Doing Our Work: Words, Deeds, and Presence

ABSTRACT

Group leadership is an art, with relational tools of words, deeds, and presence. We aim to take our groups to creative places that they—and we ourselves—have never been before. Something needs to happen, fresh experience needs to emerge that becomes relevant to the growth of the members, including the therapist. The therapist's work is done while we are also doing something else. It entails a dual focus, or “binocular vision,” directed to personal discovery, while also focused on the group’s realities and growth potentials. Three case examples illustrate how the work happens to us: we evolve as a person as we do the work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A preliminary version of this article was published in Group (Billow, 2017). I thank Dr. Charles Raps for careful readings of multiple versions of this article and his many suggestions.

Notes

¹ While originating in Experiences in Groups (1961, p, 8), “binocular vision” became a prominent metaphor of Bion (1962; 1973–1974). According to Grotstein (2003, p. 13), Bion created a “paradigm change” in psychoanalytic thinking and technique with this idea.

² For example, synergistic interplay may be between the “basic assumption” and “work group,” consciousness and unconsciousness, theory and experience.

³ Freud’s (1916–1917, p. 17) assertion that “nothing takes place in a psycho-analytic treatment but an interchange of words between the patient and the analyst” contradicts his own writings, which emphasize the importance of the relationship that exists beyond words. “If the patient is to fight his way through the normal conflict which we have uncovered … he is in need of a powerful stimulus … simply and solely his relationship to the doctor” (Freud, 1916–1917, p. 445).

⁴ Communicative play begins at birth, as the parents vocally and gesturally greet their child. It remains within the relational repertoire of therapeutic discourse, and if it is not, it needs to be (see Winnicott, 1971, p. 46). We actualize our capacity to play by participating in enactments, by an open, encouraging stance, and by our rhetoric.

⁵ In my first supervisory session, Bion (1976) frankly acknowledged, “it helps to be famous.”

⁶ In deciding what aspects of clinical interactions should be dealt with, and in what terms, “to a great extent the choice is already determined by the analyst’s personality” (Bion, 1965; p. 166; also, Freud, 1912; Kite, 2008). From Foulkes (1964, p. 179): ‘The group conductor’s influence on the therapeutic group, quite particularly from unconscious sources, is hard to overestimate.”

⁷ Nuclear ideas, which materialize from the nucleus of the ongoing group process and affectively engages the therapist, provide a pathway to the work: shifting interest and discussion from surface contents to unconscious, dissociated, or unexplored intersubjective phenomena (Billow, 2015).

⁸ Diplomacy is concerned with power and with establishing and maintaining relationships and alliances. The therapist situates certain emotional truths and not others as salient in the immediacy of the clinical situation. Integrity resides in the therapist’s moral and ethical principles, in reference to one’s professional, political, ethnic, and religious affiliations., and how they are applied. Sincerity conveys the leader’s positive emotionality. While sincerity expresses love; authenticity strives for “passion,” a relational process of realizing and engaging basic affects (attendant fantasies and thoughts), establishing and maintaining links from one’s mind to the minds of others (Billow, 2003).

⁹ In poetry in general (particularly but not only in the Western tradition) the male serves as lover and subject, and the female as the desired and often reviled “other,” defined by phallocentric ideology and imagery (Hullah, 2016).

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.