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Agnes Wilkinson recounts her experience of conducting a self-reflective small discussion group within the context of a conference. She describes doing this along lines based on Foulkes's idea of analytic group therapy, abiding by the principle of ‘letting all participate in its [a problem's] attempted solution’. She argues that this type of group could be useful for any professional gathering in which people need to examine themselves and their relationships with others, in order to avoid the pitfalls of competition and envy, for example, which are likely to arise in such situations.
In reflecting on current and past attitudes to small groups, the author comments on the dangers of their becoming ‘fashionable’. Fashion in groups inclines some people to feel compelled to support them because they are the ‘in thing’, and others to feel suspicious of them for the same reason. Both of these attitudes are defensive; they are linked to idealisation and resistance which, however, can have a positive as well as a negative side.
The substance of the paper is a description of five group meetings which she conducted at the Seventh International Congress on Group Psychotherapy. To give an example of the interactions which took place, the author recounts an episode in which she was able to demonstrate the influence of Jungian thinking. One member had expressed a wish to learn more about Jungian ideas. This prompted Wilkinson to comment on the fact that the questioner was seated on a low chair, and linked her choice to the sense of shame which she (the questioner) had expressed earlier. At the time it had felt like a reprimand, but the incident passed. However, on another later occasion the writer was able to demonstrate to her and to the group that that sense of reprimand and the accompanying guilt had not been evoked by the original comment, but had arisen rather from a deep-rooted part of herself, the archetypal shadow, of which she had not previously been aware.
The paper conclud