning opportunities’ and refers to the ‘misuse of power and position in the large group by both staff and trainees’

- The scoping exercise revealed that intersectionally racialized people within the IGA are expected to educate white people about racism. Multiple sources inside and outside of group analysis highlight the harm of the ‘unequal distribution of group-analytic, emotional labour’ placed on intersectionally racialized people, including trainees within the IGA’ (Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey Report, 2023). Sheehi (2021) identifies the double threat to intersectionally racialized people when they are simultaneously positioned as ‘knowledge producers’ on racism and as ‘dangerous’ because of this knowledge. Decolonizing group analysis requires a shift from the colonial dynamics of ‘extra, free labour’ that place a retraumatizing ‘undue weight’ on people ‘who already occupy marginal social positions, within and without the IGA’ (Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey Report, 2023).

- Decolonization requires recognition that ‘race’ as a product of racism applies to everyone not just people of colour. Therefore, the capacity to work with it as it arises in groups [is] dependent on proactive . . . attention to the racialized unconscious and its relevance to the matrix of this group, including the associated domains and types of communication, formulating the group accordingly’ (Aiyegbusi, 2021b: 432).

- The curricula of group analysis must include spaces where peers integrate and digest different parts of the training experience and learning. This is not to be conflated with student meetings, large group or therapy group spaces.

Languages of decolonizing power, privilege and position

Decolonial emancipatory pedagogy, epistemology and experiential spaces of dynamic exploration require shared and developing decolonial languages to communicate dynamics of power, privilege and position. Languages for decolonization include embodied emotional communication. Decolonial considerations include questions of who can speak, under what conditions and in what register.

It is urgently required that those in positions of power and decision-making, for example, admissions, progression, promotion, board members, training courses committee members, course directors/convenors, group and experiential group conductors, clinical supervisors, seminar leaders, tutors, dissertation supervisors, essay and paper markers, demonstrate leadership in using and promoting a group-analytic vocabulary of decolonized intersectional equity. This involves bringing the lens of intersectionality to explicitly address inevitable dynamics of power, privilege and position within the curricular specifically, and within group analysis generally. Consultations with those overseeing, designing and delivering national trainings in group analysis revealed the lack of and need for the development and use of decolonial group-analytic lexis.

Findings

- Group analysis must embed a conceptual lexis of decolonization that explicitly shines light on the ‘political nature of group analysis’ (Einhorn, 2021; Nayak, 2021b).

- As with any new language, decolonial language that foregrounds intersectionality requires continual practice, unlearning old habits, humility to learn from mistakes, and taking responsibility for our own learning. Bacha (2021) points to a ‘conversational intimacy that is needed to recognize and embrace individual and cultural differences based on intersectionality’.

- Group-analytic vocabularies to communicate decolonization are crucial because the discourses by which we communicate ideas are performative. Butler (1993: 13) explains that ‘a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’.

- Group-analytic vocabularies of decolonization must address questions of ‘how, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and obeying what rules?’ (Foucault, 1969: 118). The relevance of these questions arose in feedback from GAATS, including feeling silenced; struggling to belong; managing non-belonging by relying on being used to not belonging in society; almost quitting due to expectations of compliance with dominant white western ways; seminar leaders sticking rigidly to course texts which prevented exploration of issues of power.

- Group analysis must address Spivak’s (1988) question: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ If the reply is ‘yes, the subaltern/intersectionally marginalized people in group analysis can speak’, what code, language and condition is this contingent upon? What discursive practices permit the reply of ‘yes’? Who/what confers this agency of speaking? If the reply is ‘no, intersectionally marginalized people in group analysis cannot speak’, what code, language and condition is silence contingent upon? What discursive practices permit the reply of ‘no’? Who/what forecloses this agency of speaking? Blackwell (2021: 12) asks ‘There is the question of language and what we mean by ‘language’. Not simply the question of what language it is but whose language?’ Mayet et al. (2021) ask, ‘How do I learn when my tongue feels heavy from a borrowed language?’

- Using decolonized group-analytic language that foregrounds intersectionality requires us to speaks of the unconscious, transference, countertransference, projective identification, mirroring, and resonance in terms that deepen our understanding of why the unconscious finds intersectionality hard to tolerate and how to develop emotional intersectionality. A decolonized group-analytic vocabulary of the matrix could speak of ‘interpenetrating matrices’ (Hopper, 2018: 202) as an intersectional ‘matrix of domination’ (Hill Collins, 2000: 228). A decolonized group-analytic lexicon of somatization would enable group analysis to speak of theatres of the body as intersectional (McDougall, 1989) to extend the reach and relevance of group analysis to the embodied racialised misogyny (Nayak, 2021b). A decolonized vocabulary of group analysis might consider the connotations of psychoanalytic terms of ‘containment’ and ‘holding’ in a world where such terms serve to oppress intersectionally racialized people. Addressing language in group analysis, Blackwell (2023: 11–12) states ‘“boundaries” are associated with the colonizers who introduced them to previously unboundaried territories in order to demarcate their areas of control and domination. The term “conductor” can refer to the guy who tells you that you are sitting in the wrong seat in the wrong carriage on the train and you have to move’. Context, location and situated knowledge must inform group-analytic languages to communicate about power, privilege and position.

