Response to “Thinking About Our Work: What Do We Mean by ‘Mental Health’?” Justin Hecht1 issn 0362-4021 © 2017 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 41, No. 2, Summer 2017 155 1 Lecturer, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, and private practice, San Francisco. Correspondence should be addressed to Justin Hecht, PhD, CGP, FAGPA, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, 401 Parnassus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94143. E-mail: justin@justinhecht.com. I would like personally and professionally to endorse the spirit and substance of Lee Kassan’s brief comment on the problems with the increasing medicalization of psychotherapy. I’d like to do so in the context of my personal life and my professional thoughts. As I was thinking about how to respond, I thought about how I spend my weekend, and how this relates to group psychotherapy. My partner, Erik, and I are lucky enough to live in the Sonoma County wine country, north of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful, tranquil region of vineyards, redwoods, and (in good years) rivers. On most Friday mornings, I go to a serene old church in Santa Rosa and meet with a group that ranges in size from six to 10 people. The church was built from two giant redwood trees and has a soft, warm glow of reddish brown. (I like to think that the spirit of the tree is with us somehow.) We sit in a circle and meditate and pray and take turns reading from the Book of Common Prayer. All of us are seeking comfort, guidance, and direction from something larger than ourselves, and we help each other out, sharing bits and pieces of our lives. Something in me senses that I am walking in the footsteps of many, many generations of my ancestors. Even though the old scriptures don’t always make complete sense to me, the feeling of belonging, tradition, and continuity is deeply healing, grounding, and sustaining. On most Saturday mornings, I drive along the Russian River to Guerneville, a funky old frontier town popular with bikers, and go up a winding, narrow road to a cabin with a bamboo-floored Zendo in the basement. There, I sit in silent meditation with a group that also ranges from six to 10 people. After we sit in silence for 156 hecht 35 minutes, we take a brief break and hear from Tony, our priest, a gentle ex-hippie whose life experiences help him translate the dharma into relevant and helpful talks. We also share helpful advice about propane deliveries and water levels. I’ve come to think of these two groups on Friday and Saturday mornings as very much my psychotherapy groups. Psyche, after all, is the Greek word for “soul,” and therapy means “to heal, to wait on, to attend to.” All of us in these two groups are seeking to heal or attend to our souls. When I was in Philadelphia for graduate school, I used to like to go to Quaker meetings, where I would sit with the friends and wait to speak “until the spirit moved me.” I mention these three kinds of experiences because I believe that they represent the archetypal roots of group soul healing—group psychotherapy. As Kassan writes, most of us have known times of disconnection and unhappiness in our own lives. And most of our clients seek to work with us to alleviate the pain that they are facing , to grow in wisdom and in hope that we will be able to provide a perspective on what ails them. It’s my feeling that when we medicalize this very human need to connect and to work on our souls, not only do we objectify our clients in a harmful way but we also lose our own connection with our ancestors, our traditions, and our innate human need to be part of a healing circle. My hope is that we can embrace the ancient archetypal roots of what we are doing and, in so doing, be present in a deeply soulful way for those who seek our assistance. ...
Abstract:The first part of this article argues that a sex offender inmate begins to comprehend his relationship to the prison from his first sight of the facility and his admission, then through emotional attributes generated by this environment and its representation as a father figure. A mother figure (analytic group) is constantly present and is part of an oedipal-type triangular configuration. The second part of the article proposes that a state of apprehension links the inmate with the prison's representation as a parental figure. This is parallel to a child's postnatal experience of contact with the unknown and learning how to regulate his emotional responses when confronting new situations. The third part describes the offender's relationship to his analytic group and its conductor, followed by consideration of a group member's oedipal-type configurations and involvement with his analytic group, group conductor, and the prison establishment as primary object relationships. The author's interpretations and theoretical viewpoints stem from material from an analytic group conducted in a Type B prison in the United Kingdom.
257 1 Professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati, and Coordinator of Group Therapy, California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco. Correspondence should be addressed to Walter N. Stone, MD, 23 DeSilva Island Drive, Mill Valley, CA 94941. E-mail: w_stone@comcast.net. I was very pleased to read the responses to my Thinking About Our Work essay on analytic love. When I wrote my thoughts on this topic, I was focusing primarily on my sense that, at times, we alter the analytic frame in ways that are deemed inappropriate, such as giving advice or revealing something personal, which may include how we feel about a patient. Yet we do that out of genuine concern and caring for our patients. Fundamentally, we are not expecting anything in return, with the exception of seeing our patients benefit and grow. When I first read the responses to these thoughts, I wondered about the difference implied in “analytic” and “romantic” love and if the titles implied different concepts. J. Scott Rutan addresses the differences in a very nice manner as he contrasts Western romantic love with love as constructed in collective societies such as China. He adds and expands his view, “It is, rather, a deep affection for, knowledge of, and concern for one another.” This quotation includes my view of analytic love, with the exception of not expecting anything in return, and I think Rutan is implicitly saying that there is nothing expected in return. Further elaborating, Scott comments that if there is a sexual component, it is peripheral. I agree also with his particularly incisive comment that we often do not actually explore, in any depth, manifestations of love among members or directed at the therapist. Close ties between love and sexuality are threatening because they might lead to action. Carol Kramer Slepian’s response illustrates this point. She describes two members who developed romantic feelings toward one another, which eventually ended in marriage. During the couple’s courtship, though, the uninvolved members became distrustful. One member of the couple left the group; the other wished to remain.
