“How Could You!”: Self-Righteousness Under Scrutiny in a Therapy Group

At times patients in a therapy group express their opinions about other members with a strong sense of being morally right. I hope in this article to explore the specific underpinnings of what often appears as rightful indignation. I also want to illustrate this special state of mind with material from a psychoanalytic therapy group, now in its twelfth year, and from individual sessions with two of the group members. In my work with groups I make interpretations to the group as a whole as well as to its individual members. Along with Bion (1959), I consider the group's psychotic anxieties as clustering around three basic assumptions: dependency, fight-flight, and pairing. When the members are caught up in one of these basic anxieties, they collectively oppose understanding and development. The group does not recover its intellectual curiosity and its capacity to learn from experience until they become what Bion calls a “work group.” My attention therefore tends to focus on the group when a basic assumption mentality is present and on the individual members when the group has properly become a work group. Even a stable group can be pervaded by basic assumption phenomena, and at these times my attention will shift to the group as a whole. I therefore keep in mind at all times both the individual and group perspectives (Safan-Gerard, 1996).

In my bibliographical search I found that, surprisingly, there is a paucity of references to “self-righteousness” as such by Freud and other psychoanalysts, even though they have written on the subject indirectly in connection with grandiosity, omnipotence, narcissistic defenses, ego ideal, sense of entitlement, and projective identification. I found myself repeatedly going back