Approaching the mountain: A journey into the wilderness of large group thinking

2020 ◽  
pp. 053331642094619
Author(s):  
Emma Reicher
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Ethical Practice ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Large Group ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Group Thinking ◽  
Large Groups

Although the large group is a mandatory part of the Institute of Group Analysis London Qualifying Course, its history and theory have been absent from the curriculum. This fringe status can be seen as a reflection of the challenge the large group offers the analyst—trainee and practitioner alike. It exposes structures of power, reveals issues around race and gender, and brings historical trauma to light. The question is, are we willing to look within? My ‘journey into the wilderness’ is a step towards an answer. As such, this article is framed as field research, focusing on the lived experience of the large group, as well as revisiting its past. It moves between two paradigms of practice—developmental large groups in training institutes and discrete large groups at conferences—and seeks to define the purpose of this ritual, as well as set new ground lines for ethical practice. Through the use of large group material, I trace the theoretical language of koinonia, fellowship, dialogue, outsight and equivalence, and exemplify learnings around the mechanisms of projective processes. I suggest that a projection must be felt before it can be returned, but in such a multi-person setting, ‘countertransference’ does not do this work of integration justice. Finally, I address containment and introduce the concept of reverie/participation. Through this model the large group grants us an experience of embeddedness, and awakens our responsibility for the challenges of history making, and social change.

The Social Unconscious and the Large Group – Part III: Listening to the Voices in the Wind

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 420-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Tubert-Oklander ◽  
Reyna Hernández-Tubert
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
International Workshop ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Large Group ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Unconscious ◽  
Large Groups ◽  
Group Part

This is the third of a series of three articles, based on the lecture we delivered at the International Workshop ‘Studies of Large Groups and Social Unconscious’, which took place in Belgrade in June 2013. In the first part we compared the British and the Latin American traditions of group analysis. In the second, we discussed the conception of the social unconscious and the group analytic large group, in both traditions. Now we present our own approach to large groups and discuss the problem of the wider context in which the large group takes place.

Beyond rejection, glory and the Soldier’s Matrix: the heart of my group analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robi Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Group Analysis ◽  
Social Motivation ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Distinctive Group ◽  
Professional History ◽  
Large Groups ◽  
Special Space ◽  
Sandwich Model

During my 45 year journey in the different approaches to psychotherapy, an interest in small, median and later in large groups have influenced me professionally. Many in the Israel IGA had a similar professional history until we finally felt group analysis as our home. I also learned from experiences of rejection and glory. A Trauma-Glory continuum, connected to rejection and inclusion, will be discussed. Glory, which is considered a basic social motivation, could have a special space in group analysis. The concept of the Soldier’s Matrix will be discussed, with a distinctive group-analytic approach to the large group and ‘the Sandwich model’. This group analytic application, could be taken as a possible ‘anti-dote’ to difficult social configurations as are found in ‘soldiers’ matrices’.

Fertility and childbearing practices among poor Gypsy women in Hungary: the intersections of class, race and gender

1997 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judit Durst
Keyword(s):  
Birth Weight ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Past ◽  
Low Birth Weight Babies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Roma Women ◽  
The Village

This article explores changes in childbearing practices among Gypsy (Roma) women in a small village in Northern Hungary. The author benefited from several years of ethnographic field research and data collected in this village, where the proportion of the out-of-wedlock births and births to teenage—mostly Gypsy—mothers have increased by a factor of three in the past 10 years as the population of the village has become more and more impoverished and the opportunities for geographic or social mobility declined sharply for the ethnic minority. The author argues that bearing children early is a sign of passage to adulthood in this group of women, a function which had been assigned to other social institutions before 1989. Early childbearing at the same time exacerbates the problem of Gypsy women: this is the first study which documents the consequences of poverty on women's and children's health by showing an increase in low birth weight babies in the community since 1989.

Large Groups and Women Leadership: Caregiving for Multiple Authenticities

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-340
Author(s):  
Lauren E. Storck
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Group Leadership ◽  
Women Leadership ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Large Groups ◽  
Home Territory

Professionals in many disciplines are interested in large group dynamics, and simultaneously, there is a need to formulate coherent trainings for large group leadership roles. Group analysis being my ‘home territory’ to explore these highly complex forces and challenges, this article is one woman’s group-analytic understanding of larger groups and issues of conducting larger groups in our interconnected and interdependent world.

Picturing Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hertha D. Sweet Wong
Keyword(s):  
Leslie Marmon Silko ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
First Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Autobiographical Work ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Autobiography Studies ◽  
The Relationship

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.

At the Crossroads: Latina Identity and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-333
Author(s):  
Stephanie Rivera Berruz
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
Latina Identity ◽  
And Gender

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been heralded as a canonical text of feminist theory. The book focuses on providing an account of the lived experience of woman that generates a condition of otherness. However, I contend that it falls short of being able to account for the multidimensionality of identity insofar as Beauvoir's argument rests upon the comparison between racial and gendered oppression that is understood through the black–white binary. The result of this framework is the imperceptibility of identities at the crossroads between categories of race and gender. Hence, the goal of this article is to explore the margins of Beauvoir's work in order to decenter the “other” of The Second Sex and make known what is made imperceptible by its architecture, using Latina identity as an interventional guide. I conclude that given the prominence of The Second Sex in feminist theory, this shortcoming must be addressed if feminist theorists are to use it responsibly.

Toward a Decolonial Feminism

Hypatia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 742-759 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marìa Lugones
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Decolonial Feminism

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather I proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document