Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 131
had used similar language to dismiss criticism].
It was as if the Visitors heard these internal dialogues. Their
inquiries elicited examples of drop outs from treatment methods in
which mental health professionals disparagingly diagnosed patients -
rather than themselves or their own methods. The Visitors seemed
confused by the reluctance of practitioners, particularly those who
prided themselves on years of self- examination, to think more
empathically about the relationships they had been – and continued to
be - unable to sustain. They highlighted occasions when loyalty to a
method or body of theory replaced creativity and dynamic thinking.
They elicited examples of human organizations remaining in comfort
zones even when thinking withered or rigidified and involved a
shrinking band of disciples. Sometimes, when professionals attempted
to assert any pre-condition for their method to operate effectively, the
Visitors would make inquiries until it became apparent that the
pioneers of these methods had evolved their method during their lives
and felt freer to adapt them to a perceived need than had many of their
successors. Inflexible methods, the limited capacity of therapists or
nations to tolerate feelings or behaviours, cursory interventions,
unaffordable fees, waiting lists, cultural insensitivity, exclusive
suburbs, the fear of immigrants; expulsions from schools, workplaces
and countries; the loss of benefits, hatred of others, the nature of
cruelty - emerged unpredictably in sometimes hostile conversations
and re-enforced the longing of several practitioners to return to the
calm of their consulting rooms. It became increasingly clear that the
Visitors regarded most attempts to define method as restricting
thinking and were much more interested in developing states of mind
that responded to subjective experience of current need.
Frequently, it appeared as if both knowledge and language
was breaking down with professionals increasingly reluctant to use
diagnostic terms lest they be encouraged to explore their relevance to
their own functioning – as well as in relation to social norms.
Categories of all kinds - whether they related to attachment, trauma,
defences, impulses, motivations, thoughts or relationships - were
subject to the same scrutiny as to whether they made conversation and
free-ranging thinking more possible or shut down thinking by offering
the illusion of arrival. ‘Which theories emerged out of a wish to inhabit
safer or more respectable academic and moral territory? Why had
theories of early sexual development been central to psychological
exploration a century previously but largely disappeared from social
discourse? Had other theories become more fashionable or safer to
explore – given that this was an area that continued to elicit such