Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 78, December 2017

46 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
prior to her joining the clinical group. It had taken her 19 years before
she’d trusted enough to join the group. They were all left indelibly
imprinted with their pain etched into their skin and in ways the body
became the site for enacting their conflicts and for figurating psychic
pain – and it spilled out into the group.
Understanding the group object
Anzieu’s personal contribution was understanding the group object is
often split into two pieces of unequal importance: one is idealized,
while the other is persecuted; & this explains why the phenomena of
the cult of personality, idea or idol are inseparable from the exercise
of terror. The group object is primitively a part object and Anzieu
described several group constellations according to the type of
collective relationship that is established with such an imaginary
object: such as phantasies of the breast-group, the mouth group, the
persecutor – seducer group, the paradoxical narcissistic group and in
the collective relationship of the clinical group – I found the tortoise
group. In the group vignette, we get some sense of the space between
outer and inner faces of the group skin ego at various moments of
meeting, as the group illusion corresponds to the moment in which the
group forms itself as such.
Clinical Vignette
Carlos: hands me a little box - inside a little object – a tortoise. I ask
him what it means. He smiles and says it hides a secret in its shell. He
lifts up his t-shirt and exposes a self-inflicted wound on his belly. He
said his ex., (mother of his children) asked him to stay for dinner &
he’d said ‘no’ and went home and while cooking, feeling so upset, had
placed the hot utensil against his skin. Zoran: asked ‘why…to take the
pain away’? Carlos then lifted up his shirt higher to reveal what he’d
kept hidden - an image, engraved into his skin in the middle of his
chest, over the sternum. It lets Zoran remember when he was 15, and
the sensation of the shrapnel wound – in the same place as Carlos he
says. He feels the skin through his t-shirt & says he felt no pain, just
hot fluid sensation traveling down his left leg. It was the last day of
the war…
Grace: expressed confusion of not knowing, not
understanding why…her own painful anger that had been violated –
of why the youth had raped her, had he thought she was younger –
why didn’t he want to look her in the eye. ‘I reminded him of his
mother’, she’d said. Particularly hurt and angry because the matriarchs
from his community had approached her to forgive him, condoning