The Holy See: The Individual and the Group-Intersubjective Meetings

Abstract

The analytic group is a space where powerful meetings between the various selves of its members occur. These meetings have the potential to facilitate processes of mutual recognition and the development of multiple selves, on one hand, but may also lead to collapse of the potential space and experiences of destruction, on the other. Group and individual processes of recognition and destruction may be dramatic and require special coping on the part of the leader (mainly in situations of impasse), or they may be more subtle, almost unnoticeable. Both in the case of the big dramas and in the case of the little dramas, the possibility for surrender, for movement toward unfamiliar areas within one or more of the participants, is what furthers the group's development. In the current paper, I apply intersubjective concepts to group work and, more precisely, propose a way of looking at how the group and the group leader can act to expand the intersubjective space in order to enable processes of destruction and recognition to coexist without the potential space collapsing.

Notes

¹otherness = other self-states.

¹“The Holy See,” in Hebrew, which refers to the Pope, or the Vatican is literally “The Holy Throne.” The Hebrew word for throne (Kess) is derived from the same root as the Hebrew word for chair (Keesseh). In the context of the group interaction described in the paper, therefore, this phrase was both literal and figurative, since it referred both to the actual chair with Dana's bag on it, and to the Pope's throne.