The Communitas Project

Introduction to Articles by Thom Osborn

Here are some articles I wrote a long time ago. Re-reading them recently, I think they are still of interest, still relevant to our time, and remain illuminating for the work we are undertaking in these training events.
They go back to the 70s and 80s, when I worked on the design and running of two courses. The first was at the Polytechnic (as it was then) of North London, in the Organisation Change Unit of the Management Studies Department, together with John Southgate.  The second was in the Counselling Skills courses at Southwark College, with Brigid Procter.
The students on these courses played a large part in what they learned and how the programme was structured.  Both were for mature students, already experienced in some related field: but I don’t think their level of ‘maturity’ affects the issues addressed here. I believe this approach to be valid at every level of achievement.
The courses came to be called ‘self-directed’, but that title ignores the collective planning that the students, together with the staff, are thrown into. 
So: the determining of what an individual student is motivated to learn; and the collective work on how to put into practice a plan which will use the available resources to make these motivations possible: I believe that both these aspects were, and remain, of vital importance in two respects. One is the developing of personal and collective responsibility. And the other is a move towards resolving a central issue of our society: namely, how to integrate collaboration and competition - or, in other words, how to resolve the polarisation between co-operation and entrepreneurial freedom.
I was working in an educational setting.  But the articulating of individual wants and needs; and the interaction and shaping of a way to achieve these which gives voice and value to all of those involved: these are, I believe central to how we need to approach the social, economic and environmental problems of our time.  And not just in an ‘organisational’ framework, but in a psychological one, at all levels from intrapersonal to global.
I stopped working in this field after Margaret Thatcher came to power. This kind of approach was replaced by ‘management’ and ‘targets’. The work we had done somehow fizzled out. I lost energy for it and went on to other things.
These are old articles, and much in them was written in the context of their time. But reading them again after all these years, in the context of planning these events we are now putting on, I believe the narrative they provide from back then is still useful in looking at what we are doing now.
The first provides a kind of general history of that Polytechnic course. The next two describe the structuring of learning along these lines in the South-West London course. The fourth and fifth were more general, around the issue of responsibility (all were published in the journal ’ Self And Society’ between 1975 and 1984).
A lot of water has flown under many bridges since those days. Please only read them to the extent that they engage your attention!

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The British Experience

by Tom Osborn

[This is a shortened version of a contribution to a conference set up in around 1976 by ARIP (l'Assocation pour Recherche et Intervention Psychosociologique). It was called the Politics of Groups (or of 'Training' - Formation is the french word) and the aim of the conference was to look at the implications of a law passed in France in 1971 as a result of the 1968 crisis by which every adult has right to time for continuing further education, including social skills learning.]

In May 1968, which is a date that has become part of the French language, I ran a happenings group. We did improvised events, not directly political, aimed at affecting people's view of the world but not specifically their political consciousness. We performed in the London Arts Laboratory, in colleges and in the street. We took a minor part in the sit-ins at Hornsey School of Art and at the London School of Economics. One of our most successful events was when we stuck rubbish down on the pavement in Tottenham Court Road - a main road in the West End of London.

I think my own experience symbolises the difference between Britain and France, at least at that time. In my country, whatever happened in 1968, it only manifestly affected the student world and the art world, the avant-garde if you like. Factories, the commercial world, the working population, were untouched.

There has been some more serious political activity in Britain since, but in a way it still characterises the British experience. Britain is a place where a lot of exciting, innovative, sophisticated new-world activity, and I call our work exciting, innovative, often sophisticated and 'new-world' in the sense that it is striving for clearly a new and better way of life, Britain is a place where a lot of such activity goes on; in small enclosed pockets in London and one or two university towns; which has virtually no impact on the general economic or cultural or educational life of the country.

Your law of l971 would be quite extraordinary in Britain. There is a complete absence of any equivalent. It's true there is provision for training in technical skills, on a 'day-release' basis. What this means is that companies are encouraged to give some people one day a week off to study. But this is given and taken in order to learn some skill which will improve the employee's usefulness, as far as the company is concerned, and his career prospects as far as the student himself is concerned. Social skills training under this scheme would be quite unheard of.

Social skills training is in any case regarded with extreme suspicion by the trade unions and the working population altogether. They view it as a tool of management, and of course they are usually right. It is easy to understand this suspicion. Who pays, after all? What can someone, who is paid for at the rate of £100 per day or more [NB remember this was in 1976], what can he know of the interests of the ordinary shop-floor worker?

But even within the co-operative movement, which is relatively small, not comparable with your movement in France, even within this movement - for example in the Industrial Common Ownership Movement, of which I am a member - there is an ignorance and suspicion of training and group methods. Interest is expressed at conference and in conversation, but there is no commitment to serious work in this way, although my perception is that these firms would greatly benefit from such work.

In the field of education, almost no work of this kind goes on, neither in schools nor in higher education institutions. Such work has been done for some years in Denmark and in Germany and is growing, but in my country it is virtually non-existent. There is a little organisation development work in the technical skills of administrators; and there are school counsellors for individuals. But nothing in the social skills or in the human relationships area at the group and organisational levels, within the established system at any rate. There are Rogerian groups for teachers at the growth centre Community (run by Alan Lowen) and a sensitivity group at the Teachers' Centre which Neil Wilson managed to slip through before a disapproving Inspector noticed it.

The exception is in the management studies departments of polytechnics. Here, of course, it is main ly geared to the needs of industrial companies or else to the needs of government departments or social welfare agencies. But it is not related to an understanding of the change process that our society is going through, and to working on the difficult, deliberate, conscious transition, in individual people and in social organisms, that this process requires. This would be too close to political action.

I worked for four years at the Polytechnic of North London, where we did succeed in developing such a course. I think it was a rather unique situation. I would like to describe its development to you now.

I think it is interesting because of the way our small unit related to its environment, within the Polytechnic and outside it. And because I can now see how what we were attempting to do was influenced and shaped and limited, and perhaps subverted, by many circumstances which had nothing to do with our deliberate intention or our degree of political consciousness. These circumstances were sometimes quite arbitrary and sometimes a part of the institutional structure within which we were working. Often they were outside our control and sometimes outside our consciousness. And I can now see how these circumstances affected the wider success or failure of what we were doing.

I worked in a unit called the Applied Behavioural Science Division, which was a rather small part of the Management Studies Department. Polytechnics in England are geared to a practical training for a job. Success is seen in terms of how well students have been equipped to compete in the job market. They are not, as Universities are, geared to pure knowledge or the research that goes with it. So the Management Studies Department as a whole was for people who were following careers in some kind of management occupation. All the students were 'post-experience'. They had already been in jobs. They were usually studying for some kind of Diploma or Masters degree which would give them additional skills and greater value at work. This context within which we worked has some importance in my story.

The people who came on the courses in our unit, in contrast, just came for a week or two, and were not evaluated by means of a diploma or in any other way.

When I first arrived, which was in 1969, the unit was doing conventional skills training with mainly managerial groups. We ran a lot of T-Groups with some structured exercises put in. We also ran groups for the nursing staffs of hospitals and for child care officers doing further training. But the ideological context in all groups was managerial.

By this I mean that the work was based on the practice of skills useful to people who were taking the roles of managers in their social organism. So these groups were concerned with the work relationships between such people, and with their ability to influence subordinates.

They did not question the nature of the economic and power structure in the organisations from which the group participants came. They did not investigate together how far participants could, or should, or wanted to, extend their level of decision-making in their organisations. They did not develop a collective approach to the use of the resources of their organisation. These issues did not occur to the participants, and they were not raised by us. The work focussed on the effects of the behaviour of individuals on the group; on interpersonal issues, such as communication between individuals; on individual skills such as listening, making a case, giving support etcetera; on leadership and influence issues; on group skills such as decision-making; and on inter-group issues of conflict and co-operation. An awareness of group process was brought in, relating to such skills. An over-all picture seeing skills as perceptive skills, diagnostic skills and action skills was drawn. The Schutz phases of inclusion, control and affection provided another kind of picture, developing through time. And other concepts were sometimes drawn on, such as the avoidance behaviours described by Bion.

The training style and the designs were based on the work of the National Training Laboratories, USA, which some members of the Polytechnic group had previously acquired at Leeds. The style was open and participative: in the way the trainer behaved. It was rarely open in areas such as how much trainers (or participants at their job either) were paid. Nor was it participative in the design or programme of the work. The group, or the groups in a workshop, were entities without a context. They did no work on their own structural organisation except in so far as this affected relationships within a group or in the way it related to another group. Such work as went on which could give rise to organisational learning took place within quite strict limits, imposed through a mute acceptance of the power structure of the client organisation.

You can see how the structuring of these groups within the context of the Polytechnic as a learning organisation reflects the situation of the participants in their own organisations. They were groups with a silent context; just as the work situation of most people exists in a silent context.

Where the job of the participants was dealing with people, then the kinds of skill, the modes of relating, were not different in the work of these groups. They were human only in order to make the working relationships more effective. Any radical change in the power relationship between, for example, nurses and patients, or child care officers and their children was simply not considered.

I don't mean to say that these groups were without value. That was in 1969. Perhaps this is what most people who came to such groups in Britain were ready to learn, then. I am telling you these details so that you may understand how it was frustrating for me, and for John Southgate, who had been at the Polytechnic for some years when I arrived. And so that you may understand the relation between that existing situation (which I know is still the situation in most such Departments) and how we changed it.

Gradually, John Southgate and I formed an alliance. It wasn't based on any stated political position. We both had a strong impulse towards giving more responsibility to participants. This led us to work with large groups, with the participants themselves having increasing responsibility for design, and for management: such as decisions about where future groups should be held, what specialist staff should come (for example experts in music or drama for child care officers) and so on.

This, of course, meant that a whole new area of skills was opened up. People had to collectively recognise what they were after, and, jointly with others who wanted the same, to push for it. They no longer related individually to the trainers in their relation to management.

And the consensus model, so beloved by the NTL school in the small group, became useless for the development of a large group. The small group can behave like a family, in which the paterfamilias relates to the outside world. The large group must behave like an organisation. Of course it is possible for a large group, like an organisation, to be run paternalistically also, under a dictatorship. It is my view that the Tavistock large groups operate on this basis. But where responsibility is given to the group, it has to face its relation to the outside world as a collective. And this at once makes the group somewhat political. We ran large groups and into these we structured trainerless small groups.

The alliance between John and me became very powerful and had a big effect both on us and on the unit. For John, it had the effect of enabling him to bring politics into his job. For me, the rebellion that I had always felt against existing institutions, and acted on as an individual in various ways, crystallised into a political position. We influenced the designs and we influenced the nature of the clientele. We influenced them to such an extent that the commercial clients gradually disappeared, and the other staff also eventually left one by one! We replaced two of them with our colleagues Gary Robins and Troy Langley. They were both politically active.

Then we started the Diploma course. It was a 2-year, part time course. About 60 people came on the first intake, and continues to come each year. In this course, participants decided, for themselves as individuals, and for the course as a whole jointly with us, the staff, what their objectives were, how they would work at them, and also how well they had succeeded. In fact it was an extension of our aims as I have stated them.

But it also became, through external circumstances, a response to a critically contracting market for behavioural work which was occurring at that time.

The course was extremely radical for a Polytechnic. I became a member of the Academic Board, representing the Management Studies Department, of which our unit was quite a small part - my purpose being to help get the proposal for the course through. This in itself happened in a paradoxical way. Academic Board Representatives were elected. At my election, there was no other candidate. The rest of the department couldn't be bothered to nominate anyone else. They liked me well enough personally and they were glad that someone else would be doing the work involved. That is what is sometimes called in England the 'silent majority'.

The course was surrounded by paradoxes. The political word for a paradox is 'contradiction'. The central contradiction was like this. Here was a course based on the ideology of the collective use of resources, taken as far as we could take it. Also there was no selection: there were some formal requirements to meet the demands of the College, but no-one was ever refused entry, extremely unusual in England. And there was collective management and collective decision-making. But the aim was to get a professional diploma to help people in the job market!

Of course, this raised enormous problems over assessment. This was supposed to be by students themselves, in their work groups. They were supposed to assess each other by giving each other credits (or refusing credits) when they thought people had achieved competence in their chosen areas. However, this evaluation process, based on the idea of management by objectives and self control, has never yet been fully confronted. Well, the problem of standards and excellence seems to be very central in any social-change programme. It only reflects the reality.

There were some other paradoxes. In our department, we were badly dressed, we had beards, we supported the student Union against the central authority of the Polytechnic, we were suspected of joining in the smoking of marijuana and promiscuous sexual relations on our courses. Yet, as it happened in terms of degrees and so on, we were the best qualified; and we had the most successful marketing policy.

Director Miller, who was against what we were doing and whom we opposed, the Director privately and without any constitutional authority sent our Diploma Proposal to a friend of his in the Education Department at London University. At the Academic Board meeting where our proposal was considered, he got fed up with the discussion and suddenly explained he had done this, hoping to get the reply from his academic friend that our proposal was rubbish, but in fact the answer had come back that it was rather good. So he suggested that it be given a try. And the proposal immediately went through, because of course the people who had been opposing it, being authoritarians like himself, obeyed his word without question. So in fact he used his autocratic style to push through this radical educational proposal, put forward by a group of people who were active politically, and who had openly sided with the students who had occupied the college more than once for several weeks and were trying to get him out.

The students own position was paradoxical. They wanted Miller out because he was an educational elitist who declared he was going to run the Polytechnic like a University and so not geared to their needs. Yet their needs were to get a competitive professional training which would help them in the job market!

I want to say again that all these contradictions seem to be connected with the issue of quality and competence. One ultimate political problem seems to be: how do you ensure that things are done well without competition on the one hand and without central authority on the other? I think we have each to face this issue in our own situations.

My own situation at the Polytechnic ended about this time, that is some two years ago. I left. There were a number of reasons, some of them personal. But the relevant one for today is that I came to feel that we had reached the limit of what can be achieved in collectivity within the structure of the traditional institution.

The inevitable differences between staff and students were set by this structure. We were paid, they were paying. We were permanent, they were temporary. We were experts, they were learning. And so we mediated, in our roles within this structure, between the competitive, hierarchical nature of the real, outside world: outside the Polytechnic, and outside our unit within the Polytechnic; between those forces on the one hand, and the collective aspirations of ourselves and our students on the other. And this tension was not only very exhausting, but it often seemed unproductive in political significance.

I still feel it was a worthwhile achievement. Although I don't believe it has changed society, I do believe that many of the people who have done this course have much more power over their own lives than they had before. People have changed jobs, women have become assertive, homosexuals have come into the open. And sometimes I go to a meeting about one issue or another in London and I am struck by the large proportion of the articulate and conscious speakers taking part in discussion from the floor of the meeting who have been on the Polytechnic course. I am clear that in their own personal growth, and professional too, there has been some political effect.

And that takes me to the last part of my story, no longer the story of the Polytechnic but the story of me in encounter groups and the 'new therapies', as we call them in England. I went through a kind of personal crisis, which led me to do a lot of personal growth work with myself. I'm not going to tell this story in any detail, because there isn't time. But I want to say that I discovered that it was impossible for me to bring my political impulse into this work.

In all these activities, the direction is almost always exclusively towards individual growth. There is an ideology which says 'Take responsibility for yourself; and don't take it for other people'. I understand how this has arisen and often it is very constructive. But it isn't enough. It does not consider the many difficult boundary points where we have to make real decisions about responsibility for others, or for a social group. These activities have an aim of making a kind of perfect person: someone who feels and expresses freely what is in him, and whose energy flows without blocks. How can this be anything but a futile quest, since an individual is not an isolated energy system? These activities are not concerned with social growth or social awareness. In fact, in their work, the individual is indeed regarded as an isolated energy system. And in the structures that are set up, for groups and within the organisation of the growth centres where groups are held, they reproduce generally the same old traditional, authoritarian, non-participative structures, which now block energy in social organisms.

This is true of the management of most of the growth centres, and it is also true about the management of their groups. For instance, the ideology of 'take responsibility for yourself' means that time is just taken, taken hold of, by an individual in competition with other individuals. No work is done on the issues of competition and collective leadership at a group level, only in terms of personal hang-ups. Leaderless groups are very rare, and usually collapse within a few meetings. The normal pattern is: you pay a more perfect person than yourself to help you along the road to perfection.

What is important about this is, that no consciousness of the social organism and its energy flow and how this affects individuals, is worked on. And of course there is not a glimmer of understanding of the way in which people who go to these kind of groups are in fact taken responsibility for at a material level to quite an extent by the people in the social system of that society who do the material work, and by the poor nations of the world. And in fact all this adventurous activity in isolated pockets in one or two cities and university towns makes no impact whatever on the general culture of organisations.

The effect of this situation is that there's an almost complete polarisation between personal growth work and political activity. People either work on individual change, or they work on political change. But these two kinds of activity are combined by a very few people. One general exception is the women's movement.

The only places I know where there is a combination of our kind of work with political consciousness, such as communities in the country who have the idea of living in ecological balance with their environment, won't pay us a fee for working with them. For this reason I believe that all of us who work in this peculiar profession need to think very carefully about how we earn our money. I believe we should reduce our standard of living and learn another way of earning our living. However, I was not asked here to make this kind of intervention.

We can say, then, that our kind of work takes place in two ways in England. Firstly, in the context of management. This is for managers, usually of large concerns, both private companies and some public corporations and Government agencies. It is clearly and unashamedly work-orientated with the purpose of increasing productivity through improving relationships between managers, and of gaining the motivation of subordinates through improved managerial skill. It is paid for by the management. And there Is virtually no work at shop-floor level in England, except in very skilled situations like some chemical research laboratories, where the workers involved cannot be called working class. For these reasons it is, in my view, reactionary.

The other situation is in a counter-culture setting. I am talking about the growth centres and the 'new therapies'. In London there are now two large, busy growth centres, Quaesitor and Community, plus several smaller ones. Also there is a Gestalt Centre, a Centre for Bio-energy, an Institute for Psychosynthesis, some meditation centres and at least one centre of alternative medicine. These are elitist, they reproduce the traditional structures in their organisation and they repress a social and political consciousness. For these reasons they are, in my view, reactionary.

These two situations, in which our sort of work goes on, are completely separate. And, what is even more important, you will see that they are both separate from political activity. In general, in situations where political activity goes on, our sort of work does not.

Our work, I believe, is concerned with individual and social consciousness and action. Praxis, we could say. It's significant that this word is almost unknown in the english vocabulary. It seems there is little need to express this meaning. So, the more that significant social action is prevented in terms of the weight of the realities of power and ownership in a society, the more our work is channelled into political insignificance.

In Britain at this time, it is either channelled into a greater and more extended individualistic growth, attempting to achieve the powers of a class of Yogis. Or it is channelled into a managerial technique. I find this frustrating.

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Self-Direction 1

Planning a Student-directed Learning Programme

by Tom Osborn

[This paper was first published in Self and Society, Vol VII No.6, June 1979].

Now is the day of the trendy right.

Not so long ago, we were discovering a lot about how students could determine their own work. What has happened to all that valuable learning?

Self-direction, student planning, is no soft option. It needs its own disciplines and its own precision. Even if we assume that the staff on a course and the authorities of a college are willing: there are in particular three major obstacles which students themselves have to overcome in planning their own programme.

First, it is not easy for people to say, or to know, what they want to learn.

Second, it is not easy for people to recognise and to manage the resources available to them.

And third, it is not easy for individuals to join together collectively in organising a programme.

These difficulties are surely not inherent in human nature. Rather, they are due to the way people are brought up. Formulating what we want; handling. resources ourselves; and doing things by co-operation among equals: these are responsibilities which are largely withheld in our society. So we don't get much practice in exercising them.

Breakthrough

I have been obsessed, you might say, for years (or some years back you might have said I was one of the trendy left) with tackling these difficulties.

Some two years ago, on the staff of the courses in Counselling Skills at South-West London College, I believe we arrived at a structure for a programme-planning weekend which goes a long way towards overcoming them. We have now run this weekend structure as the start of six part-time, one-year courses (two per year). Each time it has resulted in viable programmes for the first term, which were carried out.

