Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

130 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
The Visitors showed an interest in the selection procedures
of clients by professionals. They seemed to regard as a helpful form
of reality testing the discomfort of psychotherapists trying to explain
their thinking to individuals that they would be likely to exclude from
their practice. Conversations ebbed and flowed – and over-flowed -
but almost invariably in the direction of inclusion. ‘Were individual
exclusions an exclusion of the thoughts located within those
individuals? Might re-thinking the excluding method or ideology be a
logical next step? Did boundaries exclude as much as they protected?
How often did protecting slip into protection from thinking difficult
thoughts? How well did the ‘realistic limitations’ of a way of working
hold the disowned parts of a community in mind?’
The man who had killed stared at the therapist as she tried to
speak about boundaries. She lost her train of thought. This was
intimidation. Why were the Visitors allowing this? She would have
been able to give a much more reasoned account of her practice if the
Visitors had agreed to meet separately with professionals. The warder
sat beside the staring man with a hand on his shoulder. All the man
heard was a woman making excuses for rejecting him. The warder
quietly enjoyed the discomfort of the psychotherapist. He liked the
way that the most impossible people had been placed in the centre of
these discussions. The Visitors seemed to focus inexorably on the
interconnectedness of things so that people became responsible not
just for what they did but also for what they shut out. Everyone was
becoming responsible for the difficulties he faced every day.
The Visitors inquired as to whether professional committees,
implemented to safeguard standards, were genuine attempts to
understand matters in a multi-dimensional way without recourse to
reductionist thinking. When organizations that had previously
attracted the Visitors attention by focusing on the social nature of
symptoms acted on the basis of individual responsibility, the visitors
became confused. ‘Was social responsibility inconceivable?’ When
members of organizations felt let down by their own colleagues, were
they ‘able to reflect on the nature of their own idealization,
disillusionment and impulse toward litigation?’ When the Visitors
inquired as to whether the focus of the litigation might change, would
‘self- litigation’ rather than ‘other-litigation’ be more likely to deepen
thinking?’ some of those on ethics committees found themselves
withdrawing their support. Was the Visitors’ apparent failure to allow
for an external location for guilt and responsibility a form of
psychopathology? [Some of those who tried ‘self-litigating’ on these
thoughts found themselves recalling other occasions on which they