Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 81, September 2018

62 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
But he wasn’t thinking about profit – this was something else. He
didn’t feel in control. He was still surprised that he’d spoken aloud
about that Christmas - and even more puzzled by the sequence of
events that had followed.
He thought about the tenor of the Visitors’ questions. They
seemed to lead to the conclusion that many of his actions had been
attempts to fill in a gap left by the absence of his father and to defend
against the impingements of his mother. Yet, his background seemed
much less chaotic than that of Jason and the schizophrenic woman.
There had been a kind of sparse stability in his childhood years. He’d
learnt to switch off and calculate around his father’s absences and his
mother’s distress. He’d never let himself become overwhelmed.
Could his business practices really be traced back to a sense of
infantile grievance?
Was his focus on accumulation in identification with his father’s
money-making?
Was thinking about the cost of presents a way of not being
overwhelmed by his mother’s distress?
Did anxiety fuel his greed? If the expression of this anxiety was
shaped by the social context, was his crime a reflection of a social
disturbance?
Did everything really make sense if you thought about it for long
enough and traced its roots back far enough?
He couldn’t shake off the worry that he might be just making
excuses.
The manager had joined him in his silence. She wondered
whether fraud was when you packaged a policy which was no longer
in accord with the emotional needs of recipients so that it could be
implemented without serious protest. But surely this was marketing.
Was this a package she’d first unwrapped as an oldest daughter and
then tried to deliver to others ever since? But not knowing what to do
was unbearable. Trying to remain attuned to emotional reality, as the
Visitors had seemed to advocate [or at least the answers to their
questions had seemed to suggest], was a landscape with few points of
stability. She’d initially felt attracted to the power of the politician and
the calculation of the businessman which had seemed familiar. Now
she felt attracted to their apparent vulnerability - which didn’t. Had
the Visitors predicted the direction of her journey? Was this why the
Visitors were so interested in the fluidity of the communication
between people and had seemed to regard enthusiasm for terminology
as a refuge against change and development? Was knowing so much