It is true that these courses are for mature students who already have some experience of what they have come on the course to work at. But this does not seem to make it any easier for them to deal with the difficulties of setting up a student directed programme.

It has been the structure that has made the difference. I regard it as something of a breakthrough, and my aim in writing this article is to share its features with those who want to use them. Perhaps others have made similar breakthroughs. I believe we should be hearing about them.

The Course

The programme -planning weekend is the first time this course meets as a whole, four or five months before the first term. Then the year itself consists of three 12-week terms of one afternoon a week. There is also an evaluation weekend and one or two more evaluation days, plus normally some occasional days or weekends as requested, and largely set up, by students. Individual supervision, mainly of course members' own counselling at work, also takes place, but this does not come into the joint planning of the course. There are 36-40 students and 4 staff members.

The weekend, which is residential, starts with a meal on Friday evening, followed by the first session. People introduce each other in pairs, then form groups of six as a way of facilitating the expression of their hopes and fears.

It is a rather standard group-work beginning. But this is not a weekend workshop which finishes with goodbyes and the learning being taken to another life. It is a weekend with the primary task of producing a timetable for the first term. It is the start of a real-life organisation which is jointly defining its own future.

Objectives and Resources

The hopes and fears will be about the weekend, and about the course as a whole. And they will also be about people's lives as a whole: which begins to open out the basis on which people will be formulating their objectives.

The three difficulties, that I listed at the start of this article, correspond with the three stages that a learning community has to move through in arriving at a programme. So the weekend has three main parts to it. The first is to define objectives; the second, to identify resources; and the third, to work out an actual timetable together.

These are not separate stages, one of which can be completed before the next one is begun. To some extent they depend on each other. Objectives may become clearer when resources are brought into view; the way in which available resources can meet objectives may not be seen until a concrete programme begins to be visible; and so on. Like with a complex piece of knitting, some parts of the pattern which have been started on earlier, may need to be left hanging while later parts are worked on.

The first part of Saturday morning, then, is devoted to identifying personal objectives for the course. After a short plenary, just to get started and establish a sense of the group as a whole, people are asked to prepare, individually, a list of their learning objectives.

The wording of the task we give is "What do you want to have achieved on this course by the end of the year?" After this, people work in groups of six or so, to prepare wall charts. These groups are not intended to arrive at consensus or agreement, but to represent everybody's objectives. The wall charts are then exhibited and looked at, over coffee.

Next, the process of identifying resources is started by an exploration of what resources course-members actually possess themselves. We ask people, again individually, to draw their own life chart, as a way of helping them to recognise how many of their experiences, in addition to formal education or training, form the material of valuable resources. For example, being married and bringing up children, speaking a foreign language or knowing a foreign country, being an acrobat or a salesman, having been bereaved or sick, having served a sentence on a drugs charge: any of these could be a resource. So could energy, articulateness, a sense of fun and so on. The life charts are again shared in the same small group and a general picture of these resources is prepared by each group for exhibiting.

Going into one's life-experience is an exercise that could easily take all day, so we say there is no time to do it full justice and its purpose here is to find out what resources are around in the group. We also emphasise that nobody is obliged to offer, for use by the course, a resource that they may have.

By lunch time, the walls will be well covered with an exhibition of lists and pictures of both objectives and resources.

The Staff

Staff members have also taken part, as a staff group, in both parts of the morning, producing their list of objectives and also in detail the resources that they can offer. We attach great importance to the objectives of the staff being visible. We do not pretend that we don't influence the nature of the course, and we want this influence to be open and accessible.

People are usually grateful. for a long break after this full morning. Just the life chart exercise has at times opened up charged areas for some. The free time between lunch and tea has given time for informal meetings to continue between individuals or occasionally in one of the small groups as a whole, as well as for walks, sleep and shopping.

This seems a good point to bring to the foreground the dynamic of such a community which, like every group, is an organism with a life of its own, composed of people who are emotional human beings. Needs to do with being included or remaining separate, with power and rivalry, with dependence and independence, with intimacy, may all at times become issues which vitalise, or block, achievement. Anyone familiar with group-work knows these phenomena. They are not mysteries, but to run this structure with success needs some experienced awareness of them.

After tea, we start with a short plenary at which one of the staff gives clarification of the various kinds of resources that are available to the course. There are the human resources, from staff, from outside specialists and from participants themselves; there are technical aids, such as video-equipment; there are books, films and tapes; places to visit; and so on.

Space and time are also resources, time being one of the most important of all. The aim of the afternoon is to focus on the matching of objectives to the resources available. The matching of the limited resource of time to what people want to achieve is the essence of a programme. Of course there is also a limit to the resource of money. For example, a definite budget exists for outside specialists. All these things have to be understood to make planning realistic.

People work once more in their small groups. This time, the task is to work out what resources they have within their small group to satisfy the objectives in that small group, and which ones they would need to seek outside their group. This provides a way of contacting people in other small groups; and of rehearsing the process of finding resources to meet objectives. This work is again recorded on wall charts which are exhibited and looked at, and there is a general discussion about any points that have come up.

Top Voice Groups

Now comes the most crucial part of the structure. It is the point at which people take responsibility for seeing that what they want actually gets into the programme.

What happens is that people decide what their topmast interest is, for learning on this course. They make a placard announcing it, which they go about displaying. This event we have called the Chinese Procession, an image that gives it an extra lift.

They find other people with the same, or a very similar, top voice interest displayed on their placards and they join up to form an interest group.

Such placards might read, for example, 'family counselling', 'psycho-analytic', 'ageing and bereavement', 'skills and techniques', 'personal growth', 'theory'.

This group of people will from now take responsibility for this interest and see that time and resources for it are planned. It has to be emphasised that these groups are not permanent for the course but have come together for the purpose of planning. They need not last beyond the weekend.

The process of forming these groups needs to be fairly fluid and to continue for some time - because part of it is the sense that your second voice interest, and third and fourth, are going to be looked after by other groups. Sometimes it happens that a course member finds that nobody is looking after a second interest that is nevertheless really important to him or her. In that case, she has to abandon the group that she first joined and form her own - otherwise this interest will not be looked after by anyone.

Nobody should form or join a group because they feel a topic ought to be on the course, but only because they have real energy for it.

We have found that we do not need, in the instructions, to place limits on the number of top voice groups formed. Although we have sometimes felt anxious about the possibility of ending up with a cumbersome number of groups, each time we have ended up with eight or nine, a number that works fine in the planning part of the weekend - which all this is a preparation for.

Nor is it necessary to place either upper or lower limits on the numbers within each group. Sometimes a top voice group will have only one person in it. This is perfectly alright as far as the process is concerned. It just means there is that much more pressure on that person, in pushing for a particular interest.

The process of arriving at stable top voice groups may need to be facilitated by taking stock at times, by writing up what groups there are so far, by suggesting amalgamations or splitting and so on. It has usually taken groups not much more than an hour to arrive at a stable grouping.

The beauty of it is that people take responsibility for what they have real energy for. And they trust others to do the same.

Planning the Programme

We are now, by Sunday morning, ready to start actually planning the programme for the first term's work. The top voice groups are asked to prepare proposals for their specific interest, in consultation with other top voice groups as to a realistic use of time.

These are proposals to bring to the planning table. This is an actual, large table which we set up in the middle of the room. At it will sit one representative from each group (even if a group has only one member). The rest of the course sits at the side, watching.

Only people at the table are allowed to speak: but there are two empty chairs for temporary occupation, while speaking, by anyone else.

The planning takes place in stages. First, the groups prepare draft proposals. Then, there is a preliminary discussion at the table to see how these proposals look like working. Then the groups reconsider and reshape their proposals in the light of this first meeting, and then there is a meeting to hammer out an actual programme. This has usually been achieved by about 3 o'clock.

To give details of the actual programmes planned would be impossible within the space of this article. But each time, the programme planned and carried out was at least as good as anything we, the staff, could have devised and in our judgement it covered what the students needed. Any minor defects of emphasis or differences between what came out and what we believed might have been better (and really there was as much difference between individual members of the staff group as between staff and students) is amply compensated for by the advantages in motivation and ownership.

Basic beliefs

There are certain beliefs we have to start with, in order to work in this way. One is a trust that people actually themselves know what is best for them. And: that if they themselves do not choose to follow a particular objective at a particular time, then they are not ready to do so just then, but will become ready another time. And: that the energy which comes from doing something at the right time, and trusting your own rhythm, is worth infinitely more than the well-ordered, unambiguous, apparent certainty of a programme determined from above.

All this is in accord with well-known educational ideas in the progressive. (trendy left?) tradition, from Montessori and John Dewey to A.S. Neil and Noam Chomsky. It also connects on a more general level with the admission that in our time of explosive change, nobody knows what answers are the right ones to hand on to others, nor even what are the right problems.

The staff do in fact have plenty of influence. They make their own objectives visible; they can speak from an empty chair in the planning meeting; they can draw attention to what they see as gaps; and they can exert pressure, both in the first weekend and later in the course. People finding their own way does not mean you don't face them with your own views or feelings. Staff members on a course are always endowed with quite a lot of power. But what they do here is structurally on a level with what the students do, and is seen openly for what it is. It will be accepted or rejected for much better reasons than a spurious institutional authority.

This course is in the area of social skills. The content is to do with practical human interaction, which means it is more closely related to the activity of self-directed goal-setting and of joint planning than would be a more conceptual or else a more technical subject area. I believe, however, this approach to be just as workable and advantageous for other kinds of course.

Fears

In ourselves, we have to overcome the fear of nothing happening, of the mind going blank. There is also the fear of too much happening, of conflict or emotion becoming unmanageable, taking up all the time, making it impossible for people to say or follow what they are after, paralysing progress. These are the kinds of fears people have when they contemplate, whether as staff or students, working in this way.

In overcoming these fears, the precise structuring is important. The structures which we are accustomed to in our hierarchical society have to be replaced by structures which make it possible to work collectively.

We have set out to provide a very firm and definite structure for a learning community to get together and decide on its own work, without laying down what that work should be or how it should be done. The sooner we practise precise structures for facilitating the process of joint self-directed learning, the faster will we get through the reaction that threatens our education.

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Self-Direction 2

The Question of Peer-assessment

by Tom Osborn

For a few months last year, I worked on the Counselling Courses again. I was with the full-time staff group, standing in for someone on leave. It was exciting to be back.

My last time had ended around the time I wrote that article about the starting weekend structure we designed. It had been possible to formulate and understand at least the beginning of the student-directed process that is followed in these courses. That was about five years ago. This time, it felt like it was possible to see the rest of the process, including its end, the assessment for the Diploma. And this article is going to be about the assessment by peers.

One of the courses I worked on had its assessment weekend while I was there. A general structure has evolved for the assessment procedure. It varies slightly from course to course, because the details are determined by the students for themselves each time. But it is sufficiently constant for the one that was used by this course to be representative.

The Diploma itself is firmly established, recognised by the Council for National Academic Awards. And established with this demanding enough external body, also, is the fact that the giving, or withholding, of the Diploma is decided by peer-assessment. This is perhaps remarkable in the present climate of the wide world outside.

We always have to remember that this very personal, intimate, private activity of counselling takes place in a context. It has an upstream, as Egan puts it. And the most upstream context beyond the family, beyond the organisation, is our society. And since I wrote that previous article, a lot has happened there too. The trendy right has got its second term. Any way-out educational venture is in constant danger. The job-market for "counsellor" has become more competitive, the demands laid on those who engage in this activity have become more severe.

I refer to these outside factors because the question of assessment concerns the outside world. Accreditation, externally safeguarded standards, a recognised label to show to prospective employer, these are outside-world matters. And assessment is done in their terms. So whoever does the assessing is bringing the outside world in across the boundary of the familiar inside world. And when the outside world is swept by economic recession, unemployment, shortage of resources, an ideology of competition, an ethic of productivity, then bringing it in is that much more painful.

When the people who do the assessing are also the people who are going to be assessed, the role-conflict involved acquires proportions which I have to describe as heroic. I did experience the assessment weekend as heroic - and traumatic. The course members had to straddle this boundary. It's a deeply traumatic position. The question is, does having been there add to their ability as counsellor? How much is gained, how much lost?

But first, let me describe roughly how the assessment structure worked.

During the three years of the course, and especially during the last one, each student prepares a portfolio. Into these portfolios go reports of experiences they have had as counsellor: particularised through description of style and atmosphere; analysis of interventions; discussion of contract and the implications of special circumstances; evaluation of response in the client; indication of strategy with any related method or conceptual basis; specification of criteria by which all these things are judged; and so on. Students make reports of their own work, and they are assessed on these portfolios.

The assessment itself, on this course, was carried out for each student's portfolio by a panel of three assessors. Two were chosen by the student, the third was selected by a random process. Of the first two, one assessor was chosen from the student's small group and one from the course as a whole outside that group. The third, the random one, came also from the members of the course who were not in that student's small group. All the portfolios were read by the assessors in the few days preceding one weekend, and there was a timetable of interviews at which students were "examined" by the assessors on the contents of their portfolios.

Such a system gives rise to a grotesque enough logistic problem. To timetable all the interviews with their combinations of people is a job for a computer. But the logistic difficulty is trivial compared with the Psychological. Only the Saturday was really available for interviewing, since Friday night and Sunday were needed for other activities essential to the assessment.

So imagine in one day spending four or five one-and-a-half hour sessions, in at least three of which you are analysing, discussing, judging a portfolio of work which has taken many months to compile, determining a significant aspect of someone's future, perhaps deciding conditions e.g. for more work on which to award a pass; and in one of which the same thing is being done to you.

And you are not a practised examiner evaluating candidates, but a beginner examining your companions!

A stimulating, challenging activity? Maybe. A tense situation which raises standards? O.K. for the brilliant few?

But is it collective? This is the nub of the paradox. Here we have a course which sets out to share resources, to programme jointly, to develop skills in co-operation, to exchange constructive feedback, and, finally, to equalise the responsibility for standards.

And what happens, finally, is it sounds like a competition again. I didn't go through it myself, but I don't believe I am projecting when I assert that it feels like a competition again. Some people make it with flying colours, some scrape through with the skin off their eyeballs, one or two fail.

It is true only a few people fail, just enough perhaps to keep that edge of passing or failing real. It's true each course determines that this shall not be just an all-or-nothing event, that for the one or two failures conditions can be imposed which can lead to getting the Diploma later by further development. It's true an appeals procedure is always built in. It's true there is a keen awareness of the danger of scapegoating, and the intention to avoid it.

But I am not concerned with the successful avoidance of problems in the process. What concerns me is the effect of this peer-assessment when it's working alright. The effect of judging your friend and companion and colleague. This is not judging for the purpose of giving feedback to be used by that companion in his or her on-going development. It is judging on one designated day for the purpose of attaching a mark, of granting or refusing an outside-world certification. And when the outside world is a place of such hostility.

This difference between these two sorts of judging is crucial. The first sort, on the course, has come to be called "self-monitoring". The intention, I believe, of the staff is that it should happen from an early stage. The most fruitful way to do it, I would say, is to be counselled, or see someone else counselled, and then report on the experience to the person who did the counselling. There's no question it is an invaluable learning tool, perhaps the best of all. But also, it has a clear connection, as a skill, with counselling.

To be able to say, honestly, and helpfully, how you experience someone, and make decisions about what part of that experience you report, on the basis of what they will be able to use in the process of their learning, is exactly one of the things you will need to do as a counsellor.

This self-monitoring tool needs itself to be learned. But the time and space and relationship structures within the course are there every time the course meets. No problem. There is a problem, but it lies elsewhere, and I shall keep you in suspense a moment longer before expanding on it.

The other kind of judging is the assessment kind. Now, if this is a learning tool it's a blunderbuss, where what you need is a bicycle. The purpose of a test is not to teach but to test and so is its effect. Nobody learns to drive by taking the driving test, though of course one learns a few things in the course of taking it.

The second point, as with the self-monitoring kind of judgement, is, has it a connection with counselling? If there is a connection, then it's not of the same clear and direct kind.

The best counselling is a resource-sharing, collective activity; the counsellor trusts the growth energy of the client, does not possess the answers, is open to bringing self in; there is a direction towards equality, within the counselling framework. Further: many of our problems, many of the reasons why people come to counsellors, are at root due to those very features of the outside world which denote competition.

And it is possible to argue therefore, that to have experienced this difficult situation, with its assertion of collectivity in a non-collective environment, does provide an added perspective to counselling, at a level of some sophistication.

I believe this to be true. But I have no clear idea to how many people it applies, though I think it may be rather few. And I am not convinced that this potential gain at present outweighs the losses.

Thirdly, assessing itself has to be learnt. Now, in this we have failed miserably. I just don't think that members of these courses, generally speaking, arrive at the assessment equipped to do it. Of course many of them muddle through pretty well. They're intelligent, mature people, ready to have a good stab at it. But they're amateurs. They have not had the flying hours, nor have they even had the basic training. And on this point I am not convinced that learning how to assess is worth the time and energy involved, in a cost-benefit sense.

Now, back to this problem about actually learning and doing the self-monitoring kind of judging. My perception was that in spite of the constant and ample opportunities, it was something that happened too rarely and too late on the courses. And my hypothesis is that the shadow of assessment actually interferes with the practice of self-monitoring.

The distress connected with the judging of the winner and the loser, the better and the worse, the passer and the failer, spreads over onto the judging which is loving, helpful and constructive. The invasion of the outside world across that boundary which is an inherent factor in the actual peer-assessment event occurs, if my hypothesis is right, in the imagery of the world, throughout the course, to contaminate the self-monitoring energy and enfeeble it through fear. It is precisely the dysjunction between the cultures on each side of that boundary which makes the issue. In an ideal world, we would be as sharing and collective outside as inside. But then in an ideal world, we would not have to fool around with diplomas.

Come to that, in an ideal world there would be no counsellors, or everybody would be one when needed. Actually, in the real world we all have to live with the existence of that boundary. It's just that most people manage to live one side of it or the other. Counsellors are in one of those professions that take the brunt of that dysjunction. It does seem to me an excess of masochism to then go and add the burden of peer-assessment!

And yet, as a matter of fact, I still. think it could probably work. I am in love with it, as I think are Brigid and Marcia and many of the rest. I want everybody to be a brilliant genius, and I firmly believe they can be. We don't, in the modern world, need a society based on slaves to produce a new Athens or Pericles.

What we do need is a new consciousness. And part of that consciousness has to do with an awareness of the boundary I've been talking about: between the place we share resources and the place we compete over them, and the cultural dysjunction between those two places. And this awareness can indeed come out of a peer-assessment system. But we mustn't kid ourselves. It is a heroic project. Above all, we mustn't kid our students.

Not kidding them involves, I believe, certain practical strategies which need to be brought with greater energy to the courses, by the staff. Here I am going to get prescriptive.

The self-monitoring kind of judging needs to be insisted on and structured fnom an early stage and made a regular, accepted, successful, demystified learning tool. The assessment kind of judging needs to be learnt and practised at some point. The distinction between the two needs to be conveyed. There needs to be a consciousness and clarity about the cultural dysjunction between the two. The staff need to learn more role-flexibility and reduce their reluctance to make decisions for students in this area of judging. The staff need to confront generally the issue of when to take responsibility for structuring, when to meet someone's need to be taught, when to provide a model or an authority.

These strategies relate also to problems of self-direction itself, and there is a strong thread that runs between self-direction and peer-assessment. Self-direction implies a knowledge of what you want: peer-assessment implies a knowledge of "standards".

To give effect to such strategies might enable peer-assessment to work. I don't think it does at present, and I don't think it will without them.

This article has been conceptual and impressionistic. There is no 'research' in it. Yet what kind of research can resolve these questions? Certainly only a new-paradigm approach could begin to work, one in which the subject of any research situation is involved in its purposes and design from the start. Ask these course members what they think of it all now, this peer-assessment, and my impression leads me to believe they would be critical over details but full of commitment to the value of having been through it.

I take my hat off to them, these heroines and heroes on the front line of transcending that boundary. But I have to say that I would consider their answers totally unreliable as a guide to resolving the issues I've raised!

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Who am I responsible for? Part 1

by Tom Osborn

That 'famous dictum' about responsibility is the one clear and stated ideology that the growth movement has.

