Zinkin, L. (London). ‘A gnostic view of the therapy group’.  Group Analysis,  22,  2. 1989.

In this short article, addressed to an audience not very familiar with Jung's ideas, Zinkin creeps up on controversy with characteristic understatement. He lets us know at the outset that he means to lead us to consider the ‘more esoteric’ side of Jung, and that what is in question are basic issues about legitimate aims or goals of therapy.

Groups and their therapists soon come to realise that attention only to individual problems can block the full working potential of the group. Zinkin suggests that Jung's notions about individuation, and the psychological necessity of the spiritual dimension, can help us to explore and make use of the enlarging aspects of group experience as an important vector in therapeutic change. If therapists can allow themselves not to know, they can learn from, and with, the group to accept that part of the group's therapeutic potential may well lie in the struggle with unanswerable questions about meaning and morality in human living and relating. Over-reliance on transference interpretation can block the process. A distinction can and must be made between group inflation and the numinous as, indeed, in individual therapy, and it is the task of the group therapist to interpret the first and value the second.

Zinkin then leads us to Jung's researches on the Gnostics, and he asserts that throughout his researches, and despite his elusiveness, Jung remained himself always a Gnostic—one who relies more on a traditional form of knowledge based upon revelation, rather than on reason. Gnosticism addresses the ancient problem of the one and the many, and may be of particular help to the group therapist in reconciling the interests of the one and the many in the setting of the group. By acknowledging the power of the one, the individuals in the group draw upon a ‘moving sense of unity’ and can tap a source of healing unavailable to themselves as individuals. Individuation of the group, rather than of the individual, becomes a gnostic factor in the l