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One of my strongest memories of our training group was that we were by and large very ‘nice’ to each other and keen to be mutually protective when attempts were made by a member of the group or the seminar leader to introduce a challenge to this comfortable status quo. It felt to me that powerful mechanisms of control were in operation, defending us from anxieties about conflict, rivalry, disintegration and intimacy. Much safer not to rock the boat.
This has left me with some quite ambivalent feelings about how this group experience has contributed to our training as analysts.
On the one hand I found the training seminars very freeing, where unlike previous trainings there was no threat of written examinations testing one's mastery of the theory. This gave scope to free associate to the reading and explore my thoughts within the seminar in the quiet confidence that the group would on the whole be ‘nice’ to me. Perhaps this benefit made me think it was good to let sleeping dogs lie.
On the other hand I was often left wondering whether there might be gain from exploring the group process and confronting the issues underlyng the ‘niceness’. Was it better that these issues were left to our own training analyses rather than confront powerful narcissistic defences in the group? Would the anxiety levels exposed ultimately contribute to the learning process or inhibit it if the group became too persecutory? However if our ‘niceness’ couldn't be confronted in the group, did this leave us less prepared as analysts by encouraging us to perpetuate this ‘niceness’ with our patients, perhaps limiting our potency in the consulting room?
Finally our training experiences gave us a model for relating as members of a society post-qualification, and I am left wondering whether there is a complex relationship between our experiences as a group and the anxieties of the institution, in terms of looking at difference and diversity within the society, and engaging with feared clashing of opposi