Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

78 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
The Visitors
A Psy-Fi Tale
By Mike Tait
Part VIII
End Chapter VI / I
The politician wondered whether the nurse would have come
alongside him so quickly if he’d taken charge of the situation. He
could feel the urge to punish the terrorist returning. He’d been an
impotent bystander – as he felt by living with anyone for too long.
Bootlaces, a random thought; incongruous images of a hillside he’d
never been on. The image hovered. What was it that Jason had said
about that therapeutic community? The warm emptiness of the
criminal sitting alongside permeated him.
Chapter VI / II
Boundaries
‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.’
[‘Mending Wall’, Robert Frost.] [13]
‘Group selection made a working group possible.’ The therapist
decided not to point out this obvious fact to the Visitors as she could
imagine the course of the ensuing dialogue. They would ask whether
this was a working group. She wasn’t sure whether she could answer.
They would ask her whether she took responsibility for the people she
excluded. She didn’t want to answer. They would ask about the
relationship between safety and emotional development within
alternative social and international provisions. The high ground would
have quickly receded. Her selection criteria would have seemed mean
and small minded.
Had her selection criteria been as damaging as the overvaluation
of safety, justice, empirical evidence and business models
which, outside this mad environment, appeared to have exacerbated
the lonely misery of the woman she had thought of as a patient and the
bubbling rage of the man she had identified initially only as a murderer?
Was she looking at the limits of her own self-exploration? The Visitors’