Commentary from A Group Analyst

It is no criticism to say of this piece that it feels so familiar. We've all been there, as clients and as clinicians. It is almost a stereotype of how things are, and all the more convincing for being so predictable. There is little to distinguish it from many other groups. This is how you would invent a fictitious first group, and it would not be ‘condemned as an improbable fiction’. It is the Ur-Group opening session.

Indeed, my first reaction was that there was little specific to comment upon. The presenter of the piece writes in the very first paragraph that this first session ‘contained all the anxieties and concerns that the text-books predict’. We are even told that the text-book was Yalom. And yet we know that this group, like every other, will go on to develop its own culture and unique history; even if we only get a hint at this early stage. As in a game of chess, there are relatively few legitimate moves but an infinite possibility.

So much for the first half of the first paragraph. The second half swings off at a tangent, and invites us to believe that individual and group therapy necessarily differ in their attitude to and treatment of dependency issues. It is a controversial claim at an inopportune moment.

Then we plunge into those familiar themes of the first group: names and introductions; silence and anxiety, not least the clinician's; a listing of problems; a searching for the rules; the first hesitant and covert attacks. The fact that it all feels so familiar is a tribute to the therapist, who keeps the group safe, while being aware of the potentials.

As I read the familiar litany, I found myself pondering three general issues about groups, as they implicitly arose in the story.

‘I think we are supposed to do it for ourselves …’ was a wonderful early sentence that indicated considerable sophistication, and it set me thinking about how far any group is a tabula rasa, and how far people arrive in groups with a knowledge of ‘the rules’, even while they m