Response to “Thinking About Our Work: Work” Sara Emerson1 issn 0362-4021 © 2017 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 2017 63 1 Faculty, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and private practice, Cambridge, MA. Correspondence should be addressed to Sara Emerson, LICSW, CGP, FAGPA, 21 High Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: sjemerson1@comcast.net. The Thinking About Our Work section of the journal offers a wonderful opportunity for us to connect with one another around ideas of our work and how we think about our work. I see this invitation as an open informal dialogue among professionals, sharing ideas, perspectives, and feelings about the complex nature of “work” and the practical nature of our work in particular, the profession of psychotherapy , psychoanalysis, and group psychotherapy. As Grundy suggests, there are many ancillary components to our work—the executive parts, management of our practice, and so on—although they represent a piece of the “work” I do, I will not address them in this response. Instead, I focus on the nature of work; the meaning of work; and the meaning and value of this work, psychotherapy, from my perspective. In addition, I want to consider “thinking” and how it applies to what I think and reflect upon and thus how my actions and practice are informed. To my understanding, this is not a forum to showcase one’s intellectual and scholarly endeavors but to share from an experiential and self-reflective space. In considering these questions, one must also consider learning—how we learn and what we learn, what we know, and what certainty and tolerance we have for the unknown in clinical practice. Early psychoanalytic teachings and technique promoted a stance of the analyst as “knowing,” and thus as the ability to interpret the “unconscious” of the patient, with the belief that “knowing will set you free.” Thankfully for many of us, the field has evolved from “knowing” to co-creating an understanding with the patient or the group of their underlying yearnings and feelings. I diverge from the topic, except that it is due to reflection upon our work that the theory and practice of psychotherapy has evolved, and continues to evolve. Yes, this evolution has required 64 emerson scholarly effort but, maybe more importantly, also our ability as professionals to reflect upon our work and the nature of the work—can we evolve as well or stay rooted in what we “know”? In a general sense, work is a way to contribute to society, to belong, to feel valued, and to have meaning. It is also a means of connection with others. The practice of psychotherapy exists for the unfolding of a person’s understanding of himself or herself in the context of the person’s life and relationships with others. How do we help people make meaning of their lives, endeavors, wants, desires? How many times have I asked a patient what he or she wants and the patient has drawn a blank? Usually people can tell you what has been expected of them, ways in which they have followed or failed those expectations, but what do they want? For me, psychotherapy, analysis, or group therapy is a process of discovery and connection. What do I want? What do you want? How can we create an environment, a space, in which to ask that question and then begin to play and entertain possibilities? In the young adult groups that I lead (22–30 years old), the patients can readily talk about their “failures,” ways in which they have been a disappointment to their families and not “lived up to their potential.” Hmm. What do I want? Not to feel so much like a failure and a disappointment. The question of work in a broader context, our work in the context of the larger society, and our work specifically of psychotherapy and group psychotherapy—the professional connection, the guilds—historically, its meaning is of identification, belonging, connection, value. We bond together around an identification of our “work.” Psychoanalytic institutes and organizations, the American Group Psychotherapy Association and its affiliates, labor unions, professional organizations—all provide or offer a sense of community, belonging, value, and contribution...
Address to the Graduating Class of the EGPS Training Program, June 2017 Anne McEneaney1 issn 0362-4021 © 2017 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 41, No. 3, Fall 2017 199 1 Correspondence should be addressed to Anne McEneaney, 201 E. 17th Street, #19A, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: anne.mceneaney@nyu.edu. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I’m pleased and honored to see my former co-deans and Dr. Robin Good, who has been involved in the program from its founding. It’s wonderful to see this year’s graduates; our faculty, consultants, and group leaders; and so many members of the EGPS [Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society] community. This is a commencement, a beginning. So, when thinking about what I wanted to talk about with you, I thought of the journey group has taken me on, in my personal and professional lives, and wondered, where will group take you? There is a quote by T. S. Eliot that I love: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” I first saw this in French, and the literal translation was to return to the place we knew but to see it with new eyes. This is what group can do for us. It is certainly what it has done for me. It has taken me on journeys within myself and with others, in my personal and professional lives. These journeys have been as a group member, a workshop participant, and a group leader, both clinically and as a trainer and teacher. It has taken me on journeys into wonderful group communities, in which I have come to see both myself and the world around me through new eyes. I have become able to see brighter, and deeper, colors and shadings, in which the juxtaposition of one person, group, or culture to another allows each to know both itself and the other more fully. This happens if we can keep exploring and keep ourselves open to knowing more about ourselves and others. I started life as the fifth of six children, so group has been a familiar place for me 200 mceneaney since the day I was born. When I found AGPA [American Group Psychotherapy Association], which I first attended here in New York City in 1997, doing the twoday institute, I had the experience of being simultaneously scared out of my wits and completely intrigued and exhilarated. I felt both totally at home and completely out to sea. In short, I was hooked. In that community, I found my groups—the people with whom I shared meaningful group experiences, the friends with whom I played after the workshops were over, and the mentors and teachers with whom I continued to learn and grow. Among the members of all of these groups were active members of EGPS, who brought me into this community when I moved to New York City in 2004, giving me my first highly valued experience of an active, local group community. I gradually expanded my communities as I took on new roles—leading workshops , co-leading a special interest group, leading an institute, running for governance positions. Through connections made in the U.S. group world, I have become involved in attending group conferences, leading workshops, and teaching groups throughout the world. At this point, I have taught on five continents. I’m not sure I’ll make it to seven, but I understand penguins are pretty group oriented! Each step was facilitated by the connections and risks taken that came before— my first presentation was with the members of a peer consultation group, where we talked about our process as a peer group. I co-led workshops and panels at first, and my first special interest group co-chair was a good friend and colleague. Those experiences and relationships gave me the grounding to explore more—in terms of both what I could do and where. The most recent challenge I’ve taken on is the supervision over Skype of 15 therapists in Tbilisi, Georgia. Every step that has come has been...
