Witnessing: The Axis of Group

ABSTRACT

We enter the group and, to some degree make choices in what we observe and focus on, and how we participate and make our presence known. Unavoidably, and with limited control, we are thrust into a public position of witness and witnessed. Witnessing deals with the impact of embracing experience beyond observing and participating–the uncertain consequence of coming to know and becoming known. It is specifically the axis of personal growth and transformation around which a dynamically oriented group process rotates with our leadership. Discussion and two case examples illustrate its key features and the role members and therapist play in fostering this process.

Acknowledgments

An early version of this paper was presented as the Louis Ormont Lecture, the Annual Meeting of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, Houston, Texas, 2018. The author thanks Dr. Charles Raps for his astute comments in response to several drafts of this manuscript, and Dr. Dominick Grundy for overall editorial guidance and journal leadership.

Notes

¹ In Section 21 of Song of Myself, Whitman proclaims himself “the poet of the Body … Soul …[of] the woman the same as the man,” and also, of pleasures and pain, and goodness and wickedness. And in Section 51:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

² In actuality, we participate before we observe, in that we engage our minds with the thought and anticipation of group. Perception itself, which results from an exploratory action with the sensory, cannot be separated from processes of participation and interpretation (Lahlou, 2011).

³ What constitutes an agent remains debatable. However, the consensus is that an intelligent agent is situated, autonomous, reactive, proactive, and social (Wooldridge, 2009). Proactive agents possess goals, which have two aspects: declarative, a description of the state of the world which is sought; and procedural, involving a set of procedures executed in an attempt to achieve the goal. There might be more than one goal, and a set of goals may not be consistent, or achievable (Padgham & Winikoff, 2004).

⁴ In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud (1896, p. 233), wrote: “Our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the from of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a re-transcription” (his emphasis).

⁵ Ullman (2006, p. 189) differentiated social from analytic witnessing. While the latter refers to the internal reality of suffering, social witnessing addresses the actuality of trauma and its effects. Boulanger (2008, pp. 64–65) wrote of the therapist’s imperative: “It is our job to testify, whether formally in court, or clinically in the treatments we undertake, to the reality of the psychological damage they have sustained.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard M. Billow

Richard M. Billow is a Clinical Psychologist with postdoctoral degrees in psychoanalysis and group psychotherapy. He is Director of the Group Program and Clinical Professor in the adult, child, and group divisions of the Derner Postgraduate Institute, Adelphi University, in Garden City, New York.