It's not surprising we refer to it such a lot, and use it such a lot, too. We use it like all true ideologies, to justify positions and actions. It's not surprising because patterns of responsibility are prime expressions of a society's interlocking structures, of its total culture. And when a society changes as radically as ours is obviously doing right now, patterns of responsibility will change radically as a part of that change.

Take responsibility for yourself, and don't take it for others - that's the dictum, in one form or another. It embodies an ideology with several bits to it: that the only effective change one can make is in oneself as an individual; that 'society' can only change or be changed through individual change; and that until one has made that individual change, any social action for change that one takes will be ineffective.

However: the growth movement is only one of a number of ways in which people try to bring about change - or take part in change, or relate to change. (I'm stating it variously like this because I don't want to set off any dialogues at this point about whether we can change anything, or about the dialectical nature of change, or about organic growth or any of all that. You can't push the river, right; but you can clear channels for its flow, or you can mud it up).

These ways, the ways in which people direct their change energy, form an image for me. The growth movement and political activity are two ways: they are like a couple stuck in an unhappy marriage. There's an exercise for couples in which the two people shout 'Me first', 'Me first' at each other, and that's just how these two activities seem to relate. If you're in politics, you believe that 'society', 'the world', 'the system', or whatever, is the source of personal evils, with the 'ruling class' as its instrument, and there has to be a widespread, politically informed social change first, before any personal change is even worth attempting, because people are formed by the total structure of which they are a part. If you're in to the growth movement, you believe that society is individuals, that individuals make society and so no social change is possible until individuals change, and indeed that individuals are not able, until they themselves have first changed, to act for change at a social level. Of course not everybody takes such an extreme position. But it is a heavy and mutually crippling relationship. As with such couples and the projections that go on between them, the situation gets polarised and most people are at one or other pole: 'Me first', 'Me first'.

A third way of relating to change is like a kind of lover, an 'illicit' lover, one that lives alone and apart from the couple. This is a counter-culture way, it is the alternative society ecological way: the squat, or the self-sufficient survival commune in the country. Cut off from the resources of the couple, but using what is there, and taking real action at a gut level.

And there's a fourth way, the established ecological way, the way of academic ecology and its respectable journals and experimental farms and production centres. This I see as a whore in the image a rather fashionable call-girl whore. (Or call-man I suppose. This isn't intended as a male chauvinist image). The whore uses the sicknesses and the fantasies of her society to earn rather fat fees, without herself taking real responsibility. In fact I've come to think of all academics as whores - defining an academic as one who is paid at more than subsistence rates by an educational institution: and especially if he earns private fees on the side! Well, we all have to make a living. I am a whore at times, when I am short of money for my children and part of the mortgage on the house that they live in with my ex-wife. I don't want to criticise the ancient profession too much. Let's say my remarks are intended as process comments rather than criticism.

Of these four ways of relating to change, the dictum belongs to only one. And the fact that there are three other ways, all vitally engaged with change but with very different ideologies from that of the dictum, already gives it a context.

It's striking how baldly the dictum is usually stated or used, with no possibility of qualification. Jay Stattman's discussion of responsibility during regression to childhood (Self & Society, July) is one of the rare occasions when an issue of this kind has been explored. Yet the points at which the dictum needs qualifying, examining, given choice-boundaries, seem to me the exact points where we are making everyday, actual decisions about responsibility in our real lives.

I'm going to do an analysis of these boundary points and of their connection with their wider context: i.e. the wider social context within which the dictum, and the growth movement activity which gives rise to it, exist.

In the first place, what about children? How old is a child? When does a child become a grown-up? What responsibilities should we take for a child of two, of five, of fourteen? What responsibilities does an individual take for himself, when? In many societies it is possible to give rather clear answers to this question. In Jomo Kenyatta's beautiful book, Facing Mount Kenya, he describes rather precisely what responsibilities, in the traditional tribal culture of the Gikuyu, were taken at what age. And this process went on throughout life. In our society it isn't clear at all.

Secondly: there are some instances where on the face of it we seem obviously to be responsible for what happens to someone else. If I shoot an ordinary person, or knife him, in, say, the stomach, he may well die. And I am responsible. But if I shoot a fakir, or a yogi, with sufficient power over his bodily functions to close the wound, what then? Don't we all have the potential for this kind of total control? Can't we all become able to take responsibility for our bleeding, or for the escape of our gastric juices into the peritoneal cavity? In which case, if I shoot you, and you die, why can't I say: you should take responsibility for yourself? And at what stage in the development of this degree of control or physical responsibility or whatever it might be called, at what stage could I begin to perhaps be justified in saying just that?

This may sound extreme. But it's very like a third example of these boundary points that I'm analysing. People who are in a process of change often tell (and probably every reader of this journal has had this kind of experience) how their new way of relating hurts someone they were close to. And they are often told in response, in accordance with the dictum, that it is the other person's responsibility, that he is hurting himself. In the words of the gestalt prayer, 'you are not in this world to meet his expectations' .. and gestalt therapy probably provides the most uncompromising form of the dictum and its ideology.

But let's face it, if I change and someone else doesn't, then they do expect what was happening before, and if the change hurts, then I have to take responsibility for inflicting a hurt. The other person has not yet learnt that kind of power and my new behaviour is a knife blade. In that respect, I am mature and the other person is still a child. So my attitude may be a matter of strategy, but it is still, in part, my responsibility and I have to make choices about it - just as every therapist and group leader has to make choices of strategy, and does make such choices, even when he denies it.

All this is in the interaction between two individuals. But there are other boundary points, perhaps even more important, to do with the interaction within a group, or between a group and its wider social context. The reason I say they're perhaps more important is that although it is just about possible to discuss the kind of things I've raised so far in an encounter group, or at any rate it's within the range of thought that is connected with encounter learning; when it comes to the process of the group as a whole this is pretty much taboo and is usually suppressed on the ground that it's an avoidance of an individual hang-up (it is of course the primary material of T -groups); and as for the social context within which the group exists, this as a live dynamic that can be worked with seems to be totally outside the perception of nearly everyone I meet in the growth movement.

To take next, then, a whole set of situations which involve a meaning of the word responsibility which is common in everyday use outside an encounter group but is never used inside one. There's a matter of responsibility whenever a practical job has to be done. Who is responsible for that resource? Who is responsible for paying? This is all to do with the organisation of work. And the only kind of 'work' that is recognised in an encounter group is the work of an individual on his own growth.

The work of setting up the group, of finding the space (and the cushions that will be beaten) of paying for the gas and electricity, the work of providing the food, all this is not part of the 'work' of the group. Decisions as to number of participants, how much people will pay and what will happen to the money, dates, times of starting and finishing, all these management decisions are separated from the group. The responsibility for them is not taken by the group as a whole, but is retained by the leader, or the leadership of the growth centre or whatever.

As for the organisation of the main resource of the group, which is time, this is done by each individual taking or not taking time, according to his own personal decision; and according to the norms of the encounter way of working, heavily supported by the leader and the other group members. The structure of the decision-making about working time in the group is that individuals decide separately. The management of time is done by relating separately to the central authority of the group leader or the traditionally accepted way of working in encounter.

The essential points of this whole process seem to me to be, first, that there is a separation of management responsibility from human responsibility at every level from the menial tasks of maintaining the environment to the sophisticated tasks of the growth work itself. And I want to say right now that the separation of management responsibilities from human responsibilities is precisely what alienation is about.

Second, that this separation is maintained both by the leadership and by the participants. The group leader and the growth centre leadership essentially retain the role of taking responsibility for management; and the participants essentially give up that role to the leaders.

Third, that this situation is supported and reinforced by the ideology of the dictum 'Take responsibility for yourself'.

And fourth, that no alternative way of working is ever countenanced or even perceived as a possibility; nor do those who so heavily support the established way of working have any awareness of the connections between this structure and the structures that they are dissatisfied with, if expressly only at a personal level, in the real world outside the group.

There is, for example, in fact no mechanism whatever by which participants in an encounter group as normally organised could have any say in how many should be in their group. On two occasions when I have complained that a group was too large (on one of them there was a maximum number stated in the brochure which the group exceeded by four people), my complaint was received at the level of a personal hang-up, a problem of my own on which I ought to 'work'. It just wasn't possible to engage on it at the level of administration, even when talking to the administrating person outside the group.

It's as if the encounter movement has taken over the old dodge of the Freudian psychoanalyst, who could at will put down any comment from his patient that was inconvenient by labelling it resistance. In the same way, the new therapy leader (or the participant who supports the new established leadership) can invoke that stuff about taking responsibility for yourself.

If there are twenty people in a gestalt workshop which starts at ten on Saturday morning, stops early that evening, and finishes at 3 on Sunday afternoon, then it's clear that not everyone will have time to work, and there'll be no time to work twice.

I was a participant in such a workshop (and let me say at once that I myself did a full and useful piece of work) and in fact four people didn't work in the centre at all, some people worked only very momentarily, nobody followed up what they did by a second time in the centre, and by Sunday morning people did not get into working through their here-and-now reaction to what was going on but through a queue organised by people claiming their place in advance with the leader.

Now of course I know that some people grow by watching others work, and some by not working that time; and I know and strongly believe that people do need to take the responsibility as individuals to claim what they want. But everyone who believes that the behaviour of individuals is not affected by the climate of the social organism that they are a part of is a bit of a blind fool. And when a resource, of which time is one of the most essential, is short, then the climate tends to become competitive. And what I am complaining about in this growth movement situation is that two issues which are so vitally important in the whole change process that's going on in our society, namely competitiveness and leadership, are not worked on as group issues, but only as individual hang-ups.

There's no work on collective relating. There's not even any clear awareness of the ways in which the old anti-collective structures, i.e. those which maintain existing leadership patterns and dependencies, those which make for competition and then give to the leader the role of resolving competitiveness, those in fact which altogether prevent the taking of responsibilities at many levels: there's no clear awareness of the ways in which the old anti-collective structures are being repeated in the growth movement.

Another structural example is the way the May Convention was organised, particularly in the setting up of an elite group of experts who were financed for a private residential conference by the people who just attended as passive listeners in the evening.

This connects with the last boundary point I want to look at. The dictum needs qualifying most crucially, I think, when it is related to the social context within which a group, or groups in general (I am talking about learning groups in the growth movement) exist. The dictum says 'Take responsibility for yourself'; and Fritz Perls, in, again, its most uncompromising form in gestalt therapy, says 'Maturing is the transcendence from environmental support to self-support.' (Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Bantam edition, p.30).

Now, the way the words 'environmental support' are used is rather special. In the context of therapy, they are used in a psychological sense. A more everyday use of the term would bring to mind things like shelter, warmth, the provision of food and water, the disposal of waste, the maintenance of living spaces, good air, and so on. That a consideration of how these kinds of environmental support exist is regarded as unnecessary, that it's just ignored, this is significant. What it signifies is that these kinds of environmental support are taken for granted and excluded from that work.

I believe that the people who engage in these kinds of group do not take
responsibility for themselves. In their total social context, they are highly dependent on environmental support. Their position in the total social organism is one in which their basic needs are provided. They are largely protected from a direct encounter with the physical environment, an encounter which is a battle or an agreement for most people in our society and even more in the world as a whole.

Encounter, therapy, sensitivity training, Arica training and all the other trainings are middle class activities: that's often been said without however, always a clear understanding of what it means. It doesn't only mean that mainly 'middle class' people go to groups. It means that in the total social organism, those who grapple with the environment by actually doing the physical work, don't go to groups. They provide environmental support for the people who do go to groups, who don't do this work.

It's the actual physical work of reversing entropy in our surroundings that I'm referring to, the work that makes all food growing, sheltering, servicing and production possible, the work that is the organisation of the environment and on which all organisation in the social sense ultimately depends.

This work (using a traditional Marxist analysis here) is done by the working class. And it's not done by the working class just for itself. Part of that work, a great part, is done for the owning and managing classes, to which the 'middle class' belongs and which provides the participants and the leaders of learning groups. Teachers, social workers, etcetera, are in the middle class because they service people on behalf of the owners and managers. And in any view of our total global society, this is certainly even more true. So what it means, to say that the growth movement is a middle class movement, is that it's a movement which depends heavily on environmental support, and whose members, therefore, do not take responsibility for themselves. (Q.E.D.)

Once again we see this separation. Previously, it was a separation of management responsibility from human responsibility. Now it is a separation of practical life-support responsibility from 'psychological', or we could say emotional, responsibility. We see the truly amazing picture of people who are trying desperately to achieve responsibility for themselves, independence from environmental support, at a psychological level while totally ignoring the extent to which they are taken responsibility for, and to which they depend on, environmental support, at a practical level.

I find it amazing, because it's amazing to me that such well-read and intelligent people as growth movement people usually are, and what's more people who are so influenced by non-Western ideas of the continuity of all things: it's amazing that they can maintain this separation between the psychological and the practical, and the parallel separation between the individual and the societal, in the rigid way that they do. It amazes me that anyone can imagine a human individual as an isolated system. Yet this is exactly what the growth movement approaches do. I have in mind the image of a pianist who develops a fantastically flexible pair of hands isolated on the end of his wrists, and then wonders how it is he has back-ache.

The aim of the participants in a group is a peculiar kind of perfection, to become the perfect person, the perfect individual. For instance, they want to achieve free-flowing, unblocked energy. Much of the work in groups is concerned with energy, and some systems of therapy (such as the fine neo-Reichian and Bioenergetic ones) centre on energy. But they deal, as do all the by now traditional growth movement groups, entirely within the blockages in the surrounding social organism. There's no work on the connections between the social blockages and the individual blockages. This is crazy.

It is crazy not just in the sense of a nice turn of phrase. It's crazy in the sense of being neurotic. Fritz Perls, expanding on his statement about environmental support, says 'The neurotic, instead of mobilising his own resources, puts all his energy into manipulating the environment for support'. (Gestalt Therapy Verbatim p. 141).

I believe that the blindness in the growth movement to group process and to social context is neurotic. It is a manipulation for maintaining an environmental class-support. It is a defensive strategy. It's a strategy in defence of some vested interests: not primarily economic but rather psychological vested interests, though those are connected. It is maintaining the old structures by separating off whatever is not-individual, and ignoring what goes on there and how that connects with what goes on in the individual. It is maintaining the old psychological structures even within the individual by maintaining the old practical structures outside him.

Another aspect of this strategy is the use of words. Words like liberating, oppressive, alienation, manipulate, exploit, are often used in the growth movement, and sometimes the context in which they're used makes it clear that they are so used for their revolutionary associations, as if to justify the revolutionary nature of what goes on in groups. But these words in their political context have very clear class (i.e. social power) and economic meanings. These meanings are virtually never brought in with the use of these words, which are used exclusively for their psychological meaning. Again there's that separation of the societal from the individual. It's really ironical to hear the word 'alienation' used in a manifestly alienated way by someone who is using it to describe a feeling of depressed separation in an individual and has separated off this meaning from its societal meaning of having no ownership in what you create.

It's a particularly insidious strategy because in appearance it is one of liberation and radical change towards an alternative way of life. And in fact within the individual, and within groups of individuals who use each other for the mutual individual environmental support that they do not get from the environment outside groups, it is liberating. No doubt some participants take this liberation out with them. But I do not think this is any thanks to the growth movement.

We only have to look at its structures to see how un-liberating it is in any wider sense. I've already shown how its management structures simply reproduce the established-society structures. What needs more emphasis is how it perpetuates the old-style dependencies. The group leader or therapist is a skilled expert. He knows; and is paid handsomely for his knowledge. The group leader is the one in the group who has gone furthest on the road to becoming a perfect person. And very many people who take part in groups want, as their new first ambition, to become group leaders.

I believe a good kind of learning group would be organised by the people in it getting together and setting it up. They would explore what they were after. They would use their skills with each other. (After all, there are lots of people around who have growth skills nowadays). If they wanted the special skills of particular people outside the group, they could hire them, telling them what they wanted them for. Another good kind of learning group would be a real life group which went ahead and worked that way sometimes, facing its reality and its own hangups as a group and as individuals. A good kind of group leader would be someone with skills who happened to be around (growing food or mending houses or making songs or writing or doing a job nearby) at the time when the group happened to need his kind of skills.

What I'm trying to do is to imagine a group with new-world structures.

I believe that what we're doing at the moment is actually preventing these things from happening, so I'm not at all convinced that we should go on doing groups meanwhile. But since there's no doubt that we are going to, then I believe groups should work on these issues. There are various ways this work can be done. Gestalt methods I've already mentioned. Role play and psycho- and socio-drama are other related methods. Another way is that groups can take much more responsibility for their own administration and their practical life together. This soon leads in to confrontations and regressions. (You don't do the washing up because you want Mummy to do it). And simply an awareness of what's going on at the levels of group process and social context makes a start.

'Take responsibility for yourself' is an ideology which is too much like the economic message of Adam Smith in his Wealth Of Nations. He argued for an 'obvious and simple system of natural liberty'. 'Give me that which I want, and you shall have that which you want.' 'We address ourselves not to the humanity of traders but to their self-love.' 'Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests his own way. . ' And for why? The sentence continues '.. and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.'

Adam Smith was the first man to clearly formulate the doctrine of laissez-faire, an ideology which was a strategy in support of market competition and capitalist expansion. The growth movement is a product of the culture which comes from that market competition and that capitalist expansion. If it is also to be a radical force in that culture, then we have to understand in what way the similarities between these two ideologies is not a coincidence. And we have to be very clear about what ideology we really want.

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Who am I responsible for? Part 2

by Tom Osborn

I recently visited a large number of relatives on my mother's side whom I've never met before. When l say large l mean about 70 - though it was quite a crowd and not always easy to see who was in the family and who wasn't.

It happened in Georgia, in the Soviet Union, where my mother comes from and where I'd never been. So it was a culture, and a family, in one way close to me and therefore with which l had an intimate connection; and at the same time strange to me and therefore which l also felt l could look at with some objectivity. This experience gave me an opportunity to think more about the ideology of responsibility implicit in the growth movement. l thought it was worth reporting on.

The prevailing style of behaviour in Georgia is a tremendous generosity and helpfulness. People are always giving you things and wanting to do things for you, paying for your bus-rides, refusing to take back money they have lent you, taking you home by taxi at night from their house. It is strikingly different from here.

The bright side of this is really beautiful. We met a man on a bus journey to a mountain village and exchanged a few words. Three days later we met him again waiting for the return ride early in the morning before we could get any food. He was on a bus before ours and in the next town, when our bus arrived, this stranger was waiting with a large loaf of bread and a half-kilo of cheese to give us. He refused money, of course.

The down-side, though, is that people aren't very good at listening. They help in the way they want to help you, and they give what they want you to want. They listen with difficulty to what you actually want, and they listen even worse if you don't want. What you want, and also what they want for themselves, are hidden in the rush of their giving. l often had this sense that they are not in touch with their own wants: they live through doing things for others. This is of course an interpretation, and many of them would be surprised and upset to hear it. (Nobody reads Self and Society in Georgia - there isn't a growth movement, but more of that later).

While there, l stayed with a fat Babushka (that is, Grandmother). Our visit was organised at the Georgian end by a cousin, and l stayed in fact with his son (aged 24) who lived with his mother (my cousin's ex-wife), her present husband and her mother. Babushka looked after the place while the others went out to work: and she prepared the food. Actually she spent almost all of her time preparing food.

The whole family could be described as overweight (I mean apart from the son). They ate enormously and they were obsessed with food. The man had been Minister of Food, and his wife designed wrappers in a sweet factory. But Babushka was fattest of all. Food was her means of communicating and her way of giving. At breakfast, fortunately the only meal we had there (my son and I were staying in this flat), she would hover continuously, piling not just slices of bread, but fried potatoes, pancakes, spinach, radish salad, several kinds of cheese, dried fruit, cake, and various other things around us, frequently moving them a little like chessmen and saying 'coushet, coushet', which means eat, eat, in a pleading voice.

I swear this is written with no kind of poetic or journalistic licence. If I asked for an apple, then not only would she buy a generous kilo of apples later the same morning to keep us in good supply but next breakfast-time I would find two or three apples ready peeled and cut up into slices - of course whether I wanted them or not. One day she made a rice and pumpkin dish, which I really liked. I soon wished I hadn't mentioned that, because a large bowl of the stuff appeared each following morning, till I got sick of the sight of it.

