Groups in Transactional Analysis, Object Relations, and Family Systems

Studying Ourselves in Collective Life

N. Michel Landaiche, III

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000081787
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Industrie- & Organisationspsychologie

Groups are arguably an essential and unavoidable part of our human lives—whether we are part of families, work teams, therapy groups, organizational systems, social clubs, or larger communities. In Groups in Transactional Analysis, Object Relations, and Family Systems: Studying Ourselves in Collective Life, N. Michel Landaiche, III addresses the intense feelings and unexamined beliefs that exist in relation to groups, and explores how to enhance learning, development and growth within them.

Landaiche's multidisciplinary perspective is grounded in the traditions of Eric Berne's transactional analysis, Wilfred Bion's group-as-a-whole model, and Murray Bowen's family systems theory. The book presents a practice of studying ourselves in collective life that utilizes a naturalistic method of observation, analysis of experiential data, and hypothesis formation, all of which are subject to further revision as we gather more data from our lived experiences. Drawing from his extensive professional experience of group work in a range of contexts, Landaiche deftly explores topics including group culture, social pain, learning and language, and presents key principles which enhance and facilitate learning in groups.

With a style that is both deeply personal and theoretically grounded in a diverse range of studies, Groups in Transactional Analysis, Object Relations, and Family Systems presents a contemporary assessment of how we operate collectively, and how modern life has changed our outlook. It will be essential reading for transactional analysts in practice and in training, as well as other professionals working with groups. It will also be of value to academics and students of psychology, psychotherapy, and group dynamics, and anyone seeking to understand their role within a group.

See the below link to an interview about the book with Tess Elliott:

https://vimeo.com/510266467

1

Engaged research

For many years, my professional involvement with transactional analysis was limited to my affiliation with TA-trained colleagues. My own work as a psychotherapist and human relations consultant was informed almost exclusively by psychoanalytic theory, although in later years I increasingly studied and used Bowen’s family systems theory in my work with individuals and organizations. As I struggled to integrate these different strands of my professional life and training, my interest in and contact with the transactional analysis community grew substantially. I was especially drawn to the community’s efforts to foster a practice that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

One colleague, for example, had expertise in transactional analysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and group process. When she mentioned that she would be conducting a three-day workshop for advanced, not-yet-certified transactional analysis trainees, I asked if I could observe. I wanted to understand how her attention to and interpretation of group dynamics could support individuals in learning about the problems encountered in their clinical and educational work. She agreed to my request, as did the training program’s director. My research focus was to be the effects of the trainer’s practice on the group.

Twenty-four trainees were present. As a group, they were culturally and professionally diverse—counselors, psychotherapists, educators, and organizational consultants. Their depth of professional experience varied considerably. They were asked to present points of impasse or exceptional difficulty in their ongoing work with a client or organization. This was to be examined in light of parallel process, transference, countertransference, and developmental and character issues. Demonstration supervision would address experientially the difficulties group members were having on the job.

The trainees were not given prior notice of my presence as a researcher-observer. The first day, I simply introduced myself and my background and described my interest in being there. My contract with the group was to remain silent, whether taking notes or sitting there. Group members were shyly welcoming. One expressed appreciation for the fact that someone had an interest in researching transactional analysis.

I saw some individuals on occasion watching me, although infrequently and eventually not at all. A few kidded me about taking notes. A few asked questions, during breaks, about what I was noticing or thinking. But the workshop schedule was so tight that there was not time to answer other than in broad generalities. Between group sessions and at the end of each day, I talked at length with my colleague, the trainer, about what I was seeing and what she was noting. That was the basic setup.

What’s going on here?

I have, over the years, conducted many intensive groups. Compared to those experiences, this workshop proved unremarkable in its dynamics. So, I was unprepared for its intense emotional impact on me. Freed of the responsibility for facilitating the group’s process, I wondered, why would my affective levels be so much higher than usual?