Cross-fertilization is vital to decolonizing group analysis

Cross-fertilization of knowledge and practice, the mixing ideas from different areas, is fundamental to group analysis. Group analysis works on the basis that the cross-pollination of transpersonal communication produces something greater than the individual nodal points within the group matrix. However, the scoping exercise revealed that the reach and relevance of group analysis relies on cross-border and cross-sector linkages and collaborations. On a basic level, different working groups, committees and trainings must share their work with each other and the wider group-analytic communities. Work on intersectional difference is happening in sub-groups across the IGA, for example, ‘Being Jewish in the IGA’ group; The ‘Fanon Reading Group’; ‘Group Analysts for Palestine’; and ‘The Diaspora’ group. However, there remains unconscious dynamics of atomization, fragmentation, divisions and silos. GAATS evidenced that students struggle to find belonging in a group-analytic community/institution beyond their immediate cohort/course. The IGA PPP working group repeatedly experiences disconnection between their initiatives and the work across other parts of the IGA. The scoping exercise revealed the recurrent theme of a stunting disconnect and separation between Foundation cohorts/courses and Diploma/Qualifying cohorts/courses. Creating linkages across the micro-macro divides is vital to disrupt group-analytic paradigmatic delimitations where research questions, empirical contexts, perspectives and voices that are deemed outside of group analysis remain hidden or silenced. Davies, Manning et al. argue that

under conditions of ideological distancing, shared concepts and domains will be narrowly assimilated—an effect we call ‘encapsulation’—which creates an illusion of sharing, while promoting further self-containment. By comparison, reflexive meta-theories, and cross-disciplinary community-building will enable a form of sharing that promotes cross-fertilization. (Davies, Manning et al., 2018: 965)

Findings

- Cross-fertilization is needed to reap the benefits of shared learning across evolving UK national and international training contexts and approaches, including Singapore, Russia, Rwanda, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Albania. Opportunities for UK national and international cohorts/trainings to meet and share different perspectives and experiences is beneficial. For example, Marcela López Levy, seminar leader for the London Diploma in Group Analysis, reported that in July 2023 she arranged a shared seminar on the subject of the matrix, with students from Group Analysis India. The seminar was timed to ensure that the London cohort fitted around the Indian Standard Time zone and curriculum timetable. Whilst feedback from the London and India cohorts attending the seminar was very positive, López Levy’s reflections on the process of reciprocal student learning across international Global North and Global South borders include: (a) careful consideration of the dynamics of who is teaching who and what, with explicit naming of unconscious colonial dynamics of appropriation; (b) ensuring spaces to think about colonial enactments are provided following the learning exchange to allow locations of disturbance to be unpacked and processed; (c) ensuring that the timing of the international learning exchange does not fall on cultural and/or religious calendar, or on the last session of the international timetable; (d) ensuring that detailed preparation between the seminar or learning space facilitators and students takes place.

- Bringing group analysis to different international contexts is not the decolonization of the trainings. Blackwell argues

There is the issue of ‘exporting’ something we call ‘group analysis’, (primarily developed in the UK and Europe) to formerly colonized places and communities still subjugated through various post-colonial relations by the British, European and US powers. Particularly, there is the question of, how can we even think in terms of exporting it, or even, to put it slightly differently, of facilitating its export, from the British/European end and its import by those ‘others’ who want to take it on, without that in itself becoming an exercise in further colonization and cultural imperialism? (Blackwell, 2021: 6)

Decolonization of group analysis across international contexts troubles dominant, white, western frames of reference, models of practice and ideologies, for example the dominance of the English language as the preferred or only mode of speaking, writing and reading. There is learning for everyone in group analysis about the work and activities of the International Courses Committee (ICC), the European Group Analytic Training Institutions Network (EGATIN) and Group Analytic Society International (GASi). The ICC Annual Report 2022 states

The work challenges our preconceptions about what group-analytic trainings should look like and demands that we articulate what we see as the core elements that are essential for any such training and those to which we can take a more flexible approach . . . The experience we have all gained about providing training—therapy, supervision, and theory—online must surely be harnessed to inform our understanding of what constitutes a group-analytic training that is fit for purpose here and outside the UK in the 21st-century.

