Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

80 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
Was it possible to imagine a boundary? Was it a line or an
area? National borders gave shape to a group identity. Who was in
and who was out. The exclusion of some people – and the experiences
they embodied – was inevitable. That fitted in with the therapist’s idea
of group therapy, but it didn’t seem to stack up when the Visitors
asked questions about the nature of an inclusive therapeutic culture.
The group composition had ensured that it had been plunged into
global issues – torn out of any possibility of exclusive suburbs. Did
they not consider risk? This group was dangerous. An attack had been
narrowly prevented – by a terrorist! Everyone had been stirred up.
They were unsettled - but they were connected! And - most people had
tried to support someone - although no one else had intervened as
dramatically as the terrorist and the nurse.
She revisited earlier conversations. What did it mean if
internal boundaries were established in relation to a resilient mother:
a human presence that could ‘stand the strain’? Surely that was
infinitely variable. And some strains were unbearable. How could
such an experience be re-created in a professional setting with
unwilling or impossible clients? It would make professional
guidelines impractical. Could she stand the strain of working with a
violent criminal? She looked at the nurse. Her respect for this brave
woman continued to grow although she doubted whether it was mutual.
She enjoyed the nurse’s spontaneity. There was hardly an
evidence base, or professional guidelines, for intuitive interventions
in chaotic situations. She couldn’t imagine being that unplanned. Even
in the therapy group in which she’d been a patient, she’d been in
training – and was always aware that she wanted to qualify - which
circumscribed her contributions. Had her training institution echoed
her judgemental mother to whom she had ‘bound’ herself despite her
assertions of intellectual independence? Were the ‘boundaries’ she
advocated primarily boundaries in her own mind against her own more
chaotic thoughts and impulses? This was uncomfortable. She steadied
herself - and thereby reorganized her defences, allied with the manager
and distanced herself from the nurse. She doubted whether the nurse
had even had therapy.
Did those who lived near the boundary, on both sides, have
as much in common as those who lived on the same side? Where did
that thought come from? She looked towards the Visitors. When she
looked around, the therapist realized that several group members were
similarly perplexed as to where the random questions that occurred in
their minds were coming from.
Was it the nurse’s deficient grasp of reality that made her