Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

72 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
feelings among the members of the group. But the overall sensation
produced by the people standing and talking in a random way, was
that of a movement, the illusion of sea waves, leading to an end or to
a beginning, caressing or drowning, traveling or anchoring, opening
or closing, agreeing or disagreeing, expressing group ‘symmetry or
asymmetry’; an application of Koukis’s ‘uncertainty principle, the
cornerstone of quantum mechanics’.
The concept of time was incepted by my mind like a
calculated integral, defined as a possibility and not a certainty, of
living and functioning within changeable and changing time limits.
Anxiety was produced by the fifteen-minute shortness of the group, as
well as by the unexampled extension, expansion and dilatation of the
time table. It looked as if we change the borders in order to create
Winnocott’s ‘interpersonal space’, where we can meet, group and
create a Foulkes’s ‘configuration matrix’. Perhaps this stress,
combined with a sense that there is not enough time, promoted the
tendency to interrupt each other and the conductor, hearing neither our
voice, nor the other’s.
A dominant issue in the large group was that of wives and
women. Irritation and frustration repeatedly covered the sessions
about gender conflicts. Are we fighting de novo a war in which we
women were victorious? It was the battle of our mothers and
grandmothers. Why victimize ourselves all over again? Why choosing
stigmatization, discrimination, marginalization? We have the nonnegotiable
unpalatable birth right of equality in being humans and not
women or men, black or white, old or young, natives or newcomers.
It seemed as a compulsive repetition of the vicious circle and return to
the beginning of the phallic mother in a disparate modus operandi.
Our dear colleagues from Spain wanted to organize a
Spanish-speaking-symposium right after the terrorist attack in
Barcelona. Interestingly, this shift to the coiling around the national
group of ‘us’ felt like the start of building a bridge leading to
Barcelona 2020. Even though I do not speak Spanish, it felt as if I did.
Moreover, it felt as if I spoke all the other different languages spoken
in the large group, even if they were spoken in English, namely using
pronunciation, metaphors and linguistic idioms of the mother
language in English. There was a hesitant closeness, using
differentness, not sameness as a starting point.
The German premiere of Wilhelm Rӧsing’s and Marita
Barthel-Rӧsing’s film about Group Analysis with Liesel Hearst and
Malcolm Pines, offered the opportunity of ‘meeting’ with the
‘Pioneers of Group Analysis’. There is more and more a sense that the