And this was the trouble. Within a few days of that kind of treatment I was having not-so-jokey fantasies of her shoving her fat breast into my face. For the last week of our stay I was refusing all her food, drank only a cup of tea which I made myself and had breakfast somewhere else! Such cruelty. She would sigh pitifully with each refusal.

She did, however, teach me something about how to cope with all the food-forcing that went on in the many family feasts that we were invited to. It happened like this. The Russian word for why is pachimoo. It means, literally, 'because of what?' If you were offered food which you refused, always came the inevitable question 'pachimoo?' - uttered with a kind of indignant lift to the last syllable. At first I didn't know what to say, not knowing the language, so I vaguely shook my head and there was stalemate, with repeated offering, repeated refusal, and repeated pachimoo. I learned to say 'I don't want it, thank you' in Russian but this didn't work terribly well.

What I learned from Babushka worked much better. I thought I would play the offerers' own game and, when I was offered something next which I didn't want and hadn't asked for, I would say 'pachimoo?', with the same indignant lilt.

Babushka was the first offerer after I hit on this plan who offered me something. She offered: I said 'pachimoo?' She was only flummoxed for a moment, and then came back with a new word for me: 'patamoo'. Patamoo means, I quickly found out, because, or literally 'because of that'. So now, thanks to Babushka, I really did know what to say. Next time I refused and was asked 'pachimoo?' , I said 'patamoo'.

Much later I learned that the easiest way to deal with unwanted food was to let them put the stuff on your plate and then just leave it. You still sometimes get asked 'pachimoo', but leaving food is much more acceptable than refusing it. Vast quantities of food were piled on the tables, full plates actually piled on top of other full plates because there wasn't enough table space and obviously huge amounts of it must have been thrown away because often much more than half was left at the end and couldn't possibly have been finished off in the following days.

I'm describing these experiences because, vivid enough to me in themselves, they soon began to gel around my continuing desire to relate the characteristic defensive structures of individuals to the characteristic defensive structures of social groups and societies; and they began to illustrate for me how our ideas of individual responsibility are expressions of such composite systems.

First, then, something about individual character structures. I used the term food-forcing deliberately. It's often said, and the paediatricians write, that the commonest cause of food refusal is food forcing. Certainly when Babushka fussed round me l started to feel like a little child. I got a real insight into the way food is pushed into children. And I was asking myself, how on earth do they survive? They do survive. They do it through a characteristic avoidance strategy.

I began to discern some signs of this strategy and its postural expression in the son, i.e. Babushka's grandson. His face displayed a kind of supercilious nonchalance. That's to say his eyebrows were rather permanently raised and he concealed his warmth. His mouth was held in a pout, as if dismissing every approach of concern. When he talked to someone, he looked slightly downwards and from side to side. The sideways motion was carried up from his body through his neck, with a great deal of strength.

He'd developed a considerable ruthlessness. Babushka herself he excluded with a set of the shoulders and neck that produced an almost visible energy barrier. When he spoke to her he was peremptory. If she offered him food he didn't want, or put something on the table inappropriately, he was polite but curt and superior. He seemed determined in his effort not to allow her to disturb his enjoyment of the food he wanted. I don't think he would stand any nonsense if his real interests were challenged. Yet short of such a real challenge l often experienced him as drifting along, with compliance but not commitment.

I want to emphasise that this was his defensive posture. He adopted it often. When he was being harassed by Babushka, when he was driving a car and was in competition with another driver, when he was quarrelling with his mother, when he was arguing with anyone, when he was talking about what he wanted to do in the next few years. But it wasn't fixed. When there were no pressures, he dropped it. When he was recognised or accepted, he dropped it. One such situation (i.e. without pressures) was when he was with people of his own age. This seems important and I shall come back to it.

I perceived him as disliking his situation with Babushka. However, he didn't reject the arrangement. He accepted the food and the attention she gave him, to the extent that he wanted it. She took, and was given, the responsibility for serving food. She didn't seem to get much in return, more than a kind of family servant would. That's how the situation looked to me.

To describe my own relationship with Babushka in terms of responsibility, we could say this. She felt a responsibility to provide me with food and decide what was good for me and what wasn't. I refused to respond to this, and decided I was not responsible for keeping her happy by pretending to like what she gave me. But the way she tried to relate to me seemed to exert some pressure on me to respond (words: respond; response; response-ability) in this way, and l was conscious of denying her this response.

I want to formulate right now two questions which seem crucial. What is the genesis of a pattern of relating which makes it 'normal' for her to assume this responsibility of providing and deciding, and to expect a receptive response? And what is the genesis of a pattern of relating which makes it 'normal' to refuse this response?

Babushka was a kind of extreme caricature of the way the social organism of which she was a part seemed to function - and which I want to look at now in terms of its 'social character structure'. I mean the social organism which is my family there and its connections, possibly even the Georgian society as a whole.

Food was the most important form of communication. It was difficult to communicate in another way. (To be quite clear, I am certain this was not a language problem. I know neither Russian nor Georgian, but we spoke in various other languages and through translation). When we visited anyone, food and drink were pressed on us. Food and drink obviously occupied most of the energy anticipating our visit. Food and drink were, together with talk about relatives and old times, the main topic of conversation.

To arrive and sit together, finding out where everybody was, letting people be how they wanted to be, this just didn't happen. It did happen with very young people, i.e. in their early twenties, which is important. But for most of the people we visited, food and drink were the here and now contact, and also the here and now defence. When a pause threatened in the talk, one was immediately offered more food. When the meal was over it was time to go; when it was time to go, the meal finished. And food was the major symbol of giving and helping.

I think there's a historical factor in the genesis of the character structure of this social organism. Georgia has a vivid and glorious and sophisticated past, going back to the time of ancient Greece and before. The Golden Fleece was hung in Colchis, which now forms the Western part of Georgia. It probably represented the country's extraordinary beauty and its enormous wealth even then, in rich farmlands and in mineral resources. These, together with its position as a defending outpost of Christianity against the Moslems, have led it to be fought over a good many times, by Romans, Persians, Mongols, Arabs and Turks. (More recently, i.e. 1918-20, it was used as a base for White British and German counter-revolutionary forces). A renaissance flowered in Georgia while Europe was still recovering from the Dark Ages. It is embodied in a great epic poem 'The Knight In The Panther Skin', written some l00 years before Dante's 'Divine Comedy' with which it has been compared, and some 200 years before our own much more earthy Chaucer's Tales.

The Georgians developed a tradition of proud, generous, brave chivalry. Some of their everyday greetings embody the salutations of warlike struggle. Thus the ordinary vernacular equivalent of our 'hullo' or 'how d'you do' is 'wishing you victory'. The equivalent of 'goodbye' is 'wishing you peace'. The equivalent of our toast 'cheers' is 'be victorious' .

Now, although Georgia today remains breathtakingly beautiful, still has its rich farmlands and its natural resources, and is one of the most admired areas of the Soviet Union, the people that I met, who were I believe ordinary Georgians, some of them in solid positions in the Government and in the professions, seem to live in some important way through a legacy from the past. It's as if giving, helping, drinking, toasting (they are eager and eloquent makers of toasts) are part of a character structure.

So if the giving and the helping that goes on are defensive, then defensive against what?

Let me try an analysis. The Georgians have lost their past glory and its purpose and meaning. In the growth and development of the structure of the individual ego, Lowen recognises three major kinds of disturbance. These are deprivation, suppression and frustration. He summarises them in this way. (I am extracting from a brief summary at the end of the chapter on character formation and structure in The Language Of The Body p.158): '. . . the infant has a need to take in energy. If this energy (food, love etcetera) is not forthcoming, there is deprivation. At about the age of three, the child has a growing need to give, to express his affection, to discharge energy. His libido, formerly turned inward, is now directed out into the world, and it needs an object. The lack of an object or, what is the same, of response by the object, causes a frustration.

Bioenergetically, frustration describes the inability to discharge, deprivation the failure of lack of charge. Suppression involves a denial of right. The child is forced into a passive position.

Suppose we do a rather free translation, into the area of a social organism and the effect that its situation has on the development of the characteristic behaviour of the individuals who grow up as part of it. Then we could say that to lose meaning is a deprivation, to lose purpose is a frustration, to lose glory is a suppression.

Deprivation in very early childhood is supposed, in the genesis of a character structure, to lead to an oral element in the character, one of whose basic features being, when not covered over, a sense of inner emptiness. To constantly give to another can result from projecting ones own inner emptiness onto the other and keeping him fed and supported.

To draw again from the Georgian vernacular, two terms of endearment which are the equivalent of our 'darling', are made compositely from the two phrases 'your sorrows be on me' and 'let me be your substitute for you in your difficulties'. If the other also has his own inner emptiness, then he will reciprocate and both are mutually defended. A whole social organism could build up a way of behaving like this.

I'm not very committed to this specific analysis. It begs questions, it is an incomplete conceptual picture, it goes beyond the evidence which I have put forward, it has no settled methodology. But I am totally committed to an approach which sees the social organism as an entity within its environment, with energy and character dynamics, and with a parallel relationship between the dynamics of the social organism and the individual organisms within it.

I said that a whole social organism could build up a way of behaving like this. But, more likely, a social organism could be left with a way of behaving like this, when the original reality situation, leading to this kind of behaviour absolutely appropriately, has changed. The social organism is saddled with it. It is encased in a particular kind of character structure which is a leftover from a past reality.

This reality must ultimately be environmental, economic, practical in its basis. It depends on how a social organism makes its living out of its surroundings; on how that living is threatened; on how the organism specialises within itself; on how its energy flows; on how it can and cannot afford to distribute its energy. And the change also must ultimately be environmental.

This is the really crucial point. What brings about change?

Because one of the things that struck me forcibly during my stay in Georgia is that there are strong pressures for change, at a personal level. In terms of my subjective antennae I felt this acutely. It seemed to me that people were not satisfied with the way they were interacting, and I don't think this was just my projection. Yet, this way is accepted. There seemed to be more tension than in this country, perhaps precisely because no change is happening. Here, when there is pressure for change something usually starts.

This seemed like a contradiction, strong pressures for change and yet no change process. There are no neurotics either! Here, people I meet who are going through a transition (and that is most people I meet) can be perceived also as evolving out of a neurosis. In Georgia, it's not that people are specially integrated or fulfilled but the neuroses are not visible, there is no process of evolution which can be recognised in 'therapeutic' terms.

The relationship between Babushka and her grandson seemed tense. There was a pressure for change. Yet it didn't change. The tension was contained on Babushka's side within her long-standing, solidified character structure which to her made her assumption of particular responsibilities seem normal.

It would have been extraordinarily difficult to equalise the relationship. The only way I could actually relate to Babushka in a way that worked for her was to accept her food. I tried giving her flowers, but this was only a gesture, not even received well because Babushka had no developed ability to receive. I emptied the dustbin for her one day and she was astonished and rather horrified.

My other relatives were the same. To get them to agree to let us pay for a meal once for a change, we virtually resorted to threats, and even then the meal was about one quarter the price it should have been through some trickery which we never managed to unfathom (i.e. it could have been them, or the restaurant, or a collusion between the two, but I couldn't find out!) So from Babushka there would be no pressure for change, and she might have great difficulty in responding to it.

The tension was contained on her grandson's side by his defensive character system, which I've already described. One situation in which he relaxed his overtly defensive posture was with people of his own age. Here, with young people, it did seem possible to leave space, to let things happen a little.

However, there is no general movement out from under in Soviet society, as there is here, so far as I could see. And at this point it begins to seem extraordinarily difficult for someone in his position to take responsibility for himself in a way that would make sense for us here.

Look at his situation. He lives with his family. Now this is absolutely the norm in his society. Almost everyone lives with their parents at least till they marry and often long after. Living space, though very cheap, is allocated by the local authorities. Everyone must register their address. There are no squats, and no communes. There is no dissent, and no dropping out. (Well, almost none, and it can be dangerous). He earns little, no-one earns very much, there are a few ways of earning more but they are difficult and some of them are risky, and to get round the allocation system is expensive.

Most people, just accept all this. How can he relate to his grandmother, or his mother and step-father, with responsibility when all his life they have taken certain sorts of responsibility, when it has been normal for them to do so and is built into the structure of the social organism and into the character structure of individuals?

Within the relationship between him and his grandmother there is some pressure for change from his side. But does it come from him? The small social organism which is formed by the two of them is not an isolated system. Both the pressure for change, and the resistance to it have to be related to the larger social organism of which they are a part. The vital question, again, is: what is the nature of the energy which will change this situation? And how can we move with it?

To me it is quite clear that it is an energy which affects the social organism (the social group or the society) as a whole. That it's not isolated individuals making separate decisions. That the change impulse arises from pressures which are widespread.

Babushka actually is not Georgian. She comes from the Ukraine. This led me to wonder whether all this food-dependence in, and on, grandmothers is a characteristic of the whole Soviet Union, or the whole Slav and Caucasian people. (Using the term Caucasian to mean the people who come from the area around the Caucasus mountains).

And then I came to wonder how it would be to visit THE FAMILY in Scotland; or Somerset or Lincolnshire or Finland or Belgium or Provence or Umbria or anywhere. Do all grandmothers everywhere try to take responsibility for what I want to eat?

'I am not in this world to live up to your expectations. . . '

In analysing what responsibility means, I came to think of it in four parts.

1. l am responsible means: I am true to my own sense of experience; to my feelings; to my own perception of what's going on. And I have an urge to accept those even when painful; to experience them; to enjoy them if possible; and to develop my ability to sense and feel and perceive for myself.

2. I am responsible means: I am independent. I am practical in providing for myself. I make my demands in accordance with my needs. I am not dependent on anyone else for my well-being.

3. I am responsible means: I take care of others who are growing up or have needs which they depend on me for; making sure, however, that I am not taking care of others for my own projected needs, that I am not compromising my own needs without my clear choice, and that I am not sitting on the power of those others to become independent.

4. I am responsible means: I am looking after the resources available to me and my fellow men and women. I am responsible for the renewal of these resources, for storage of a part of them, for improving their availability and their distribution to everyone, and for guarding against their exhaustion; in fact, together with my fellow men and women, for their management.

This looks a pretty absolute and ideal statement. This is full responsibility. In fact each one of these meanings is relative.

How many people can just be true to their own feelings? What does it even mean? During the Chinese Revolution of l946, the Eighth Route Army set up what were called 'speak bitterness' meetings in the villages. For the first time many people spoke openly about their experiences under the old feudal system. In this process of sharing made possible by a structural change in the social organism, they recognised their own feelings for the first time about events that were previously a part of the nature of things.

Who can be just independent, provide entirely and demand freely for themselves and be well in isolation? I like these goals and think they're important, but I also believe they are romantic ideals. What I see in reality is that the people who glorify them most are too often some group leaders and therapists in fact surrounded by adherents who give up to them their own power and support them in financial and other ways.

As for taking care of others, yes, to give freely without thought of return, either in the future or in the present in terms of my needs, to those who need what I can give, that is a fine ideal.

And managing our resources with my fellow men and women, this is the most clearly political meaning, because unfortunately the social organism where joint responsibility is anything like real is a rarity. For this reason when it comes to managing our resources we are most of the time responsible to someone else with greater ownership, higher pay or more power (usually all three), rather than to a collective of which we ourselves are a part.

The development of individual responsibility is a relative thing. What it is relative to is the state of development of the social organism of which that individual is a part.

Saying that, I still want to achieve responsibility in all four of these meanings as far as I personally can. And I still believe it is, in all four of these meanings, a part of a humanist ethic.

A social organism has needs and it has a defensive system. We have to ask, how does a social organism express its needs through individuals? How do individuals mediate the needs of a social organism?

The characteristic defensive structure of an individual forms largely in response to what happens in babyhood. We have to ask why the parents relate to that individual baby as they do. What are they transmitting, in the total pattern of the social organism? And how does this connect with the here-and-now response of that individual to the structure of that social organism? We have to understand the ways in which 'social structure' and 'social structures' (to use two sociological terms); and the defensive structure of a social organism (to extend the use of a Reichian term): how these two sets of phenomena relate to each other.

At present, we are not asking these questions.

After my article last December (Who Am I Responsible For), I received a letter from Jenner Hoidale in which she said she didn't think we were preventing change by working with individuals. I thought about that for a long time. I agree that we should work wherever the energy is. But people who are involved in a change process as individuals or at the level of individuals too often don't have any consciousness of the social organism of which they are a part. They get better at making individual choices, but they don't see how these choices take place within the life of a social organism and are a part of its expression. This blindness does, I believe, prevent change.

Much of the individual work that goes on reproduces the existing structures of the social organism within which it takes place. And much of it fosters the blindness to those structures. I have never yet seen anyone acquire a consciousness of the social organism out of individual awareness or development alone. The two have to be deliberately related.

Anyway. For anyone in a therapeutic process, I recommend a visit to the family.

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Emergence

A talk by Thom Osborn, given in the late 1990's, touching on some of the historical origins of 'self-direction'

I’m going to talk about what we used to call ‘self-direction’.

I never liked the term self-direction very much. It sounds so individual - and that was certainly a part of it but that never took into account, in that term, the part in relation to others, the collective part. It’s a very individualistic way of looking at it. It expressed the part of Humanistic Psychology that related to the lone cowboy in the Western.

That lone cowboy, of course, totally independent, totally capable, totally self-determining, makes a wonderful myth, but one that never solved anything outside the story, and he surely never existed. So self-direction is a term that gave rise to some distortions and I’ll touch on them, though it’s not the central part of what I’m going to talk about.

I’ve been in on this self-direction thing since the beginning - or perhaps better said since its previous phase before this current one. That’s to say I’ve been connected with it since the sixties. Then it was interrupted, in my view of things, at the end of the 70s, with the advent of Thatcherism. And possibly it is in another phase now, though not a very clear one - I shall be saying more about that.

But historically speaking, of course, self-direction has been going on in a way throughout the whole of evolution. And that illustrates one important way in which the term self-direction is inadequate - since to talk about the self, in the sense that we mean it today, in reference to early evolution is highly problematic. And yet the laws of evolution seem to be characterised by self-organisation. Somehow that term feels more acceptable.

The current phase is informed by chaos theory, complexity theory, strange attractors, ideas about self-organisation. And so I favour emergence, and that’s what I’ve called this lecture. We emerged from chaos. An emergency seems to stimulate emergence. In a state of chaos we are, in a way, merged.

But to go back to the sixties, when chaos theory was hardly yet conceived and certainly not generally known. My first experience of self-direction was in the theatre. I worked with Keith Jonstone and Bill Gaskill. Keith wrote that wonderful book "Impro" - it’s the best book I’m sure about theatre improvisation and a great read.

Theatre improvisation teaches us some things about self-direction and emergence - importantly about not-planning. Improvisation works best when you go out there and you don’t know what you’re going to do. Well, you know something about what you’re going to do. So there we are right in the issue about structure. And therefore also right in the middle of the issue about leadership.

It’s not that there is no structure, but it’s a different level of structure. It’s not that there’s no leadership but a different kind, a very different kind, of leadership. And a part of that difference, as I shall enlarge on later, is a flexibility about leadership, an ability to move into and out of it.

I’m going to ask you to do something in a short while, make this experiential, you know, in keeping with the style of self-direction and emergence, here I am giving a lecture about this stuff and we all know the thought that this is not quite right, that’s not the done thing or certainly it is paradoxical. So I’m going to ask you to do some things in a moment which will give some illustrations of what I’m saying and also, more importantly perhaps, give the opportunity, provide the structure, for some of the information, initiative, impulse, to come from you. But before we do that I’m going to go historical again, with a rather broad brush.