- Sharing how group analysis is applied in creative, inclusive ways across the UK. For example, the ‘HEART’ collaboration between the University of Manchester Institute of Teaching and Learning and Group Analysis North. HEART uses an approach to Higher Education Anti-Racism Training based on group-analytic principles in median group spaces for staff to explore racism.

- What can be learned from other modalities of practice, institutions/organizations and grassroots groups that are further ahead than group analysis in decolonizing? ‘Models of Group Dialogue on Climate Justice’ series of experiential online workshops (Oct 2023–March 2024) convened by Marion Neffgen, medical psychotherapist and XR activist, and Marcela López Levy, group analyst exemplifies cross-fertilization with decolonial practitioners and activists. These workshops facilitated links between group practitioners and an ecology of group practices. Models of group dialogue on climate justice include social dreaming, climate cafes (based on Death Cafes), Buddhism and ideas from systems thinking, deep ecology, ecopsychology, spiritual traditions, and anti-oppression movements. ‘Black Female Group Analysts Speak’ webinar (October, 2023), chaired by Foluke Taylor, author of ‘Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room’ (Taylor, 2023) also exemplified cross-fertilization with decolonial practitioners and activists. The diversity of the webinar audience demonstrates that cross-fertilization enhances reach and relevance within and beyond group analysis.

- The IGA needs a cartography of what is happening where, in order to respond to gaps in knowledge and facilitate cross-fertilizations.

- Widening the legitimacy of where and for whom Qualifying Course (QC) training groups can happen, beyond the NHS and traditionally recognized settings, is urgently needed. The reach and relevance of group analysis in community settings and grassroot activist organizations/groups must be embraced. Notions of what constitutes a heterogenous QC training group must be based on intersectionality, not reductionist gender and race or social problem categories. Under the lens of intersectionality, a training group (or any group) constituted of only racially minoritized people is heterogenous. No one is just their race, gender, disability, age, sexuality or other social construct. Under the lens of intersectionality, a training group (or any group) constituted of people with a specific social problem, for example sexual violence or forced migration is heterogenous.

- Group analysis must embrace the concept and practice of co-production. People in group analysis, including training cohorts come from diverse theoretical backgrounds including critical psychology, critical race, Black feminist, and queer theory—how are group-analytic curricula and group analysis generally using this knowledge?

- Another question concerns how far the design, content, delivery and assessment of group-analytic curricula involve students in group analysis and other relevant stakeholders. For example, the Qualifying Course 2 Cohort, Group Analysis India (GAI), presented a proposal, written by Shama Parkhe, to the ICC in January 2023 entitled ‘Proposal for the creative expansion of the qualifying process’. The introduction stated: ‘As part of our qualifying process, the QC2 cohort has been discussing the requirements and, particularly, the essays required to qualify as group analysts . . . being the first GAI cohort, we feel a sense of responsibility and ownership in the growth and development of GAI’. The proposal asked: ‘Could we adapt the qualifying requirements to local cultures and contexts? The proposal stated: ‘When GA courses start in countries outside the UK, adapting them to local contexts is crucial to understanding and fulfilling the learning needs of students/learners/trainees in those countries . . . a response to the evolving needs of a community’. To date, the GAI QC 3 cohort are required to follow the traditional IGA assessment mode of writing an essay. Blackwell (2023: 16–18) argues that ‘alternative forms of “assessment” or “validation” can readily be found once we are free from the preconceptions and established paradigms in which we have become somewhat imprisoned . . . Despite group analysis being a living spoken discourse, has writing come to take precedence over talking?’

Evaluation and feedback mechanisms

How invitations for feedback or raising a concern are received is a matter of power, privilege and position. Marginalization in the social unconscious produces marginalization in the process and response to the invitation. Do evaluation processes explicitly name/frame intersectional power, privilege and position? How does the IGA invitation for feedback or raising a concern take account of an internalized unequal sense of entitlement?

Findings

- The Rising Concerns Guardian initiative developed by the IGA’s Rising Concerns Group (RCG) is part of IGA’s anti-discrimination policy. The RCG explains the structure and process in the following way:

We are acting on behalf of and are ultimately responsible to the IGA’s Board of Trustees. The RCG has three main functions:

- To air concerns from voices that may not otherwise be heard and to promote dialogue that may be capable of resolving concerns before they become problems.

- To identify problems early and find potential solutions.

- To report back to the organization about these problems, solutions and difficulties encountered.

- We will work to support the democratic and inclusive principles of the IGA.

Consultation with the Group Analysis Associate Trainee group (GAATS) in June 2023 revealed student experiences including: ‘we say things but have no idea where it goes’, ‘it is hard to get a sense of what actions are being taken as a result of our feedback’, ‘when we go to the National Training Review we would like the minutes, we need to feel we belong to the process’.