My focus shifted immediately away from the trainer’s behavior to the palpable difficulties being lived out, in the group, by the participants as they presented their challenges with clients. I became so immersed in the process that I often had no idea what I was thinking. For the first day and a half, I wrote almost continuously, noting what caught my attention or generated questions. I filled pages with these fragments and free associations. Then, for the second day and a half, I sat without writing, as if I had already captured all I needed, yet all the while finding myself more and more exhausted. It was like endurance training, far more demanding than having an active role.

On two occasions I did not restrain myself and made statements about what I saw in the group. I could tell by the puzzled faces of the group members that they did not understand what I was saying and were confused about my speaking at all. Although my contract violations seemed to create no lasting problems, I wondered how my “outbursts” might have been experienced in a less sturdy group.

I could not tell what I was learning. I could not remember why I was there. Keenly engrossed, as I was, with how the culture of transactional analysis hindered and helped its practitioners and how the practice of helping actually worked in the untidy midst of human relations, I still found the 3 days to be endless and felt I would burst with fullness. I was both committed to being there and itching to run from the room.

I gradually became invisible to the group, in part because they had so little interaction with me, in part because I presented no apparent threat, and largely because of their increasing engagement with the material and learning in the group.

Yet during the participants’ closing remarks and feedback, I was startled when one of them addressed me directly by saying, “I thought at first you were going to watch us, like we were bugs under a microscope. But you were very respectful. I didn’t feel like you were watching us as much as watching out for us.” Many heads began nodding in agreement accompanied with warm smiles.

Whether from exhaustion or from gratitude for this man’s interpretation—for his effort to give meaning to something I had not seen—tears came to my eyes. His comment helped me feel what I had been living outside of my awareness. But still I had no idea what had actually happened. I had only the sense of discovering something important, something I had not consciously set out to find.

The risk of gathering data

One of the paradoxes of professional relationships with clients, students, or others who come to us for help is that we are supposed to maintain our objectivity even as we, too, may become infected by what the person has brought us to work with. This is an inevitable consequence of our agreement to listen to and think with someone emotionally troubled. We literally open ourselves to the impact of their affective world. Something of their experience comes to reside uncannily within our bodies and selves.

Psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion (1897–1979), throughout his life and writings, acknowledged the problem inherent in this way of working:

In turning ourselves into receptors we are taking a big risk. From what we know of the universe we live in some of the information may be most unwelcome; the sound or signal we receive may not be of the kind that we want to interpret, to diagnose, to try to pierce through.

(Bion, 1980, p. 60)

Yet this risky procedure—of receiving what we may not want to know—is precisely how we come to be of help. We do not just apply our cognitive capabilities to sets of words or facts; we figure out how one can live within the same emotional forces that are disrupting another’s life or capacity to function well. It was Bion’s insight that the psychoanalyst or other helping professional first processes the client’s unconscious material at a bodily, felt level, and then essentially works up from the body into the mind, where that experience can be symbolized even as it remains bodily rooted.

Bion’s work and contributions to psychoanalytic theory were familiar to Eric Berne, in keeping with the latter’s awareness of and interest in other psychoanalytic writings of his time. In The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups (Berne, 1963), for example, he noted:

Bion is one of the few people who have tried to observe what goes on in a group from a naturalistic point of view, not trying to prove or disprove anything but merely asking themselves: “What’s going on here?” In some ways Bion’s work is more interesting than the usual commonplace statistical studies.

(p. 102)

Berne’s link between Bion’s thought and attitude of research into human phenomena helped me understand that one of Bion’s key concepts—that of the containing function—might describe more than just the responsible and useful behavior of a parent, teacher, mentor, consultant, or psychotherapist. It might also elucidate a process whereby research need not interfere with treatment nor just evaluate its outcomes. Conceived in light of containing, I wondered if research might itself perform a therapeutic or educative function that would enhance our work as professionals in a variety of fields.

