A forty-week psychotherapy group conducted along group analytic lines was run in an outpatient department of an NHS trust. The clients had mild learning disabilities. This was the first time that psychotherapy was offered to learning disabled clients within this trust. Many difficulties were encountered in the process of running the group, as has been the experience of others when running psychoanalytic groups with this population (Gravestock and McGauley 1994). Some of the difficulties related to contextual problems. Others were concerned with the painful process of the therapy itself. The pain of the process of thinking about oneself within the group and of being thought about by the therapist was very difficult for group members. This process highlighted the importance and meaning of thinking, and the difficulties associated with thinking for people with learning disabilities. As McCormack (1991) suggests, thinking brings awareness, but awareness can be extremely painful. The countertransference provided a powerful medium for understanding the struggles experienced by both the conductor and the group members. This paper begins with a description of some important aspects of what it means to have a learning disability. The paper then considers why a group analytic approach was chosen. Special emphasis is given to the importance of the countertransference in the process of conducting this group. Examples of feelings of shame, loss and rejection are described from group material and the powerful feelings of ambivalence and guilt evoked within the countertransference in the closing of the group are highlighted. Important contextual and practical considerations for conducting a psychotherapy group within a not familiar with psychodynamic ways of working are also Conducting psychotherapy with people with learning disabilities is not so different from conducting groups with any other client This paper aims to make this evident. Keywords: Learning DisabilityPsychotherapyEmotional IntelligenceCountertransferenceAmbivalenceGroup Analysis
In 1934, James Strachey wrote that the active ingredient of psychoanalysis was the mutative interpretation. Even at this early date, Strachey observed that a relatively small proportion of the analytic literature was concerned with the mechanisms for change implicit in the analytic model. In this paper, the author proposes two modifications of Strachey's ideas. One is that it is a moment, an event, and not an interpretation as such that creates change. The author terms this the ‘mutative moment’. The other modification is the proposal of an unconscious internal group matrix as an image of the structure of self. This is a self that is at one and the same time, internal and external, individual and social. Building upon Freud, the object relations theorists, Kohut and the work of group analysts, the author pinpoints where and how change occurs in both individuals and in groups. The active ingredient of change is the focus on the here-and-now, a perspective common to both therapists and counsellors. As an understanding of the meaning of this focus develops, it becomes apparent that it takes courage to stay in the moment.
Concern about the welfare of professional dance students is growing as it becomes clearer that the training is not producing emotionally healthy and mature young people. Psychodynamic ideas and concepts offer a means of analysing the problems of the training and indicating where change needs to be implemented. This paper looks first at the areas of adolescent development towards separation, autonomy, the creation of peer relationships and the development of sexual identity and awareness, and shows how traditional dance training fails to facilitate their growth. The paper then discusses envy and competition and argues that they need to be addressed within dance training if they are not to be so destructive. The paper then suggests that group theory could enable the better use of the dance class. Finally, the idea of the body storyline is used to show that dance training has the capacity to have a creative and remedial effect on students, if training institutions provide a sufficiently facilitating environment. Keywords: PsychodynamicAdolescentWelfareMature
In this paper I analyse ways of thinking about authority relations in groups. As a specific example of more general processes I discuss the gendering of power and authority within group processes. Using vignettes from an experiential women's group, I attempt to identify and evaluate available ways of conceiving power relationships between women in groups (sister-sister; mother-daughter; the masquerade, the androgyne, honorary man, the father of whatever sex, and the lesbian). From this the paper calls, first, for a move away from treating gender as the primary organizer of difference in order to address the diverse and intersecting forms of power relations operating within groups and, second, to broaden consideration of women's positions within dyadic and group processes beyond the current (conventionally de-sexualized) maternal metaphor. It is argued that attending in these ways to sexed/gendered relations within groups offers vital resources towards theorizing and exploring the group body, whereby the group is conceived of as composed of embodied minds structured not only around gender but also by relations of class, ‘race’ and sexuality. This approach therefore envisages group psychotherapies as providing psychic surfaces between familial and broader cultural relations in which transformative group relations can be prefigured.
