You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the preceding section I said that patients arrived with a preconception that serves very well as foundation for a structure intended to help the group to keep its behaviour pegged to a sophisticated level. The preconception is that the group consists of doctor and patients.
When men meet together, for example in a committee, rules of procedure are established and there is usually an agenda; the formality with which work is done varying with the group. In the groups in which I am psychiatrist I am the most obvious person, by virtue of my position, in whom to vest a right to establish rules of procedure. I take advantage of this position to establish no rules of procedure and to put forward no agenda.
From the moment when it becomes clear that I am doing this the group sets out to make good my omissions, and the intensity with which it does so shows that more is at stake than a passion for efficiency. The phenomena against which the group is guarding itself are none other than the group manifestations I described in the last section – the ‘fight–flight group’; the ‘pairing group’; and the ‘dependent group’. It is as if the group were aware how easily and spontaneously it structures itself in a manner suitable for acting on these basic assumptions unless steps are taken to prevent it; just as a group of students may use the idea of a seminar or lecture on which to found a sophisticated structure, so the patient group has a basis for a structure ready to hand in the commonly accepted convention of neurotic disability as an illness and of therapists as ‘doctors’.