Bion’s containing function

Among the many contributions made by Bion to psychoanalytic theory and practice, perhaps best known is his concept of the containing function, which he developed over the course of his career in such works as Learning from Experience (1962/1977c), Elements of Psycho-Analysis (1963/1977b), and Attention and Interpretation (1970/1977a), to name a few.

As Bion used the term in his many writings, “containing” has a special meaning. It denotes a series of critical steps in an interpersonal process. He proposed thinking of this process prototypically in terms of the mother–child dyad, a proposal that drew initially on the work of Melanie Klein. He theorized that the child’s unorganized, unconscious bodily experiences of being alive in the world would be communicated nonverbally and concretely to the mother. The mother would receive such communications primarily at the body level. In ideal circumstances, she would sit with the unsettledness or discomfort picked up from her child, generally corresponding to the child’s highly charged experience of hunger, fear, fury, or excitement. The mother would then respond, after reflection, in a manner that would relieve the stress (for example, by providing food or attenuating the alarming stimulus) or that would name it (perhaps by saying, “I know. You don’t want me to put you down right now. But I have to go do something and will be right back”). Through her act of reception, reflection, and response, mother conveys a felt sense of being able to bear lived experiences rather than needing to push them out of sight and consciousness, like so many unpleasant thoughts.

To illustrate, I remember when my then-infant daughter was first being weaned from her mother’s breast in readiness for her mother’s return to work, sooner than any of us would have preferred. It was my job to get our baby used to the bottle. Her initial response was utter fury and noncompliance. And based on that display, I had the distinct impression that I was murdering her, crazy as that may sound in retrospect. I was so caught up in the moment and in the passion of her protest that I believed the worst. I recall the nearly overpowering urgency I felt to hand her right back to her mother, calling off the whole awful mistake. But then, looking down at my livid baby, it occurred to me that she might be feeling as if I were killing her by introducing this rubber-tipped, plastic object filled with formula. Of course, I knew it was not my intent. I also knew the transition would not kill her, although I felt deeply sympathetic to her distress, loss, and anger. With this awareness, I felt a distinct shift in my body, in which I held side by side both sympathy and the confidence that she could adjust to this traumatic change. That is, I was able to contain my initial bodily panic and fantasy (of harming her), reflect on the possible source of those feelings, come to some sense of accord within myself, and then convey that balance to my daughter. No, she did not immediately calm down. But I was able to remain present in a way that eventually allowed her to adjust, in her own time, unimpeded by my own reciprocal hysteria. What I remember most was the feeling of having awakened from a dream or mini-psychosis, accompanied by a sense of sturdiness at having separated myself while remaining in contact with her—engaged but not entangled.

Bion suggested that in a normal process of development, this sequence of communication, reception, reflection, and considered response helps the child learn to process her or his own experiences. Furthermore, although Bion specifically referenced the mother–child dyad, he saw this as a universal interpersonal exchange between any two or more intimates. In particular, he was concerned with this communicative interaction between the psychoanalyst and patient, which exchange bore directly on the success of treatment. As with the mother in relation to her child, the analyst or other helping professional could demonstrate that the client’s internal emotional world could be suffered realistically rather than avoided and elaborated into catastrophic or magical “phantasies.”

The term phantasy is used by Kleinian analysts to indicate an unconscious narration of bodily experience that differs from our more conscious fantasies or stories. An infant, for example, may link the experiences of hunger-then-gratification (or separation-then-anguish) with the clustered feel-smell-sound of her or his mother. Based on the infant’s own temperament, as well as the rhythm developed with the mother, a story or hypothesis about certain feeling states (hunger, gratification, contact loss, pain, Mommy) will be developed in which the infant’s sense of autonomy and helplessness will play a role in connection with that of the powerful (giving, withholding, loving, or hateful) parental figure. Even more, the infant will begin unconsciously to live this story about what it means to be alive. These unaware and archaic qualities of phantasy are similar to those of script and protocol in transactional analysis. However, phantasy also differs in that the narrative arrangement is not impressed on each of us but actively created, outside awareness, as a function of our human predilection for making sense of sensory experiences. Furthermore, we make these unconscious bodily stories not only as infants and children but throughout life. And as with script and protocol, phantasies operate as more than just simple explanations we create but also as templates that guide our behavior and choices.