I’ve said that currently we are in a context of chaos theory, complexity theory, self-organisation. And I’ve placed my own early experiences of all this in the sixties. But we are part of a long tradition here. Certainly a long educational tradition. Montessori, Dewey, Piaget all focussed on ‘maturation’ as distinct from, and often opposed to, ‘training’. Provide the right environment and the human organism will grow, learn, develop from its own impulse. Noam Chomsky’s work on linguistics also illustrates this tradition. There is an inherent ‘deep grammar’ wired into the human brain which gives us the ability to create grammatically correct sentences, whichever language we grow up in; provided we do grow up in a language environment. We are not ‘trained’ to speak. The ability to speak is there in us, so long as speaking is part of what we experience. Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic may be different - but not that different. Co-operation, social relating, responsibility, caring, self-reliance - none of these are just a matter of ‘training’. Creative thinking likewise. Good management, entrepreneurial strategising, decision-making, communicating, likewise. Many skills, physical and emotional and mental, likewise. The laws of self-direction and emergence are relevant to all of these.

These are not new-fangled ideas. Their labelling as trendy left is an invention of the trendy right. Nor is there any lack of discipline here. We really mustn’t let the forces of reaction take the high ground in the areas of morals or skills or discipline. We need to recognise, acknowledge, assert our own skills and disciplines, and the high degree of value-impulse that motivates us. I do not like an attitude, somewhat widespread though perhaps not more than thinly spread in our kind of culture, the attitude which pisses on the sixties. I am old enough to remember the fifties, well I had my second growing up in the sixties: but that earlier time was grey, thin-lipped, secretive, oppressive. Many things were the norm then which are almost unthinkable now, divorce contrivances, criminalising of homosexuality, the absence of civil rights for Blacks in America, also for Aborigines in Australia - the Beatles, even the Stones, wore suits and ties in their early clips, yes that’s a frivolous example but think how awful it would be to go back to that time. Alright, I won’t get further into that rant now!

Well, I promised you some experiences, so let’s do that now.

OK. [this very simple exercise was basically the following: groups of 3 - turn to someone, don’t plan who - be aware - you don’t know what will happen - don’t plan - be inclined to say ‘yes’ to whatever initiative you are given - not more than 3 people together - if a 4th comes then one turns away - don’t move the chairs --- an interval for processing, include considering constraints, perhaps repeat with this added possibility: you can change the constraints, but don’t plan to do so --- processing suggested to include the beginnings of discussion of the boundaries of a chaotic situation]

I want to do some more lecturing.

After working at the Royal Court, which is where I met and worked with Keith Jonstone and Bill Gaskill and others, I got a job for a year directing in Coventry, at the Belgrade Theatre. Well, I was a trainee director. And my boss was a man called Warren Jenkins. He was definitely a director of the old school. He told people, I mean the actors, what to do. This was confusing for me. At the Royal Court, the style of directing was to set up a situation, the environment of a scene within the context of the play, and then to let the actors find what to do. The word was ‘find’.

At the Belgrade, Warren Jenkins’ style, like that of most directors at that time, this was in the early sixties, his style was to decide what the play was, to assume this wisdom and to pass it on to the actors - even to the extent of demonstrating precise gestures and sentences, changing the position of a wrist, modulating the inflection of a voice.

It was a confusing time, and not just for me. Some actors wanted that, thrived on it. Some hated it, were deflated and disempowered by it. Some, most, needed a bit of it sometimes. Some needed a lot of it sometimes. You recognise that? I was learning about the need for flexibility.

Actually, the most interesting thing that happened to me in Coventry was I met some students at the Art School. They were doing a very free kind of improvisation, using their bodies and some materials and a very little speech, which they called Dance. They called their group a Dance group. The two main inspirers, they certainly would not have let me call them leaders, were Ronnie Rees and Mike Baldwin. I asked them how they decided what to do. They said ‘Oh, we never make any decisions’. They gave me a book to read, it was by Calvin Tomkins called ‘Ahead Of The Game’ and it was about John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely and about the ‘Happenings’ movement, in New York mainly. I stayed up a whole night reading this book, I was totally absorbed and often laughing, some of what they got up to was very funny, and it changed my life at that time.

When I left Coventry and came back to London I started, and ran, a happenings group. It was made up of sculptors and painters and actors, also a sociologist - most of them post-graduate students at Goldsmith’s College, where I was fortunate enough to become a part-time tutor on the art-teacher’s certificate course. We met twice a week, once for exercises, which I usually ran, and once for an event, governed by a form of script we called a notation, put on by one or sometimes two of any of us. Some of these were private, some were public and therefore to a greater or lesser extent performances. I learned a lot then, about structure. It was a fun time. It lasted about eighteen months and it ended, gradually and organically, mainly because I found I got more and more interested in the real interactions between the members of that group, and at the time I didn’t seem to be able to integrate it with the performance - though I know other such groups were able to.

And that’s how I came to join the Poly, the Polytechnic of North London as it was at the time, the Organisational Change Unit of the Management Studies department.

Now I want to talk about the T-group.

The T-group was fashionable then as a learning tool; and I thought of it then, and actually I still in one rather restricted sense do now, as a kind of prototype of the self-directed learning group. It was described as non-directive, and one thing this entailed was that the trainer, so-called at the time, said rather little and was supposed to make process interventions and not take any leadership role in the content of what the group was doing.

It was a great training for the trainer! You really learned how to handle silence, and the hostility, and the projections. You learned how not to be nice or understanding. You learned, too, what interventions worked and what didn’t, you certainly knew which it was. And you learned intervention strategy, that you had to strategise, to make your own internal decisions, and therefore you learned about immediate design, and therefore also about planned design. And of course you discovered that this certainly was not a non-directive group, that you were constantly reinforcing your position as leader by not leading!

Now this was all very well for commercial organisations at that time and for the civil service, where hierarchies were desired and established and where managers were required to manage and to learn how to take initiatives and communicate and so on within this context. But we had political pretensions. We thought we could contribute to changing the world. We were connected with the Growth Movement. I and two other members of the Poly staff, plus a fourth ‘trainer’ who frequently worked with us, were actually asked to design and run the first meeting of the AHP in London (so probably in the UK). John Southgate, who was a leading light of this unit, was politically active, a member of the SWP. And anyway, the world was changing. The old methods no longer worked, even the T-group was shot through with old-method orientation. We were influenced by Roger Harrison, a progressive, trendy organisation trainer from the USA, by Charles Handy, at a bit of a distance because he was English perhaps, and especially by the Danes, by Gunnar Hjelholdt and his minisociety model, and Ulla Ehrensjöld, who ran a lab with us and got into a deep dispute with John Southgate, confronting him as being, covertly or perhaps unawarely, oppressive, which he surely was!

So the way we worked changed. We began to work much more flexibly, moving into a semi-participant role at times, into a leadership role when it seemed needed. We might suggest structures and exercises. We would go along with a group’s mode of interaction, its defences and habitual patterns to some extent: before openly perhaps even judging (yes, judging!), rather than pretending just to comment. We became much more spontaneous, bringing our real selves into the group. But we retained within ourselves the responsibility for deciding whether this was strategic or not.

We let small groups, within the context of a larger course, work on their own, trusting them to do valuable work without a ‘trainer’. We retained our monitoring responsibility through the plenary, through task and skills groups, through being available in a consultant role and occasionally through confronting a group uninvited.

None of this was ever or easy or flabby. With our flexibility went a considerable toughness, a lot of thought and a lot of discipline.

And what we learned from all this was that the participants learned how to co-operate; and how to be self-reliant, as individuals and in groupings. They learned to take initiatives. They learned to plan together. They learned how to organise the resources available to them. They learned how to be critical. I mean by this that they learned how to support other people’s initiatives as well, but no longer did they just accept what they were told or let themselves be pathologised if they didn’t.

In the old T-group the stages were ‘membership’, ‘conflict’ and ‘intimacy’, and intimacy was a sort of sentimental personal interaction. No integrated personal/organisational/ political development happened. In a large organisational group with co-operative planning, it did.

People learned collective responsibility.

Also, and clearly this is of significance, we changed the clientele of the unit. Previously we had clients who were companies, and public sector organisations with a company-like structure, they sent their people. Now we set up a 2-year, part-time Diploma course working with individuals - yes, some of them came from similar companies, some came from social work, nursing or educational organisations, and some came as individuals, perhaps to become group-workers or leaders of one kind or another themselves.

And of course there was the outside world. This was not a true peer group, not a true collective. We were staff, they were students. We were permanent, they temporary. We were paid, they were paying. And all was within the within the framework of an institution, which then assessed them, with us being part of the assessment process. Real peer-groups are rare. Do any of you know any? Have you been in one? What is their structure? Even peer-supervision, peer-assessment is rare.

This assessment process was taken a step further when I worked at South West London College on the Counselling Skills courses, with Brigid Procter as chief. This chiefdom was not an easy matter, I mean it was OK for us on the staff but it was heavy duty for Brigid, who occupied that link position on the boundary with the outside world. There was also a heavy duty for the students - they had to assess each other. I had my doubts about this. It was not clear to me that learning how to assess your fellow student is going to make you a better counsellor. (I have written about this issue - see Self & Society Vol XII No 4 July/August 1984) It may well make you better at other things, I am sure it does, and some of these are surely related to counselling. But whatever things it may make you better at they are highly charged nonetheless and require, I believe, a good deal of emotional and political work. I use the term political here in the broad sense, the sense of learning how to live and work with others, which these structures I believe do address.

But I want to say right now that this process of peer-assessment takes us right to the heart of one of the cathexes of conflict in the phenomenon of emergence. I mean evaluation - in other words, the criteria by which one makes judgements, the need the world has for criteria because that’s how emergence crystallises out. We judge; I judge; you judge: but we are also a part of the process.

Structure is another cathexis. The students in the dance group in Coventry refused to admit that they had any criteria or any structure, but obviously they had - some things ‘worked’, others didn’t. And the way they set things up, the way we all set things up, makes a difference, we often do not know how to set or even to recognise the limits of strange attractors but we have to work with the intention to predict, or influence, or manifest, or ride, or express in our being, those limits.

That is what human responsibility is about and that is what membership and leadership by each and every one of us in the new millennium is about.

---

Group Body Psychotherapy (Part 1)

This was written in 2007 as a contribution to the comprehensive "Handbook of Body Psychotherapy", edited by Marlock & Weiss to be published in 2009.

Introduction

A review of the literature and the internet suggests that very little dialogue, let alone cross-fertilization, has occurred between the two established disciplines of body psychotherapy and group psychotherapy.

Therapeutic groupwork with a thematic focus on body-image (e.g. eating disorders, addictions) is common; and body-oriented work in groups exists in a variety of forms - for example Feldenkrais, Body/Mind Centering, Pilates, dance and movement styles including Five Rhythms and Laban, and Eastern practices like yoga, Tai Chi, Qui Gong; many of these only tangentially or implicitly attend to psychological and relational dynamics. There are also body-oriented approaches practiced in groups, both within the Reichian tradition, and outside it (e.g. Pesso-Boyden Psychomotor System, Psychodrama, Process-Oriented Psychology, and Gestalt). However, in body psychotherapy as defined by the EABP and the USABP, groups are generally seen as a mode of delivery, rather than an integral aspect of what is being delivered, and little attention has been paid to the specific terrain of the group itself nor to its therapeutic potential in terms of the actual relationships between the participants and the group as a social entity.

Groups are a microcosm of each member's life patterns and therefore manifest, mirror and bring to awareness in vivo, in immediate relational experience, a large proportion of the very issues which participants seek therapy for. At the same time simple participation in group interactions - whether explicitly intended by the therapist or not - can have transformative and sometimes healing effects - the group itself can thereby constitute an agent of therapeutic change.

These are principles well-recognised in group psychotherapy which, of course, exists as a recognised discipline in its own right, as an ensemble of modalities which includes both humanistic approaches such as encounter (Rogers 1973, Schutz 1966), T-groups (Lewin 1948), Worldwork (Mindell 1992), and psychoanalytic approaches including the tradition originated by Bion at the Tavistock Clinic (Bion 1961), and the somewhat different methodology of group-analysis pioneered by Foulkes (Foulkes & Anthony 1965).

Historically, body psychotherapy has largely identified itself with the humanistic wing of psychotherapy (Totton 2002), though some re-integration between psychoanalysis and body psychotherapy has been taking place over the last 20 years (Geissler, Cornel, Totton 1998, Soth 2004). However, with some notable exceptions, body psychotherapy has been only very slightly influenced by any tradition of group work, analytic or humanistic.

There is a wide gulf between the largely verbal focus of established group work practice on the one hand, and the bodymind paradigm, concepts and techniques of body psychotherapy on the other. Any formulation of Group Body Psychotherapy principles needs to straddle this gulf and consider how the two disciplines can inform and cross-fertilise each other.

This chapter is an attempt at a broad-spectrum integration of diverse approaches to group psychotherapy that is specifically grounded in modern body psychotherapy and practically relevant for the body psychotherapist as group leader. Its basic premise views the group as a complex bodymind organism constituted by individual bodymind organisms, and subject to collective processes not readily grasped by the individualistic focus of the counselling and psychotherapy field in general, as well as traditional body psychotherapy in particular.

Working at the interface between individual and collective, 'private' internal and 'public' external worlds generates awareness of the fundamental psychological processes of internalisation and externalisation: how we manifest our internal reality (object relations) in external relationships, and how we internalise collective dynamics in our individual psyche. It allows recognition of the parallel processes implicit in characterological patterns, specifically, between group members' collective/familial past and their role in the group dynamic here and now and how the originally wounding relationships are being re-enacted in and through relationships in the present. These phenomena - highly relevant to group therapy - have, as far as I am aware, not yet been considered comprehensively from a bodymind perspective, and this chapter sets out to at least begin such a project.

The humanistic influence on Body Psychotherapy and its limitations concerning group therapy

Body Psychotherapy owes much to the humanistic revolution which placed big hopes on working in groups as they played a central role in the youth- and counter-culture of that time. However, alongside the many precious gifts we derive from the humanistic influence, we also inherit some fundamental limitations in our understanding of groups and group therapy.

One of the inherent contradictions of the humanistic revolution is its emphasis on groups and the collective whilst championing individual freedom over and against social constraints. As necessary and liberating as both of those elements were, arguably the underlying tensions were not fully resolved: humanistic aspects of groupwork practice, therefore, remain influenced by that unresolved dichotomy as well as a reactive bias against authority and any kind of hierarchy (Bly 1997).

Three related and overlapping key issues in groupwork can be differentiated, where the humanistic influence manifests in one-sided and dogmatic or split and confused attitudes, in either case precluding a full validation of bothpoles inherent in the following - often polarised - tensions: a) the conflict between individual versus collective perspectives, b) the tension between power differential versus equality and c) the dialectic between structure versus unstructured space.

Any formulation of Group Body Psychotherapy would first need to address the dichotomies inherent in these key issues to the point where boththe productive and the defensive potential of both polarities are recognised. These tensions are pervasive and perennial, and central to the life of groups. By questioning one-sided assumptions on all three issues, and embracing the polarities as paradoxical rather than polarised only, a group therapist can enhance their capacity to respond flexibly and fluidly when confronted with these tensions.

Individual versus collective

As made explicit throughout this volume, therapeutic theories and values are informed by social and historical context. The more the prevailing zeitgeist sees human pathology as an individual issue, rooted in individual psychology, the more people tend to use therapy to work out their own 'private salvation', most likely resulting in (pseudo-)therapeutic adjustment of the individual to the social climate.

The more, on the contrary, we see psychological dysfunction as a healthy response to a dysfunctional social environment (Laing 1970, 1988, Illich 2005), the more our conception of a comprehensive therapeutic approach needs to include group work. It is in the group as a 'mini-society' that humans as social beings can become aware of and hopefully resolve unsatisfying and dysfunctional interpersonal patterns. To the extent that both the origins and manifestations of psychological pain are socially constructed and transcend dyadic relating, groups can be considered the ideal setting that both constellates and confronts as well as helps us to work through the issues at their root.

The first perspective - espousing the capacity for individual freedom (as, for example, traditionally suggested by Gestalt) - holds that group members need to take responsibility for the ways in which their individual psychology contributes to the group dynamic. The other polarity - emphasising the power of the collective over the individual (as, for example, suggested by a systemic perspective) - sees the group dynamic as creating and perpetuating certain roles which will inexorably be filled by somebody. In this view, individual psychology merely influences which role a group member is more prone to being drawn into.

Yalom, in one of the seminal texts within the field, says (2005): "Does group therapy help clients? Indeed it does. A persuasive body of outcome research has demonstrated unequivocally that group therapy is a highly effective form of psychotherapy and that it is at least equal to individual psychotherapy in its power to provide meaningful benefit."

The polarity between individual versus social perspectives is especially relevant to the body. In a culture where the body is considered as one more 'object' that 'belongs to me', feminist and postmodern writers (Merleau-Ponty 1969, Orbach 2006, O' Loughlin 2006) have critiqued both the social construction of the body, and its pervasive objectification. The body as an object - as a narcissistically presented image, an advertised substitute rather than an expression of self and therefore subjected to endless manipulations as illustrated for example by cosmetic surgery or some eating disorders - is a sociocultural phenomenon which is best addressed in groups.

In spite of its awareness of sociocultural influences, humanistic practice has often focussed on the individual and their 'inner' capacity for change. Thus the traditional methodology of Reichian, Post-Reichian and Gestalt therapy was primarily focused on the individual within the group, resulting in what might be called 'public individual work'. Typically (and with some significant exceptions), the group leader would conduct individual sessions in the middle of the group, with the other group members functioning as props, stand-ins for significant others, or sources of feedback after the work. Undoubtedly, as I can confirm from my own experience, this can be a powerful way of working: as sessions are conducted by the therapist and therefore usually uninterrupted, this allows the work to find both depth and resolution, thus often triggering other group members' own material and leading to further sessions in the middle. And even group members who do not work in the middle can derive significant relief and learning from witnessing other people's work, both in terms of painful struggles and possible transformations.

However, with the focus of the group leader mostly on individuals, or at best on the relationships between individuals within the group, large areas of the group's therapeutic potential remain unexplored. With most of the communication flowing through the therapist as the hub of the group, the two principal areas that get neglected within this format are a) the spontaneousunstructured and unmediatedinteractions between group members, and b) the dynamics of the group as a whole.

In established group therapy practice, it is precisely these two areas which are seen as essential: "One of the most important underlying assumptions […] is that interpersonal interaction [between group members!] within the here-and-now is crucial to effective group therapy." (Yalom 2005 p XV)

And: "There is little question of the importance of group-as-a-whole phenomena." (Yalom ibid p. 193)

A first principle for Group Body Psychotherapists would, therefore, have to be the capacity to work across a whole spectrum of formats, including bothconducting individual sessions in the middle and attending to the spontaneously unfolding group dynamic between participants as well as the group-as-a-whole.

Power differential versus equality

The term Group Body Psychotherapist does not - yet - exist. Humanistic groupwork often uses the term 'facilitator' to convey the implicit notion that no imposed guidance of the group by a 'leader' is required. The group is seen as quite capable of organising and regulating itself, requiring only - if at all - the catalytic help of a facilitator (Heron 1999). In a field which a) is richly diverse, where b) no one established nomenclature is adhered to and where c) so many hybrid integrations between often contradictory approaches exist, it would be oversimplifying to make sweeping generalisations. With this in mind, the term 'facilitator' nevertheless circumscribes a well-established body of knowledge, attitudes and practice (Heron 2001) and often reflects an important anti-authoritarian and anti-patriarchal perspective on group work and collective reality.

However, it could be argued that - deriving as it does from humanistic influence - the term 'facilitator' does not sufficiently include the legitimate function and purpose of authority, as would be understood in the term 'group therapist' or would be implied in the role of the 'group analyst'. There may be aspects of the group's reality that can not be accessed or disclosed by the facilitator's egalitarian stance, and which such group practice may therefore remain oblivious of. One of the dividing lines between the humanistic 'facilitator' and the analytically-oriented 'group therapist' would be the question: what group and leadership functions are required to perceive, reveal and work with the 'unconscious' both of the individuals and the group as a whole ?

The more emphasis is placed philosophically and theoretically on the opaqueness and the vicissitudes of the unconscious, the less likely it is that a purely catalytic facilitator function is sufficient to create the necessary safety for unconscious dynamics to fully manifest and be fruitfully addressed. Considering that much human pain originates in relationships characterised by power differential, the humanistic emphasis on equality and its bias against oppressive authority often leads to the superficial avoidance of power issues rather than their radical transformation.

