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It is on the face of it a daunting task to respond from the somewhat peripheral perspective of group dynamics, and in a small space, to the subtle and powerful analysis that Thomas Catlaw offers in his essay on recognition and school violence. Indeed, it would probably not be possible to do so sensibly save for the support provided by the Samuels and Giraldo pieces that accompany it. The helpful context Samuels sets enables me to utilize aspects of all of three of Lacan's perspectives on recognition—in the Imaginary, the Real, and the Symbolic—without elaboration and without seeming inconsistent. In a similar way, Giraldo's essay explicates a critically important concept relating to group functioning and does so clearly enough that I can invoke it by reference only.
Group facilitation provides a revealing context for seeing the power of Lacanian concepts as they apply at the level of social process. Groups are a microcosmic social order, and as such, provide a laboratory that displays the interplay of the Lacanian registers as they function to constellate the human subject—or fail to do so.
Subjectivity must be understood in terms of the type of Symbolic Order (at present it is late-modernism) that is hegemonic at a given moment. What group dynamics reveals to facilitators on a