Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

60 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
A 36 year-old woman, in temporary retirement for two years
because of her borderline personality disorder. Self-injuries, suicidal
thoughts, drugs and alcohol caused many hospital-stays in her past.
She had had several psychotherapeutic treatments. I got to know her
at a time when she was ready to join a first outpatient group therapy.
She was lucky to experience the process of forming a new group. She
called her mother “simple” and had to face the fact, and her concerns,
there could be “simple” patients in the group. At first, she was full of
contempt towards the other group members, a projection of her selfcontempt,
which we could work on in individual sessions. She was
very quickly offended and wanted to leave the group several times in
the first months. After one year in this group she developed individual
relations with each of the other group members, although there was
still contempt. For her, the group had become the most important
thing. She is very intelligent and curious and develops well. She feels
that she belongs to this group.
Case report 2: This case report is an example for conjoint therapy. A
54 year-old man, unemployed because he lost his job after six months
of being unable to work because he was a depressive. He tried again
and again each Monday to drive to his job, but always turned the car
in the wrong direction and drove to his family doctor, who recorded
him ill again and again. He stayed in bed or in the house while his wife
went to work. He could not explain why he wasn’t able to drive to
work. During the preliminary individual sessions, it was his wish to
have group therapy. He wanted to understand why he had always had
problems with his colleagues and bosses for so many years and why
he wasn’t able to drive to work. As he had never been in any
psychotherapy before we decided that he could join one of my groups
and at the same time have individual sessions. Because I could not
offer him individual treatment at this time, he went to a colleague and
friend of mine. We worked together. While working in the dyad
wasn’t complicated with him, it was quickly obvious why he always
got into trouble in groups. He annoyed the leader very quickly, as well
as the group. He made us feel stupid and slow on the uptake and made
us feel inferior, helpless and angry. The group members chose a
friendly way to show him what he was doing to us and why there was
a lot of anger in the room. They could point out how he treated the
conductor in an insulting and subtly aggressive way - his problem was
with authority figures. He grew up in a family with three sisters all
more than ten years older than him and with parents who both worked
hard in alternating shifts to run a sausage and chips stand. During