A second underlying principle for Group Body Psychotherapists would include the capacity to be unbiased towards both power differential and equality and to hold the tension between these polarities in such a way that the group unconscious can be allowed - to borrow an analytic phrase - to transferentially construct the therapist according to the prevailing, emergent dynamics within the group. This means the group therapist does not unilaterally determine the stance they take purely based on their own principles and convictions, but remains susceptible to the transference realities called forth and required by the group. The therapist holds the tension between authentic self-disclosure on the one hand and on the other allowing transferential dynamics to emerge and build (rather than side-stepping and minimising these by premature declarations of their own beliefs or by other manoeuvres).

Structured group work versus unstructured space

Although nearly all body psychotherapy training happens in groups, and the tradition has accumulated considerable group experience over the decades, both the content and the educational purpose of the training modules mitigate against the open, unstructured space required for therapeutic attention to the group itself, as well as to the transferential position of the combined tutor-leader-group therapist.

One specific advantage of psychoanalytically influenced group theories is their understanding of unconscious dynamics and their impact on the group leader. It is possible - by taking a proactive and facilitative-educative stance - to provide useful structures and experiential exercises for the group through which lot of useful therapeutic work can take place. However, through participants consistently co-operating within the structure given by the leader, powerful unconscious forces may be stopped from manifesting and certainly from reaching and impacting on the therapist. In its extreme and defensive form, the therapist - as an unquestioned benign parental figure, providing a consistent flow of nurturing and enlivening structures - is protected from anything other than compliant responses on the part of the participants.

This does not deny the value of the wealth and breadth of creative group exercises being used by humanistic facilitators and therapists, both within the Body Psychotherapy tradition and its surrounding field. In their emphasis on experiential exploration, participants can discover and gain awareness of themselves in a myriad of powerful ways, reaching from body-oriented work to psychodramatic techniques.

However, there are problems with the therapist assuming an unquestioned benign and beneficial role, even if the structures provided - within an overall reparative framework of positive transference to the group and the leader - do enable safe and productive exploration and individual development. One common ingredient in such a framework is the unspoken assumption that the group be conceived of as the positive 'anti-family' to the originally damaging 'bad family'.

The dangers of the leader over-structuring the group are well-recognised in groupanalytic practice which, however, can fall into the opposite extreme of absolutising 'unstructured non-directiveness' into an equally one-sided, inflexible principle (through, for example, a policy of 'silence' on the part of the therapist in order to 'let the group stew', waiting for 'the weakest link to crack'). Whilst such ideas contain a valid rationale, as a rigid policy they can become counter-productive and unnecessarily punitive.

When we do not approach the group with either a bias towards or against structure, we notice that any given structure, when employed habitually, will tend to be used and usurped by participants' defence and control mechanisms which quickly learn to adapt and 'play the game'. Some flexibility and fluidity between structure and structurelessness, and a commitment to both as part of the group experience, is best suited to bring out such rigid and defensive adaptations and maximise the potential for addressing these effectively.

The group expresses the unconscious of the leader

It is important that leaders do not unconsciously import - through the backdoor of their therapeutic principles, assumptions and beliefs - their own rigidities and habitual relational patterns (Soth 2007 "The implicit relational stance and habitual therapeutic positions"). There are situations where the group - via a reverse parallel process well recognised in group dynamics - rather than being facilitatedby the leader actually manifests the unconscious of the leader. This is more likely when the leader adheres to protocols and rules of supposedly 'correct' practice. Any habitual bias or assumption which the therapist makes about groups and how to work with them (maybe based on their own past experience of significant groups including their own family), is likely to engender such a process. It is hard to overstate the significance of this phenomenon in group work; I will come back to this later in the context of habitual assumptions in the Body Psychotherapy tradition regarding energy and spontaneity.

Benefits of unstructured space

Body Psychotherapists are conversant with the tension between directive, educative, guiding interventions on the one hand versus a patient, allowing, inviting presence (what Gerda Boyesen calls the 'midwife approach' which relies on 'being' rather than therapeutic 'doing' and allowing 'impulses to impinge from within').

The same tension between contradictory stances on the part of the therapist applies to groups: providing structure from within an energetically-attuned, involved position can be experienced as facilitative and reparative in itself. But open unstructured space is equally required and has many benefits: it allows and invites spontaneity and communicates both acceptance and faith in 'what is'. By allowing space for unmediated spontaneous interaction, group members can experience permission to become involved (rather than implicitly deferring to the leader's expertise or perceiving the group leader as a hovering, observing parent likely to pounce on anybody's 'wrong move'). In this atmosphere, both deeply conditioned shadow aspects or regression to primitive realms of experience as well as unthought-of new ways of relating may emerge. Thus unstructured space allows and invites on a group level what Winnicott considered a crucial therapeutic ingredient: play.

"A freely interactive group, with few structural restrictions, will, in time, develop into a social microcosm of the participant members." (Yalom 2005 p.31)

This spontaneous emergence both of the participants' self-sabotaging interpersonal patterns in relation to each other and the often unexpected self-regulating and self-healing capacities of the group can be 'structured out of existence' by a too active and central facilitator. Once unstructured space has allowed participants' patterns to manifest, there "... is no need for them to describe or give a detailed history of their [interpersonal universe]: they will sooner or later enact it before the other group members' eyes." (Yalom ibid)

Group therapy is therefore a highly effective avenue into what in Reichian terms we call characterological issues and how they organise a person's relationships.

It is in the fluidity between these poles of structured and unstructured space that group therapists can maximise both containment and spontaneity, security and novelty. A third principle for Group Body Psychotherapists would, therefore, include the capacity to be familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of both structure and structurelessness and to hold the tension between these polarities.

Summary: the therapist's paradoxical position in relation to the three basic polarities

A habitual bias or aversion on the part of the group leader, on any of these three issues (inclined towards individual or group focus, for or against power differential or equality, favouring or avoiding structure or unstructured space) will limit the therapeutic potential of the group, whatever the particular theories and techniques, skills and capacities which the therapist relies upon and through which they define their therapeutic identity.

To do justice to the full potential of group therapy requires a familiarity with the whole spectrum of theories, techniques and formats. More importantly even, it demands of the therapist the capacity to sustain their vulnerability in the face of the necessary uncertainties, paradoxes and tensions between the various poles of the spectrum (which they will inevitably be drawn into).

Many groups, by their definition, restrict the leader's free access across the whole spectrum, such as those structured by a shared theme, problem or client group, or those defined by a particular therapeutic approach.

But Yalom is unequivocal about the disadvantages of such restrictions and structured group formats: "[…] managed care decision makers may make the mistake of decreeing that some distinct orientations […] are more desirable because their approach encompasses a series of steps consistent with other efficient medical approaches: the setting of explicit, limited goals; the measuring of goal attainment at regular, frequent intervals; a highly specific treatment plan; and a replicable, uniform, manual-driven, highly structured therapy with a precise protocol for each session."

He is only too aware of the therapeutic potential that gets lost in such theme-focussed and structured groups and warns: "But do not mistake the appearance of efficiency for true effectiveness." (Yalom 2005 p XV)

Over and against such restricted applications of group therapy, Group Body Psychotherapy has the potential to bring an holistic-integral approach to working with diverse and heterogeneous groups, reflecting the multi-cultural reality of the 21st century and bringing the transformative potential of bodymind wholeness to socially embedded interpersonal relationships.

Towards an integration of group therapy and body psychotherapy

A dialogue between the estranged traditions of body psychotherapy and group psychotherapy involves bringing a group perspective to areas neglected by body psychotherapy, and - by applying our holistic perspective to group phenomena and approaches - making the theories and techniques of body psychotherapy accessible and available to a field which is still largely steeped in body/mind dualism. The advantages of such dialogue go beyond the mutual cross-fertilisation of the two traditions: a possible integration of bodymind and group perspectives may generate a new sensibility and new ways of framing the therapeutic endeavour altogether, including new ways of perceiving, understanding and intervening therapeutically within the 'body politic'. Such an integration may be of profound significance for the future of both group therapy andgroup facilitation if they are to make an impact on the roots of our sociocultural crisis and our established ways of conducting group relations in every aspect of society. We can envisage the development of an integrative and embracing socio-bio-neuro-psychological model and technique of therapy which would not only be relevant to groupwork, but to the underlying assumptions governing the modern practice of therapy in all its forms. By including and focussing on the body within the context of the bodymind as a whole multi-dimensional system (Soth 2007), body psychotherapy is already providing and modelling certain fundamental integral attitudes which are relevant not only to specifically body-centred work, but have a contribution to make for all therapy and therapists (Totton 2005).

How might this 'body psychotherapy paradigm' operate in a group context? And how might such an understanding of body psychotherapy add to as well as transform the already existing corpus of group psychotherapy?

Bringing in the body

The most obvious and basic contribution of body psychotherapy is, quite simply, to include the body, in awareness, in experience, in interaction, welcoming and attending to the bodily experience of participants and leaders in just the same way that one might do with any other aspect of experience. Thus, group members are encouraged to share and explore body sensations, impulses and symptoms, just as they might share emotions, fantasies and thoughts; and these body experiences are considered as valid and important contributions to the group's knowledge of itself, as well as the individual's self-understanding. In parallel, the leaders will consult their own embodied experience, asking themselves how shifts and alterations in the flow of their embodiment express countertransference responses to the group and its members.

Beyond and arising out of this attention to and sharing of body awareness, body psychotherapy follows and surrenders to embodiment as it manifests in all kinds of spontaneous processes. Many group cultures require members to participate mainly through contributing impulses which have been reflected upon and suitably civilised, channelled or censored. But since group members allow for and arrange themselves around everybody else's control mechanisms, an exploratory space of 'play' is unlikely to emerge without judicious encouragement of spontaneous impulses and their expression.

Psychotherapy has a traditional bias towards symbolisation and reflection, equating action with 'acting out', and discouraging spontaneity in the supposed pursuit of 'meaning' that is then understood to be primarily mental. By encouraging the emergence and the creationof meaning through following spontaneous impulses (see Marlock - Wiederbelebung des Selbst), body psychotherapy has helped to counteract that traditional imbalance.

Example 1

Jane had consistently been the quietest group member throughout the first six of twelve weekly sessions. Nobody - not even herself - had noticed what was obvious with hindsight: having a tendency to arrive late, she never sat anywhere other than opposite Tom, easily the most verbal and intellectually articulate participant. Tonight she finally took issue with what she perceived as his self-involved, alienating and abstract ruminations. Compared to him, it turned out, she felt inferior and less entitled to the group's attention.

Their interaction started with Tom holding forth, rather like a king holding court, self-consciously preoccupied with reflections on his place and contribution to the group. In the middle of his soliloquy, Jane broke into a wild coughing fit which - to begin with - she politely smothered in her handkerchief. She begged the group to continue and to ignore her coughing, but there was something about her self-effacing manner which some members of the group, including the facilitator, found funny. For all his usual composure, Tom was offended - he looked hurt, as if the laughter was exclusively meant for him, referring to what he had said. He went distinctly quiet.

The facilitator noticed that his own laugh had acquired several meanings. He felt caught between what both Jane and Tom were making sure was most certainly not a confrontation. He also noticed that - apparently - his laugh carried more weight, with both Jane and Tom, as if he was siding with one against the other.

On the surface this was an issue between two individuals, and the facilitator initially pursued it as such, asking Jane to experiment with coughing 'at' Tom. The cough soon became a direct challenge and an open expression of her hostility towards him. The dynamic between the two of them was quickly established and took its time to unfold, with Jane and Tom owning their mutually negative feelings towards each other. This was a moving exchange, but with a deeper layer of significance: later in the work, the facilitator began to think of Jane and Tom as the protagonists of two quite polarised ways of being, both in the group and in the world.

On the most simple level their polarisation is between 'articulate mind' and 'inarticulate body', and the question whether - in Gaie Houston's words - the "verbal self" is used "as a tool to enlightenment rather than neurosis-maker" (Houston 1993, p. 82). It was through the leader not only trusting, but actively encouraging Jane's coughing that an apparently meaningless and otherwise unconscious element of the group dynamic, carried in the body, could unfold and reveal its relational meaning. Where verbal exchange is taken for granted as the dominant or exclusive mode of interaction, such a body symptom could easily have been overlooked as 'irrelevant data'; it requires a particular holistic sensibility, as developed in body psychotherapy, to notice and value Jane's spontaneous bodily expression as communication, especially in contrast to Tom's defensive disconnected mind.

For sure, there are many other facets to the polarisation between Jane and Tom, rooted in their contrasting individual identities, reflecting their particular life stories and especially how they each found ways of coping with pain whilst getting some form of attention. But if we do not reduce such conflicts to individual issues only, we recognise that one dimension which groups often polarise around is the body-mind split, dividing the group into one faction essentially afraid of the body and identified with the rational mind over and against spontaneity and an opposing sub-group identified with vitality, expressiveness and impulsivity. The first group needs to control the body, whereas the second feels imprisoned unless it is given free reign. The group thus manifests and plays out unresolved cultural conflicts which none of us entirely escape. Each participant's identity is bound to have been organised in partial and biased ways around these painful conflicts. And each participant will therefore tend to maintain and defend that identity, inexorably drawn towards a particular characteristic position in the unfolding group dynamic.

A crucial step for the facilitator is to think of these polarisations as manifesting not only between people, but also within each group participant. Using the group sculpt technique (which is infinitely adaptable to a whole range of situations), the leader suggested that everybody line up on opposite ends of the room with either Jane or Tom, depending on whom they felt more identified with. A lively interaction between the two sides ensued, with a predominantly goading and raucous rather than hostile undertone. The group ended feeling energised, as one unexpected aspect of the exercise was that people found themselves repeatedly switching sides.

An essential skill for the group leader is the capacity to recognise the parallels between intrapsychic, interpersonal, group and cultural dynamics, and to see how each level reflects the others. The group leader is then able to flexibly use each as an avenue into the others, shifting backwards and forwards between internal and external, individual and collective, fluidly using techniques appropriate to each domain. Where group participants present partial identities, specialising in one or the other domain to the exclusion or neglect of others, the leader can thus facilitate a group awareness which is oriented towards a more wholesome embrace of both individual and cultural splits.

The group as a whole - the group as an organism

The perception of the group as a whole entity, rather than just a collection of individuals, is of course central to both systemic and psychodynamic approaches to groups.

"As Bion (1961) noted, we may observe individual gears, springs and levers and only guess at the proper function, but when the pieces of machinery are combined, they become a clock, performing a function as a whole, a function impossible for individual parts to achieve. Appreciating the group as a whole requires a perceptual shift on the part of the observer or consultant, a blurring of individual separateness and a readiness to see the collective interactions generated by group members." (Barnet and Hayden 1977)

Rather than a clock, however, body psychotherapy sees the group as an organism. Unlike many mechanistic models of groups, this picks up on the important fact that the group members are organisms, and suggests that the group is an emergent entity no less complex - and embodied - than the individuals who make it up.

Like an organism, a group is a complex living system, which needs to change and develop in order to sustain its evolving dynamic integrity. Like an organism, it needs to both interact with its environment by opening its boundaries, and to maintain them so as to organise its separate identity.

Phases of group development - the orgasmic cycle

Like an organism, one of the most basic features of a group's experience is that its development can be seen to go through cycles and that the group itself has a life cycle.

Since its inception, groupwork has generated - mainly linear - models of the phases and stages of group development (Bennis & Sheppard 1978; Feder & Ronall 1980; Houston, 1993), the most familiar one captured by Tuckman's (1965) famous phrase 'forming-norming-storming-performing'.

Body psychotherapy has made its own contribution to our understanding of the cyclic aspect of any living process and relationship. Reich's original 'orgasm formula', the process by which 'energy metabolism takes place in a four-beat rhythm of tension, charge, discharge, and relaxation' (Reich 1983), was developed further in a variety of ways and appears, amongst others, in Gestalt, Hakomi, Biosynthesis and Biodynamic Psychology.

Randall & Southgate's pamphlet (1980) Co-operative and Community Group Dynamics: Or, Your Meetings Needn't Be So Appalling (Randall, Southgate and Tomlinson 1980) explicitly applies the Reichian concept of the orgasmic cycle to group life, but distinguishes further between the 'creative orgasmic cycle' and the 'destructive orgasmic cycle'.

Creative groups (Randall & Southgate focus mostly on work groups of various kinds rather than therapy groups) begin with nurturing, move on to energising, then reach a peak after which the group moves into relaxing. A destructive group, however, follows the same cycle with a different emotional tone: destructive nurturing involves smothering, withholding, paternalism, dependence, destructive energising is dominating and conspiratorial, the destructive peak is explosive and fight-and-flight, and destructive relaxing is false and illusion-based. Most real life groups, of course, are a mixture: "neither wholly creative nor completely destructive. Sometimes it is closer to one extreme than the other. Sometimes it just feels a bit flat." (1980, 12)

This model combines Reich's four-phase cycle with Bion's understanding of the destructive potential of the 'basic assumption group' (Bion 1961). An embodied perspective can thus bring added dimensions to models of group development, both theoretically, first by complementing linear models with the cyclic phenomenology of living systems, and secondly by translating these principles into group practice. There are many techniques and group exercises which can be used to facilitate the unfolding of these phases - whether over a weekend or over a year of weekly meetings. Through 'energetic perception' of the cycle and an understanding of each member's characterological barriers to certain phases of the group cycle (see Halko Weiss chapter on character barriers to existential issues), the embodied therapist can work with the group as an organismic bodymind system.

Group Energy

The Randall/Southgate model of group life is basically an energeticmodel, consistent with Reich's functionalism and tying together the life of the body and that of the mind: physical, physiological, neurological, sexual processes are seen as interwoven with and functionally identical to emotional, imaginal and various mental processes in a dynamic whole which can be tangibly experienced.

"Our energy is our aliveness. It is the stuff that creates the continuity of our life. We wake up with it, we go to bed with it, it is present in our waking and sleeping dreams. ... It is the ground from which our living emerges. ... In a way energy is nothing special, but it is the glue that binds everything together and connects us to our essential self." (Heckler 1984, 58-9)

Identifying with one's energetic process as emotional subjectivity is a fundamental, radical and significant recognition embedded in the Body Psychotherapy tradition, and quite unique to it.

'You are your energy. Your body is your energy. ... The unfolding of your biological process is you ... as body. Your body is an energetic process, going by your name. It delights me to say that I am my body. It gives me identity with my aliveness, without any need to split myself, body and mind. I see all my process - thinking, feeling, acting, imaging - as part of my biological reality, rooted in the universe' (Keleman 1975: 24).

The equivalent in a group context - and one which is employed by many who are not body psychotherapists - is to talk about 'the energy in the room' and what it feels like, even what it 'wants' or is 'trying to do'.

In practical terms (that other approaches to psychotherapy can readily understand), the term 'energy' is co-extensive with what we might call emotional tone - what Daniel Stern calls 'vitality affect' (Stern 1985, 53-60). The ability to read vitality affect is probably central to group facilitation, and there are many passages in Reich's work which anticipate the significance of vitality affects (Totton 1998, 166-9) and how they interweave with sensations and movements.

Reich often likened the energetic functioning of the human bodymind to a pulsating amoeba, a notion which is echoed throughout our tradition:

"Energetically speaking, the whole body can be viewed as a single cell with the skin as its membrane. Within this cell excitation can spread in all directions ... One can experience the flow of excitation as a feeling or sensation which often defies anatomical boundaries." (Lowen 1976a, 51-2)

Attention to this basic level of aliveness underpins and informs the therapist's perception: there is the energetic state of particular participants; and also that of the group as a whole, the 'emotional weather' of the group. In the 60s and 70s, political meetings often appointed someone to act as 'Vibes Watcher' and give periodic reports on the emotional atmosphere - in particular, to bring awareness to 'stuck' and 'heavy' or 'anxious' and 'jumpy' vitality affect.

'Charge' as an embodied-relational notion of energy

As has been explored elsewhere in this volume (Wehowsky p.152 in German volume), rather than being clearly defined, the range of meanings which the term 'energy' holds within the field is diverse, contradictory and best understood as multi-dimensional.