Recommendations

The recommendations of the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis Project’ Report (2024) are a triangulation of the ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023) and work of the PPP group. The recommendations give explicit and practical guidance on what is required and how to do it. Implementing the recommendations must be mandatory and require mechanisms for all people responsible for any element of group-analytic training to evidence and be held to account for putting decolonization into practice. Multifaceted dissemination of the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis’ Report (2023) across the whole of the IGA membership, including the group-analytic training community.

Summary recommendations

Decolonizing group analysis must be prioritised in IGA core business, reflected in how and where resources are allocated. Approaches relying on colonial dynamics of the labour of people who occupy subjugated social positions is not an embedded systemic institutional commitment to decolonization.

The guiding principles of the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis Project’ Report (2024) underpin the recommendations, with particular emphasis on:

- Exclusion is not inclusion within an already established structure.

- Intersectionality.

- Cross-fertilization.

- Co-production.

Action planning with a theory of change

Decolonizing the colonial practice and theory matrix of group analysis requires tangible actions, measurable impacts and identified immediate-to-long-term outcomes. A theory of change method offers an evidence base for future planning.

Co-produce a Decolonizing the Curriculum Action Plan identifying a five-year trajectory of action-orientated goals. This should be placed on the IGA website, linked to the IGA mission and accessible to everyone within the IGA and external stakeholders.

Identify IGA governance structures to review and monitor the IGA Decolonizing the Curriculum Action Plan.

Use a Theory of Change tool for each Action Plan Goal to specify the activities’ immediate and long-term outcomes, outputs, resources, context, assumptions and resources.

Centres delivering group-analytic curricula create local co-produced Decolonizing the Curriculum Action Plans and aligned Theory of Change.

Decolonizing curriculum, environment and experience: Curricula as dynamic context

National minimum requirements of group analysis curricula must be reviewed in light of the ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis Project’ Report (2024) and the ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023).

Build a resource repository about decolonizing group analysis, accessible to everyone in the IGA training community.

A rolling series of training/workshops on the ‘curriculum as a dynamic context’, ‘emancipatory critical pedagogical praxis’, and allyship as pedagogy.

In light of the IGA training community where ‘racialized minorities constitute less than 10% of the population’ (Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey Report, 2023), the IGA must act to increase the number of intersectionally racialized people in the IGA. How many training course directors/convenors, training analysts, and Board of Trustee members are people of colour? What barriers and institutional systems lead to this discriminatory demographic profile?

Decolonizing the conceptual framework of group analysis

Curricula assessment criteria and tasks must require evidence of understanding and application of emancipatory conceptual frameworks such as queer, critical race and Black feminist theory, and particularly intersectionality.

Decolonizing group-analytic experiential spaces of dynamic exploration

IGA teaching staff and Training Group Analysts must evidence continual professional development (CPD), including supervision regarding intersectionality and decolonization to inform their practices.

The group-analytic curricula must ‘introduce more experiential/reflective groups during study days to help identify and process institutional dynamics and trauma’ (Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey 2023).

Languages of decolonizing power, privilege and position

IGA people in positions of power and decision-making to evidence and be held to account for promoting a group-analytic vocabulary of decolonized intersectional equity.

Rolling CPD programme to embed a conceptual lexis of decolonizing group analysis generally and the decolonization of group-analytic training specifically.

Action to address colonial structures and dynamics that silence and inhibit intersectionally subjugated people in society. Collection and evaluation of quantitative and qualitative data focused on dynamics of power, privilege and position that legitimate inequitable participation in group analysis generally, and group-analytic training specifically.

Cross-fertilization is vital to decolonizing group analysis

The IGA must learn from others, especially grassroots groups who are further ahead in decolonizing.

The IGA must act to embed subjugated situated knowledges of trainees.

The IGA needs a cartography of what is happening and where across the IGA, to foster cross-fertilization.

Evaluation and feedback

The design of—and invitations to participate in—evaluation and feedback must account for concrete and unconscious institutional and societal barriers to speaking out faced by intersectionally subjugated people in the group-analytic training community.

More rigorous IGA response to feedback so that trainees feel heard and valued within feedback and evaluation processes.

Existing and developing work across the IGA on evaluation and feedback mechanisms, data collection, and dissemination of themes arising must be resourced, and lessons learned for continual improvement.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I give gratitude to the IGA PPP working group, the authors of the ‘Discrimination and Othering in the IGA Survey’ Report (2023: PPP Training and Governance Subgroup) and the Decolonizing the Curriculum Steering group. Special thanks for the thinking, editing and solidarity of the PPP Curriculum sub-group who helped me turn the report into this article, with particular reference to Debra Nash, Deborah Licorish, and Sarah Tucker.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Institute of Group Analysis Legacy Fund. To access the full ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum of Group Analysis Project’ Report (2024) contact the Institute of Group Analysis.

ORCID iD

Suryia Nayak

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