Receiving

In his conception of containing, Bion meant more than just biting one’s tongue. He described containing as a sequence of receiving, mentally processing, and speaking or interpreting. It is not easy work, and each step in the process is equally critical. A therapist, consultant, or teacher must first be receptive to the communication from the client or student, which inevitably comes loaded with emotionality. That emotionality or affect must then be held and mentally chewed over—lived within and digested—in order to understand the nature of the emotional communication. At that point, it becomes necessary to speak to the truth or fact of that communication, no matter how hard it is to hear and know.

We often think of communication as occurring through words or through developed nonverbal symbols (images, gestures, sounds, or touch). Bion and many other psychoanalysts, however, have been concerned with communications that are sent and received unconsciously, outside ordinary channels of awareness. These communiqués are typically states of bodily affect, the ways we register life’s impacts as well as the surges within our own dynamic bodies, similar to Daniel Stern’s (1985) concept of vitality affects. Some of these affects can be subtle; others arrive with the full force of a storm. And yet they can remain undetected by our minds, especially if the emotions correspond to experiences for which we have no ready words or shared symbols. Entire swaths of life can exist in a limbo of unexamined experience. Bion termed these beta elements, the bits and chunks from which we eventually hope to structure our consciousness. As psychoanalyst Michael Eigen (1998) put it, “[Bion] calls on us to face the fact that our ability to process experience is not up to the experience we must process. This is not only so in infancy, but all life long” (p. 99).

Human beings are inclined to put unpleasant experiences out of mind; in fact, such experiences may never reach consciousness. They are repressed, split off, relegated to the outer limits of the bodymind. Yet, as with offshore dumping, these repressed experiential contents have a nagging way of floating back, muddying the waters of our status quo. Sometimes, too, these rejected experiences find their way into the bodies of those close to us, as reverberations transmitted through a process that psychoanalysts and others have termed projection. That term captures the force with which these orphaned bodily experiences can be aimed to hit their targets, but it also has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that we are broadcasting to one another along invisible radio waves. It is more accurate and simpler to say that, as human beings, we are acutely sensitive to one another: to tones of voice, to minuscule facial twitches, to muscular tensions, to smells, to changes in breathing. Countless cues operate outside awareness to signal changing states in a person, changes that can be picked up nearly instantaneously by someone in proximity and even relayed in a flash throughout a group, community, organization, or family. Affect is extremely contagious, especially when burning.

I worked once with a man, a physician by profession, with whom I used to find myself moved to tears in the middle of his sarcastic and complaint-filled stories. At those moments when what I felt intensely did not match his words, he typically responded to my inquiries by claiming to feel nothing, a claim his body language seemed to support. He looked at me as if I were crazy. Yet over the course of several years, we were able to link my feeling states to his aggressively repressed inner life. Gradually, he began to cry. I was then free to feel with him, not just for him. Eventually, he found these words to describe his everyday work with his own medical patients:

If I get overwhelmed, if I have a patient I don’t know how to help, nothing is in my brain. They want help. I draw a blank. It feels bad. It begins to feel out of my hands, like a patient I can’t understand. If I can’t make the connections, I don’t want to deal wi...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1. Engaged research
• 2. The shared bodymind
• 3. Learning and hating in groups
• 4. Social pain dynamics in human relations
• 5. Looking for trouble in professional development groups
• 6. Maturing as a community effort
• 7. Groups that learn and groups that don’t
• 8. The learning community
• 9. Principles and practices of group work
• 10. Closing reflections
• References
• Index