In trying to overcome the body-mind split, the body psychotherapy tradition has often swung from one extreme to the other: from mind-over-body dominance into body-over-mind, leading to oversimplified notions of 'spontaneity' (Soth 2000) and 'energy'. Imagining the therapeutic task as "liberating the animal" and its life energy (Reich 1983) implies taking a polarised position in the conflict between mind and body. As I have suggested elsewhere, following in the footsteps of Reich's 'mission', generations of body psychotherapists have tended to construct their therapeutic position as an "enemy of the client's ego" (Soth 2005). Whilst consciously working to overcome the client's body-mind split, it is perfectly possible for a body-oriented therapist to actually end up exacerbating it or enacting it relationally, precisely by polarising against the dualism inherent in the split (Soth 1999, 2006). In siding with the body against the mind, we have tended to favour cathartic expression, aliveness and the flow of energy over inhibition, numbness and stuckness. Whilst this has provided a useful counterbalancing of the disembodiment structured into our culture, it is - as Perls criticised early on (1951) - not always a therapeutically productive position, or one that actually facilitates true spontaneity. Rather than favouring expression over inhibition, Perls therefore insisted on therapeutic attention to the conflict between body and mind, between flowing and blocked energy, between aliveness and 'resistance' (and pointed out the degree of energy contained in resistance).

Because of body psychotherapy's traditional bias, and contrary to Reich's own meta-psychological conception of mind and body (as being antagonistic and therefore equally valid expressions of an underlying functional and energetic unity), in practice the notion of energy has often been reduced to the vitality of the body only. Consequently, the associated concept of 'charge' is usually understood to refer to the degree of energetic aliveness in the client's physical body, which can be influenced through conscious breathing, physical exercises and stress positions, and is observable and even measurable from the outside. However, this fails to take into account both the charge in the mind (Lowen's notion of the brain as a condensator of energy 1958; e.g. the energy contained in images, dreams, fantasies, thoughts - generally speaking: symbolisation and verbalisation) and the relational charge arising from the subjective and inherent meaningfulness of contact - with environment, with other or with self (Perls' "inherently vibrant contact").

Example 2:

In a supportive group atmosphere, Paul had over some weeks increasingly got in touch with how much he had missed just such an atmosphere in his life, and in his family of origin. 'I always thought my longing for a more loving family was a pipe dream, an impossible ideal. I did not think it might actually happen.' He then fell into a phase of depression, with the 'wasted years' weighing heavily upon him and feelings of despondency and hopelessness actually beginning to separate him from the group. One evening the group encouraged him to contact his passion and aliveness which they vividly remembered from just weeks before, but the more they tried to rescue him and nudge him towards an apparent group consensus of 'health', the more he felt dead, isolated and misunderstood. The group leader noticed Paul's impulse to draw his knees to his chest and curl up. Encouraged to follow this, Paul started rocking and finally rolled onto his side, into an isolated foetal position. The therapist drew Paul's attention to his breathing which had nearly stopped. This prompted Paul to remember how as a child he used to lie on his bed like this and experiment with holding his breath: how long could he survive without air ?

What eventually allowed some transformation was the insight that the impulse behind these 'breath-holding experiments' had been his desire to superhumanly control the one thing in his life, going right back to his parents' divorce, which might not be out of his control. Although his body felt dead and immobile, there was a lot of charge in the recognition that these attempts at control were still continuing to this very day, right here in the group. The charge then moved into his contact with the group: the love he had received in the group threatened his identity, and provoked this regression into an accurate replication of what had actually been his childhood reality.

But was he nowgoing to allow another outcome ? This question precipitated an opening of the floodgates, and he broke down into profound and uncontrollable sobbing. Some group members spontaneously came towards him, and he allowed himself to be held and rocked. The group surrounded him and touched him, until naturally he felt soothed and his crying subsided. As the group continued over the following months, nobody was in any doubt that this session constituted a profound turning point in Paul's life.

This example illustrates various points:

a) the importance of the facilitator not siding with the group in their definition of 'health', but giving attention to 'charge' as both an embodied and a relational phenomenon: by not reducing charge to 'energy in the body', the therapist allowed the possibility that there can be a lot of charge in the reflective and contactful awareness of a frozen, paralysed state of embodiment, or even disembodiment.

b) the importance of touch: the group had created enough safety for disinhibition and spontaneous gestures, to allow members to respond warmly and authentically to Paul's distress. Had he been left alone in the isolated state, his 'felt sense' of the group would simply have been a re-enactment of his childhood scenario. At such times, the group transcends the individual therapist and to some extent functions as a substitute parent, without some of the major transference implications which would be inevitable in individual work. It opens up touch as a culturally neglected and underrepresented avenue of social interaction, and reinstates its essential function in human bonding.

c) the group as the family of origin: this is one of the most significant - and in its intensity and pervasiveness to most participants surprising - phenomena in group work, which especially in ongoing, weekly groups is almost guaranteed to manifest clearly after some time. This can be used and set up as a group focus and theme deliberately (e.g. as a technique in psychodrama or Pesso-Boyden enactments), or it can be discovered by the group members as a spontaneously emergent group dynamic which occurs unconsciously and of its own accord. In either case, the very dynamics which according to developmental theory are at the root of people's difficulties, become repeated and tangible in the group context. Participants project members of their family of origin into the group and enact the wounding relationships which constitute their character. Roles taken within the group replicate those taken or allocated in the family, setting up characteristic patterns of communication and interaction as well as transferential dynamics in relation to the leader(s) as parent(s).

d) the transference implications: whilst in this case no major transference fall-out seemed to occur in the further development of the group process, such a possibility cannot be ruled out altogether. Whether the group or the therapist become idealised 'good objects' as a result of such a session, and locked into a demand for further, potentially collusive gratification, depends on many factors, not least whether the regressive experience was forced prematurely, involved a degree of compliance or self-conscious cathartic 'performance', and whether it was completed and integrated. An organic, containable and transformative unfolding of the regression within the group context is supported by the therapist modelling attention to both 'resistance' and 'cooperation', inhibition and expression, spontaneity and reflection as valid modes of contact.

Perls' focus on awareness of the conflict between body and mind rather than on siding with the supposedly 'alive' body againstthe supposedly 'deadening' mind as well as Gestalt's paradoxical principle of change ("change happens when we accept what is") give the group therapist a more balanced, less habitually proactive position, suited to allowing both the group's unfolding in 'unstructured space' as well as still retaining the capacity for decisive and determined intervention.

Building on this, we can expand our notion of charge beyond identifying it with the body, i.e. beyond Reich's very literal, bodily sense of libido (Soth 2005, Totton 2003). Charge can then be defined as a characteristic of both intra-psychic and interpersonal relationship: charge is not mainly a feature of mind or body, but of how they are relating to each other, i.e. the current process of 'vertical' body/mind organisation; and secondly charge is not a feature of the client orthe therapist, but of how they are relating to each other, i.e. the current 'horizontal' organisation of the interpersonal system and the interactions within it.

Charge can thus become a helpful embodied-relational term to describe the body/mind phenomenology of the transference/countertransference dynamic, a crucial ingredient in the therapist's awareness and attention. Reflection on countertransference often boils down to a contemplation of charged moments in the relationship.

By reframing our notion of 'charge' through a relational perspective, we do not lose its groundedness in spontaneous vitality and a communicated 'felt sense'. In a group context, we do of course attend to energy - as described above - in terms of the cycle of expression, i.e. flowing or blocked, expressive or inhibited, agitated or calm, frightened or excited. Here the therapist wonders what energetically wants to happen, what is ripe, what is blocked and what would need to happen to unblock. But beyond asking ourselves where the energy is, as a second step we also wonder where the contact is. This is a question of awareness and to what extent the energetic processes are embraced, owned, inhabited or conflicted, split-off, disowned, fought-against. What processes are in awareness, and which ones outside of it ? Which ones do group members identify with, which ones against ? What kind of contact are participants making with themselves, with each other and with the therapist? Is that contact forced, hesitant, half-hearted, ambivalent ? Here the therapist wonders what - amongst the myriad of interactions and bodymind processes - to bring awareness to.

Whilst there can be a fair amount of shared perception as to the salient energetic dynamics, the question which one to focus on and attend to immediately brings the therapist's subjectivity more into the room. As the therapist, what am I in or out of contact with? Where is my attention drawn to, what is missing or denied? The processes which the therapist selects as significant and worthy of attention speak as much to the group's energetic reality as to the therapist own psychology. Here the therapist's awareness of their own wounds and authentic self-awareness becomes paramount.

Beyond asking ourselves where the contact is, as a third step we can wonder what kind of relating and which internal and/or external, fantasised and/or real relationships are most charged and constellated in the field.

Attending to charge in this sense means going beyond a focus on energyor contact, not habitually privileging embodiment over disembodiment, or contact over disconnection, or 'health' over dysfunction. Here the therapist wonders about what relational dynamics are being enacted, irrespective of bodily energy or contactful awareness.

A deadeningly neglectful, paralysingly intimidating or numbingly shaming relationship can be very charged, whether or not it is expressed emotionally or somatically, whether or not it is explicit and in awareness or hidden and denied.

These considerations become relevant for the body-oriented therapist as group leader, because via the reverse parallel process mentioned above, the group will often express the leader's unconscious bias and - as every bias constitutes a polarity - polarise around the conflict implicit in it. As long as body psychotherapists operate from within a one-sided primarily literal-physical notion of energy, the group will tend to reflect this bias by splitting into compliant 'alive-expressive' and resistant 'held-back inhibited' factions. The leader's therapeutic stance, repetitively implying a bias against the mind, is picked up and enacted by the group as favouritism towards the 'alive-expressive' faction.

If we are not caught in operating from an unequivocal habitual bias towards the 'alive and expressive body', or towards the 'authentic and explicit contact', then we are free for our embodied countertransference to guide our attention towards how the conflicts between body and mind, aliveness and numbness, expression and inhibition, engagement and withdrawal, spontaneity and control are being played out within the group. For each person and the group as a whole, habitual patterns of relating - to self and others - are colliding with the reality of relationships in the here and now. As group facilitators we constantly attend to how charge gets 'organised' around these conflicts individually and collectively and we monitor how we are affected, implicated and involved in these dynamics at any particular moment.

Emergence

Whereas in the past leadership and the process of change were seen largely as a top-down affair, the science of complexity has discovered and postulated the emergence of new patterns from the bottom-up. Ideas such as dependence on slight variations in initial conditions (the 'butterfly effect'), self-organisation in complex systems ('autopoiesis'), bifurcation and strange attractors point to a new understanding of how change comes about and what the leader's role may be in it (Coveney and Highfield 1995; Maturana and Varela 1987). The new paradigm of non-linearity and complexity has had a revolutionary impact in groupwork, helping facilitators and consultants generate more flexible and diverse notions of leadership.

Rather than painstakingly pushing incremental, linear change against the perceived resistance of established structures, we can understand allsystems as dynamically and delicately balanced. Structure - although it may appear inert and frozen - is still process; the ego with its defences - as impenetrable and homogenous a fortress as it may seem - is actually split, conflicted and vulnerable, with the cracks always already showing. As Body Psychotherapists we are used to intuiting the frozen process in character, and the continuing here & now pressure cooker atmosphere and brittle tension susceptible to and positively 'begging' for radical transformation.

Group leaders can attend to the emergent processes in the group by viewing it as such a complex finely balanced system, alert to indicators of impending discontinuities and quantum leaps of non-linear change.

Body psychotherapists are at home with the notion that transformation need not be an imposed effort, a disciplined application of will; they have been working with 'emergence', the idea of 'going with the flow', for decades. As illustrated above, we have learned to trust and follow spontaneous bodily impulses even if - to begin with - they do not yet make sense. Complexity theory thus confirms many of body psychotherapy's basic assumptions regarding self-regulation and the body-mind relationship. Therefore, body psychotherapists have the perceptive and emotional skills as well as facilitative capacities to profoundly affect groupwork practice. Emergent process tends to announce itself in subtle, almost imperceptible ways, arriving outside established structures, group norms and the dominant discourse. The participants' bodies and their subliminal cues are a principal route for emergence. Mindell (1995) explicitly heralds 'the disturber' in the group as the often unwilling and unwanted messenger of emergent process - all kinds of behaviours, otherwise judged as insignificant or immaterial to the task at hand, can be perceived, followed and thus explored.

Projection

A group works as a projection screen for each member's 'inner world', i.e. as a complex social organism onto which inner figures and relationships can readily be projected. This, in turn, can become fertile ground for the therapeutic work of re-owning projections, thus leading to increased self-awareness and 'better' relationships.

However, as important as this work is in a group context, it is limited by the visual-perceptual bias traditionally inherent in 'projection' as a concept which is primarily understood in mentalist terms. Body psychotherapy can help us understand projection as a bodymind process and thus contribute important perceptual, theoretical and technical skills.

From a holistic perspective, projection involves more than simply (mis-)perceiving the 'image' of a disowned internal process as belonging to another person. The projected image is only the perceptual fragment of a much larger phenomenon: an inner relationship of which (at least) one pole is disowned and externalised. But both poles are bodymind processes and as such tangibly experienced, communicated and apprehended by the other.

Body psychotherapists understand the characterological patterns at the root of projection mechanisms and how these are anchored in subliminal bodymind processes. Each fragment of the disowned internal relationship - whether externalised via projection or not - immediately constellates the whole dynamic: a simple frown may open up a whole scenario of self-contempt; a swaying foot may conjure up a whole story of internalised aggression.

These body-oriented skills put facilitators in a better position to notice, access and pursue the shifting tapestry of projections as they follow each other in quick-fire succession; to support the energetic-cathartic working-through of such patterns before they become hopelessly entrenched (as they often will do in groups unless we 'interfere'); and to help participants experience for themselves their own patterns of internalising and externalising and thus develop psychological awareness and fluidity. As a result, the group atmosphere and the kind of relating that occurs within it will deepen and become more 'real-life'-like.

Example 3

In the last hour of a first group session, participants were invited to move through the room, experimenting with gazing and not gazing at each other. They were asked to notice the three people in the group they experienced most charge with - whether pleasant or unpleasant - and to trust their physical and gut reaction to each person. In the next session, this was explored further, through each participant imitating, mimicking and quietly miming the three people they had picked the previous week. This provided material both through the accuracy of the imitation (for the imitated person), and through bringing attention to the non-verbal anchors for projection (for the imitating person).

Gina for example, mimed Sue - one of the women which would later be recognised as being given high-status by the group - as gesturing and moving in a slow, deliberate and composed fashion. In Gina's mind, this was a sign of Sue's vulnerability as it resembled Gina's older sister Mary who had been abused and traumatised, leaving her frequently in a semi-catatonic state. Gina had only recently found out about the abuse, but throughout their lives had always felt guilty about being irritated and impatient with Mary whom she perceived as helpless and broken.

The non-verbal exploration drew attention to a nascent process by which Gina was projecting her vulnerable sister Mary onto Sue. There was an element of surprise in how distinctly different this was from how other members perceived Sue: they responded to Sue's slow speech and hyper-controlled, deliberately calming manner by feeling intimidated and inferior. In this case, Gina's projection of her sister Mary onto Sue had several functions: on the one hand, it was a competitive attempt to weaken Sue's position in the group, but on the other hand, it gave a profound insight into a hidden side of Sue. During the exercise, when others imitated her, she discovered the degree to which her posture and mannerisms resembled her controlling mother whom she had introjected. Gina's different perspective on this high-status domineering behaviour later opened up important avenues for understanding that behind the controlling attitude of Sue's mother lay buried hidden trauma.

This example is, of course, not meant to suggest that non-verbal work pre-empts and avoids projections, but rather that it deepens them, connecting them to their pre-conscious roots in sensory and bodymind processes. All of the projections involved would have occurred, anyway, subliminally, but working through the body allowed both their explicit, felt recognition as well as the transformative potential of the kernel of perceptive accuracy.

Character styles as embodied interpersonal patters within the group dynamic

To a large degree, character patterns are both communicated and perceived - as well as experienced in the first place - in somatic and right-brain intuitive ways. Their restrictive inertia is felt, and perceived by others, as embodied. Since these patterns are frequently experienced as 'normal' ('ego-syntonic'), the group provides a profound feedback system against which the pattern can stand out as something that can be questioned rather than taken for granted.

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Group Body Psychotherapy (Part 2)

Example 4

Tim and Rita developed an intense love-hate relationship throughout the course of a group. Tim was a tall, skinny, languid, shy man in his late 20s with a history of medium-term relationships with older women who basically mothered him. This would develop into a downward spiral, with both partners increasingly resenting his dependency. Rita, a woman in her late 30s who had joined the group after her divorce from a man she felt bullied by, was the perfect match for Tim's pattern. She found his reluctant helplessness quite cute, and certainly unthreatening, and he appreciated her steady attention and nurturing attitude. Bion (1961) observed that such pairing is a common reaction, often serving a defensive function and helping both people avoid engagement with the group. This 'coupling' can shut out the rest of the group, setting up rivalries and envy of the 'special' intimacy. In this case, Tim and Rita could be seen to fit what character theory describes as oral and masochistic (holding) styles, respectively.

Rather than directly interpreting the defensive aspects of Tim's and Rita's pairing, the facilitator used their body language when sitting next to each other to draw attention to how they were shutting the group out. They were ever so slightly turned towards each other, their backs rounded and shielding the space between them. This developed into a scenario where the two of them were given special attention by the therapist, whilst the group crowded around at a distance. In both allowing and embodying the dynamic, interpretation became unnecessary: through attending to a shared sense of diffuse bodily tension, Tim and Rita discovered how much they were already protecting themselves in anticipation of envious attacks. The therapist encouraged them to deliberately and actively protect themselves; after explicitly confronting and jointly shouting at the rest of the group, it became obvious to both of them how in their different ways they were projecting a hostile family environment onto the rest of the group: Tim felt ignored and neglected, whereas Rita expected shaming and humiliating responses, denying her right to intimacy. The short-term effect was that Tim and Rita began to see each other more realistically, including each other's defensiveness, rather than being simply united against a shared common 'enemy'.

Regression and transference processes

The number of conscious and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal messages communicated in a group increases exponentially the more members it has. When compared with one-to-one contact, this makes any attempt at control - by either group members or leader - a hopeless undertaking. Beyond a group size of ten, we are confronted with such a multitude of dynamics that it approximates a 'mini-society' - a sense that some people find containing and others utterly threatening.

The uncontrollable diversity and complexity of collective process overwhelms the individual ego and explains the regressive potential of groups. Another source of regression is a culturally neglected, but intense longing for community - what Paul Goodman, one of the co-creators of Gestalt, called the communitas aspect of therapy (Goodman 1947).

Regression has long been recognised as a powerful and valuable therapeutic tool, though a double-edged one. If anything, body psychotherapy intensifies and enhances regressive tendencies: 'Touch is our earliest language, and capable of taking us back instantaneously to our most primitive universe' (Conger 1994, 13). We commonly find that if an individual resists awareness, then any movement towards embodiment will be regressive (or at least experienced as such). Although regression does entail dangers of retraumatisation, the tradition of Body Psychotherapy has accumulated decades of evidence that 'an unfreezing of an environmental failure situation' (Winnicott 1954, 287) and transformation of deep structural psychic wounds cannot occur entirely without it.

In a group context, regression and associated transferences can take on a particularly trauma-laden, primal quality. In particular, there can be a transference onto the group as body, including as the body of the mother: since the group is so much 'bigger' than the individual, the transference is frequently infantile, with qualities of needy dependence, destructive envy or helpless terror. Leaders can, of course, have similar countertransference experiences of the group.

We can usefully distinguish between more primitive and potentially more overwhelming and unconscious transferences to the group, and more differentiated and particularised transferences to people in the groupincluding the facilitator. Both levels, of course, co-exist, in the group and in each individual, but a detailed exploration of transference-countertransference as bodymind processes is beyond the scope of this chapter (but see Soth 2005, 2006).

A socio-bio-neuro-psychological paradigm?

Since the inception of our discipline, notably through Reich, a bridging between the intra-psychic and interpersonal-social domains, as well as between the biological-neurological and psychological-mental has been intuited as a possibility. But the beginning of the 21st century may now herald our capacity to actually achieve such an integration in ourselves, in our therapeutic theory and practice on a wider scale.

I have suggested elsewhere (Soth 2006) that psychotherapy as a profession has a 'birth trauma', going back to its origins in the zeitgeist of the late 19th century. By transcending both the doctor-patient dualism implicit in the 'medical model' as well as mind-over-body dualism, we come closer to embracing the inevitable and necessary paradoxes at the heart of our work.

Meta-models, such as Wilber's integral theory (AQAL), drawing on holographic systems theory (Johanson, G. chapter in handbook), as well as neuropsychoanalysis (Schore 1994), based on detailed scientific investigation of the biochemical and anatomical systems of the brain, indicate the degree to which more comprehensive and integrative models are being pursued and now considered feasible and necessary. One of the main obstructions to such integration, the popular reduction of psychology to genetics, is no longer tenable and its entrenched and polarised position has been challenged and superseded by the notion of 'nature via nurture' (Ridley 2003).

An important aspect of all integral models is the recognition that a) our identity is structured by larger-than-individual forces, and that b) psychology cannot be reduced to only internal processes. The social construction of subjectivity, through early conditioning and socialisation, through implicit relations of power in every sphere of life, through a myriad of frameworks and influences (Chomsky 2003, Foucault), is acknowledged across the human sciences. It is equally understood that a large proportion of pervasive modern distress is rooted in the dislocation and alienation of the individual within social and community life. Rather than mis-representing this distress as an individual problem, and in the extreme as a genetic or biochemical condition, we now have theories which interweave biological, emotional, psychological and social domains, as anticipated in Reich's functionalism and his analysis of psycho-social processes. Wilber's 'four quadrants' explicitly distinguish individual and collective processes (in both the subjective-interior and objective exterior domains) and the complex dialectic between them.

In therapeutic practice, however, such grand integrating models have as yet remained fairly abstract and inconsequential in their influence. Undoubtedly, there are many reasons for this, but the traditional absence of the body within the field of psychotherapy needs to be seen as a crucial factor: without a holistic bodymind paradigm the integration of the various domains remains theoretical, and does not work through to an experiential-embodied level.

Postmodern and feminist discourse has long recognised the social construction of the body: the bodymind processes organising our social identity are largely taken for granted as they are pre-conscious and pre-reflective. But it is precisely because they are embodied, and communicated as such, that the inclusion of the body in a collective therapeutic context is required if we want to bring into awareness the otherwise implicit sociocultural forces. These are strong indicators that a body-oriented and holistic-integral theory and practice of group therapy is needed and could make a powerful contribution to the provision of therapeutic services. However, before concluding this chapter, some cautions and provisos need to be addressed.

Whose body is it, anyway ? And whose feelings does it carry and express ?

In the same way that Body Psychotherapy's reaction to the body-mind split has been situated within the cultural objectification of the body, we can ask: are there socially embedded assumptions which condition our understanding of the body in relation to collective processes? Or, to what degree is our thinking about the body restricted by individualism ? Whose body are we talking about ?

Group Body Psychotherapy is liable to be torn apart from the outset by inherent contradictions unless we challenge individualistic notions of the body.

Apart from the phenomena of projective identification, somatic countertransference and parallel process (Soth 2005), there are two therapeutic approaches which both place great importance on subtle body messages and consider the body as a carrier of forces beyond the individual: Process-Oriented Psychology and Family Constellations are both relevant to group work and share an underlying assumption that the body does not 'belong' to the individual only.

Transgenerational Processes and the Field

Hellinger's approach to family constellations recognises all kinds of transgenerational family dynamics and collective-cultural processes which deeply shape the body and its largely unconscious functioning and communicating. But he also sees the body of the representative - the group member who stands in for and represents a figure who is entirely unknown to them personally - as participating in the 'knowing field'.

Process-Oriented Psychology's approach to groups also starts out from the concept of the 'field' (although the term is defined differently here):

"We think we manage or organize our lives and groups, but actually fields create and organize us as much as we organize them. Fields organize people into groups, if we understand a group to be any number of people who use the word we in the same way." (Mindell 1992, 24-5)

According to Mindell, fields also position the group members to take on specific roles and feelings which the group field requires to be filled (Durkin 1981). One image which he offers for this process is of the group as a single embodied being:

"Imagine a group of which you are part. Can you think of it as a field, as a huge humanlike or divine figure? What role do you play in the humanlike figure? Are you the eyes, head, feet or stomach? ... The work you do is done in part for the figure. The field may be using your eyes to see with! How does that last sentence change your relationship to this group?" (Mindell 1992, 29)

Mindell here emphasises the physical and sensory aspects of identifying with this figure. Body psychotherapists are at home with this kind of awareness, but are not used to seeing it in a group context.

Continuing in Mindell's vein, we might say: "whichever body system is currently activated in you, at the moment you are carrying that capacity for the group as well as for yourself. Hence, to welcome, engage with and process that activation is to accomplish something for the group as well as for yourself."

This is a holographic way of understanding groups: because they are made up of embodied individuals, who influence and resonate with each other, activation at the individual level also reflects activation at the group level and vice versa.

Example 5:

In a group facilitated by two therapists, one was working with a conflict between Lou and Dave which had been brewing up for most of the morning. She supported them in fully expressing the anger they felt towards each other, culminating in some lively (still predominantly controlled) pushing and shoving, together with a lot of shouting and swearing. The group's attention was riveted by this dramatic scene; luckily, though, the other therapist noticed that Grant, on the far side of the group, was pale and tearful. She sat with him and supported him while the scene played out, then asked whether he could share what had been happening for him throughout the process. His bystander reaction of helpless shock was picked up by several other participants, and turned out to be a crucial turning point in the group process, bringing out the fearfulness that had been hidden within Lou's and Dave's interaction, and in the group generally.

Resonance, embodied attunement and the 'shared intersubjective manifold'

In recent years, neuroscience research into infant development has both confirmed and further stimulated body psychotherapy thinking through its emphasis on the crucial role of relationship: specifically embodied attunement between baby and carer. Stern (1985), Trevarthen (1993, 2001), Schore (2001), Porges (2005) and others have explored how, in Stern's words: "All learning and all creative acts begin in the domain of emergent relatedness." (1985, 67).

Such attunement occurs pre-reflexively, right-brain to right-brain and relies on a myriad of subtle messages, the bulk of which are both communicated and received unconsciously. However, it is possible for therapists to develop and sharpen awareness of such non-verbal communication, and - as NLP has shown - to 'clear up our perceptive channels'. Body psychotherapy has a long-standing tradition of subtle and energetic perception, and helps us translate and apply neuroscientific insights to the group context.

Stern and Trevarthen both emphasise the rhythmic, mirroring quality of infant-carer interaction, and the importance of cross-channel reflection, which Stern terms 'affect attunement' (1985, 138-61): frequently-repeated interactions in which the baby acts in one expressive channel, and the adult responds in a different channel but with the same rhythm or activation profile. This sort of interaction occurs spontaneously in all human relationships, and sets up a resonance between individuals which generates a continuous reinforcement of social bonding - or conversely, if affect attunement does not happen, social disturbance and anxiety.

The therapeutic effect of harmonious group interaction can be understood further through Stephen Porges' theories, one of many neuroscientists to implicitly validate body psychotherapy, in this case by his work on the vagus nerve as a hardwired 'Social Engagement System. He points out that social bonding depends on interrupting the fight-flight-freeze reflex triggered in mammals by close proximity, and substituting instead a capacity for relaxed presence, enabling us to experience interpersonal contact as soothing and nourishing, through a complex interactive effect on the ears, eyes, breathing, heart and digestive system (Porges 2005, Kepner 2005).

Our understanding of the subtle messages constituting embodied affect attunement can be further enhanced through the function of 'mirror neurons' (Gallese 2003). Recent research strongly indicates that when we observe or even hear about someone else performing physical actions, dedicated neurons in our brain fire in response, creating a vicarious sense of embodied action in ourselves and allowing us to empathically recognise the other's internal state and bodymind condition.

On the one hand this lends support to the notions of 'energetic perception' and 'embodied countertransference' which body psychotherapists increasingly rely on. On the other hand it complicates the question as to whose experience it is that is activated in the body. Body Psychotherapy, consistent with humanistic principles, has assumed that sensations and feelings experienced in 'my body' are 'mine', and that it is healthy to own, inhabit and express them - as mine. Likewise, if I resist feelings, I am assumed to be defending against 'my own experience'. There are strong indications, however, that not everything occurring within my skin is my individuality. On the contrary: the evidence from somatic countertransference, Process-Oriented Psychology and Family Constellations as well as neuroscience suggests that our bodies carry and express the sensations and feelings of others.

So if we extend the functioning of mirror neurons to groups and social organisation, we can arrive at Gallese's 'Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity' (2003): we are constantly mapping, representing and therefore experiencing subliminally each other's internal states - through bodies which we presume to be individual, but energetically and experientially are far from separate and neatly delineated. This lends some substance and embodied reality to the notion intersubjective oneness: we are indeed inside each other, swimming - so to speak - in a soup of shared experience. A complex embodied weave of intersubjectivity will be operating in the background of all group processes, defining the group 'feel', its affective tone.

Much of group life is the emergent product of multiple experiences of resonance and dissonance, attunement and non-attunement, merging and separation at each level from the dyad to the whole group. The subtle internalisation and externalisation processes are how the 'group organism' - referred to above - actually comes into being: wavering in and out of existence as the group resonance patterns shift between order and disorder, separate experience and collective entrainment. Such phenomena will ensure that shifts in the embodied process of one member affect the embodied process of the whole group.

We can perceive an inherent drive to wholeness in the group, which directs the group process towards the goal of entrainment. But this entrainment is not some sort of disembodied consciousness - an impossible concept in itself (Damasio 1996): all human relatedness is grounded in and expressed through embodiment, through biology and anatomy, through all the tissues and systems of the body, through the heart and the guts. It is the particular alertness of body psychotherapists to the energetic and embodied aspects of group process, across the whole bodymind spectrum from cellular and physiological to imaginal and cognitive processes, which is a unique contribution to the field.

Whilst our culture is largely unaware of these subtle processes, both in how they affect individuals' inner experience and how they shape interpersonal and group experience, there is nothing mysterious or mystical about them. We can usefully apply Reich's notion that many ideas associated with 'mysticism' are rooted in mis-perceived life energy to groups and how they organise, communicate and support individual aliveness and collective togetherness.

Even though much of this communication is pre-reflective, non-verbal and unconscious, group body psychotherapy can nevertheless rely on its presence, bring awareness to it and help with the containment of dynamics which the participants would otherwise be unaware of and disconnected from.

Conclusion

Groups raise energy: concentrated collective attention intensifies everything, all interactions and contributions. This heightened awareness can bring stark recognition of basic life scripts, character styles and interpersonal patterns, thus allowing for deep work. The group context also tends to lend more weight and significance to any resolutions and transformative moments which do occur, allowing for easier and more comprehensive translation of the therapeutic experience into 'real life'. If, therefore, it gets facilitated as a real-life setting (rather than an artificial and idealised therapeutic world - of healing, reparation and harmony), the group dynamic - if it works - can be transformative in and of itself.

Body psychotherapy is an ideal foundation from which to bridge and integrate diverse disciplines into a new and larger whole - into a comprehensive socio-bio-neuro-psychological paradigm and the potential for socially transformative practice. By bringing - amongst others - group dynamics, relational psychoanalysis, neuroscience and attachment theory to body psychotherapy's established holistic theory and practice and its inherent countercultural social commitment, we can forge a profoundly creative and undogmatic therapy which can address the pain of social and cultural splits, precisely because it has embraced and transcended those splits on both personal and professional levels.

Such an approach does not just apply the principles of individual work to group practice, but can re-define more fundamentally our vision of what therapy is about: an integral-relational practice of evolution/transformation which recognises the interweaving of individual and social identity and does justice both to the depth of the individual 'inner world' and the significance of inter-dependent intersubjective relating.

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Notes on Facilitation: The Role and Task of the Facilitator

Here is a hand-out (old and as yet unfinished, written for a journal which then folded) on some of the issues for facilitators:

© Michael Soth (1990)

For the purposes of article, I will imagine the group and its activities as a flowering plant.

the ROOTS are equivalent to the basic shared values, modes of consciousness and paradigms/worldviews which are the foundation of the group’s co-operation. These paradigms inform what I call the structure / meta-level, the HOW of the group.

The human, emotional interactions which constitute the group process are like the LEAVES which provide energy and nourishment to the plant. In simple terms this is the feeling level, the human relationships, the intricate web of conscious and unconscious interactions.

The tasks and goals of the group are like the FLOWER which grows out of and depends on the underlying root foundation and the nourishment from the synergetic metabolism generated by the relationships between the group members.

This image (structure - process - task) is reflected in the well-known formula for the developmental stages of the group cycle: norming - forming - storming - performing (Bruce Tuckman 1965).

Norming is equivalent to what I call the underlying / established structure, and during the norming phase agreements about structural issues are achieved by meta-level discussion: what are our shared values and how do we therefore want to operate ? what ways and styles of working together express and carry our shared values and aims (which in turn are based on even deeper shared understandings of the world and who we are as people; see my comments about the distinction between the explicit and implicit aspects of the structure / meta-level below). This includes issues such as power-over versus power-with, structure versus structurelessness, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ styles - in short: issues of collective and cultural consciousness. One way these have been categorised is through the integral Wilber/Spiral Dynamics model of 'value systems' or 'memes'.

Forming is equivalent to what I call the group process - the web of interactions and relationships which determines the internal and external shape of the group as a set of relationships. The emotionally significant concerns can be grouped into issues around belonging (inclusion - exclusion), nurture (likes and dislikes, mutual recognition), power and status (influence, weight).

Storming in groups could be considered part of the group process (i.e. the phase when the above issues are actually addressed and worked out). If this phase comes to a satisfying resolution, it can then manifest in some creative expression or in the shared task (performing) which may have been the group’s main objective for coming together in the first place.

My assumption is that the group’s capacity for creativity (= performing) depends on how well the norming, forming and storming phases have been navigated, and what degree of coherence, stability, flexibility and spontaneity is possible within the structures and relationships which have been established in the early phases of the group. This is the same as saying that the task is like the flower which grows out of a root and leaf system which both both support and nourish it, providing the foundation and the energy for the task / business.

The cyclic nature of these stages implies that these phases re-occur in possibly deepening and intensifying cycles which each build on the group’s shared experience of the previous one.

The structure/meta-level (roots) can be divided into two aspects: implicit and explicit.

 

Implicit structure:

an implicit, maybe unspoken, maybe unconscious aspect which is like a shared understanding of the world. We inhabit different cultural universes with different assumptions, values, priorities. These world views obviously also inform our assumptions about groups, what they are, what happens and should happen in them, how business and group process should be conducted, how power is shared or distributed, etc. Spiral Dynamics research has established a solid correspondence between certain ‘memes’ and their preferred organisational styles.

There is an interesting and subtle inter-relationship between the structure/meta-level on the one hand and the group process on the other. The basic logical connection between them is that the structure is of a higher order in holarchic terms (see, for example, Ken Wilber “Integral Psychology”): cultural and paradigm differences are more basic and underlie the group process and the task. The structure (essentially as a result of a particular mode of consciousness, or a mixture of different, sometimes conflicting, modes of consciousness) structures and gives shape to the group process and the task: it provides the determining norms, features and procedures employed on the process and task levels. Therefore, conflicts on the structure/meta-level cannot be reduced to - or resolved through - either group process or working together on a task alone.

Structure consists of the underlying paradigms which inform, shape and determine the way group process and business happen and are conducted. This most basic level of human co-existence is, of course, the area where oppression and discrimination originate and manifest. If there are major unresolved conflicts on this level, the group energy may not be ready to engage with anything else, and the group process itself may not feel safe as the established structure may privilege certain group members, their paradigms and world views and their way of conducting the group process.

The tempation is to try and address these differences or conflicts through meta-level discussion, through naming and making explicit the underlying norms, assumptions and values. However, paradigm conflicts on this level can usually not be resolved through abstract, philosophical discussion, either, and attempts to focus on a shared task at this point are usually based in denial and distraction.

Of course, the diversity of conflicting paradigms needs to be named and discussed. But when somebody’s taken-for-granted assumptions about the world are disturbed or threatened by somebody else’s equally taken-for-granted world view, the group process reflects these clashes on a feeling level: group members feel unsafe, threatened, hostile, defensive with each other, and discussion often just reflects and exacerbates these feelings because through being translated onto an intellectual level they acquire an indirect, frustrated and ambivalent expression. Philosophical misunderstanding of each other then escalates the differences and makes the feelings uncontainable - usually the group then breaks apart.

A mixture between meta-level discussion, exploration of diversity, paradigm reflection on the one hand and direct human emotionally-charged relating on the other (working through the feelings around differences) - maybe interspersed with periods of cultural sub-groupings getting together - is usually necessary.

Explicit structure:

The explicit structure consists of the spoken and agreed rules which are the basis for the group’s ways of operating together. Out of this grow procedures and explicit ways of working regarding decisionmaking processes, the balance between task and process, how the group handles conflict and disagreements, how the group starts and ends, how the time available is allocated to different goals and tasks, how much time is given to individual concerns, the balance between structure and structurelessness, etc.

One way of dealing with this is for the group to delegate the responsibility for the explicit structure to a facilitator who then suggests procedures, sequences of activities, focal points for attention. This ideally allows the group members to fully engage with and concentrate on the activity itself, without having to reflect on or worry about meta-level considerations (as these are taken care of by the facilitator). This delegation of responsibility for the explicit structure to the facilitator is obviously fraught with difficulties, power issues and the potential for mis-direction and misuse of the power inherent in the role.

In order for the facilitator to minimise these dangers, and operate optimally in the interest of the group, we can distinguish three inter-related aspects of the facilitator’s internal process: perception (of the group energy), understanding (the significant dynamics constellated in the group and forming working hypotheses about them) and then designing interventions (aiming to facilitate the group’s functioning by suggesting activities, procedures, exercises, tasks).

 

The task of the facilitator

In every group there is always already an implicit structure and an implicit emergent process, i.e. something that needs or wants to happen. The facilitator does not need to make anything happen - the metaphor is more of a stream that is already flowing finding its way - the facilitator provides suggestions for the path, the channel, the particular course which the group energy is inclined to follow, anyway. And there may well be a tension or conflict between these implicit potentials and the explicit and established structure, often resulting in a sense of paralysis or stuckness. The facilitator’s task goes beyond applying the group’s current, explicit, rational agreements. I define the facilitator’s task as responsive to the functioning of the group as a whole (including the group’s conscious and unconscious dynamics), relating to the group as a developing organism, yet without the facilitator throwing their own weight and personal investment behind particular developmental tendencies.

The facilitator is not a leader, manager or director. The task of a facilitator does not include pro-actively shaping, negotiating and influencing future direction. Without directive power, the significance of the facilitator’s role can be underestimated, by equating it with that of a chairperson. But the traditional understanding of the chairperson is focussed on facilitating discussion, decisionmaking procedures, rational exchange. If there is a clear, shared and unambiguous readiness to engage with a particular activity or task of that kind, the facilitator’s input may be temporarily indistinguishable from that of a chairperson. In some situations the facilitator may even be replacable by a prepared agenda, a sequence of procedures and group activities, with suggested time slots for each activity in the sequence. Outwardly the facilitator may be seen to be offering technique, method.

But the way I see it, the facilitator role is much wider than that: its purview encompasses the group as a group (i.e. more than the sum of its parts) AND as a social web of individuals, as a collection of whole human beings living together rather than (replacable) contributors to a shared task only, as a tapestry of physcial, emotional, mental and transpersonal . It’s about perceiving and enabling emergent process as it spontaneously arises and clashes with established structure. It’s about the group’s spontaneous development and transformation as a collective organism.

The task of the facilitator is to attend to these, and to form a judgement as to what the group is ready for. Here the notion of the task-flower being nourished and energised by the leaves of the group process / group dynamic which in turn is underpinned by the root system of the established structure becomes useful in terms of order and priorities.

Does the implicit structure require attention before anything else can happen ?

Are the conflicts around different identities, diversity and power dynamics (oppression / discrimination) so strong that no meaningful, cohesive and shared process can occur ?

 

to be continued .....

 

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