This issue starts with a powerful but unusual paper on the role and meaning of The Body in the migrant experience. Amira Yahiaoui and Elise Pestres' Figures of the Body in a Situation of Exile: The European case considers in depth and with subtlety the topic of the migrant’s body, using formulations ‘at the intersection between psychical, political, and social fields of enquiry’. In the article the authors look at the paradoxes of a body ‘physically forced into hyper-mobility’ while ‘the exile’s psyche is for its part subjected to a constraining immobility’ and ‘both strong and vulnerable because overly exposed to death, but also surviving and ultra-powerful’. Drawing on interviews from the Calais ‘jungle’ the paper forces us to face uncomfortable truths about the terrible situation facing migrants and refugees as they seek to find a better way of life for themselves and their families. This includes how the body can become ‘refuse’, soiled and polluted, or wilfully damaged as the mind is turned in on its relationship with the body in the face of trauma and rejection. This paper is difficult but essential reading for us all.
Next comes a talk given to the British Association of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Supervisors by Clifford Edward Watkins entitled Conviction, Commonality/Context and Culture in Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Supervision: My Personal Perspective in which the author presents a passionate and challenging account of his attempts to ‘incorporate a multicultural orientation into his (supervision) practice and bring the Cultural Third to life. He quotes the helpful (but hitherto not known by me) “Platinum Rule – do unto others as you would have others do unto others” (Pawl & St. John, 1998) as a guide to our supervisory practices. He points out how psychodynamic supervision is unique to our field and deserving of being more explicitly and highly valued as an area of practice and inquiry in its own right. He gives us insight into how to be a multi-culturally minded supervisor who is willing and open to “to reflect on one’s own self as an embedded cultural being, having awareness of personal limitations in understanding the cultural other”. He urges us to make explicit both our own and our supervisees’ cultural beliefs and values so that these can be discussed and revisited whenever needed, modelling also the way in which this can be incorporated in the work with the clients – passing along the chain a deep cultural sensitivity.
We have a particularly rich Open Space selection of papers in this issue. While they are all very different from one another, there are links, whether in considering key dynamics around remote working and the return to in-person encounters or in using Bion’s ideas to elucidate complex unconscious processes.
Beatriz Curtis’ paper on Uncertainty and anxiety post-pandemic is an illuminating rumination on issues brought into focus by the return to work after the pandemic, looking in depth at both the new and old anxieties disturbing the two ‘rather frightened people’ to whom Bion famously refers . She looks at how, in resuming in-person work ‘For some of us, the threat seems to have changed from it being an external one, a lethal virus, to a more internal one. The threat of being authentically with one another’. She starts with the very real business of ‘how anxiety-provoking it can be to open Pandora’s box, in the presence of another’ but also moves further into becoming more curious about all the decisions now open to patients, and therapists, about how to conduct the work. She uses this to do some useful thinking more generally about the anxieties encountered in the exposure involved in therapy and the challenges of learning about oneself. The choices available of telephone, online and face to face work provide a new arena for the patients to wrestle with their ‘anxieties around exposure and control, in relationship to oneself and others’. Curtis provides some illuminating examples showing how different patients have responded to these choices, both defensively and developmentally.
In her paper on Zooming in on Experiential Groups (and what is it like not to be able to see each other’s shoes during Covid?) Sarah McMichael pays close attention to the rich but difficult opportunity provided by experiential groups in trainings, including how different these are when on zoom rather than in person. She is alert to how ‘an unstructured space can be intimidating, frightening, exciting and filled with potential for exploration and creativity’. While these groups gives the members the chance to experience and explore unconscious processes, they can be powerfully disturbing.
Using examples from her practice, McMichael brings to life many important questions about the nature and role of experiential groups and the unique challenges they present us with in learning about ourselves and others and our capacity to work together on shared experiences and conflicts. She rightly points out how relatively little work has been done on this element of our trainings (compared, for example, to the more ‘glamorous’ Group Relations Conferences) when they are full of potential for insight and emotional processing.
Absence and presence are, as we know so well from our clinical work, experienced differently on zoom. But with experiential groups there are added issues. As well as the in the moment differences – for example not having an ‘empty chair’ for absent members and ‘not seeing one another’s shoes’ - the fact that the ending of the online group is so sudden and complete can inhibit the airing of conflicts as there is no shared experience such as the tea break, so if ‘something difficult arises they are left alone literally afterwards in their individual homes’.
Dominic McCloughlin contributes an unusual and inspiring paper on ‘Giving up Knowing’: Wilfred Bion and R.F. Langley, in which he brings out intriguing links between Bion’s ideas and the poetry of R.F Langley. He highlights how the ‘different kind of truth’ which Bion was urging us to seek in our therapeutic work with patients connects to Langley’s way of taking us ‘to a place of truth based on an understanding between reader and writer which has some connection to the goal of psychic truth pursued by Bion’. Langley, he writes, ‘dramatises the limits of not knowing and in so doing gives the reader an experience of the rewards of close attention and of commitment, whether in relation to one’s own mind, or to a poem, painting or person’. For both Langley and Bion the value of negative capability shines through as a means to encounter one another at the deepest level, whether as therapist and patient or writer and reader, so that while ‘our eyes do not have to meet … our viewpoints can intersect’. I had not known Langley’s work before reading this paper, but McCloughlin puts forward an enticing treatment of some of his key poems and their epistemological links with psychoanalysis which makes me want to look into them further. Furthermore, this paper poses intriguing questions about the nature of psychoanalysis itself, using Phillips’ words to consider how ‘psychoanalysis can be positioned not just between poetry and science but between poetry and philosophy’.
To conclude the issue, we have reviews of a wide range of books: Donald Meltzer: a contemporary introduction reviewed by Gavin Ivey; Jung, Deleuze and the problematic whole reviewed by Giovanni Colacicchi; Christopher Bollas: a contemporary introduction reviewed by Harriet Peters; Psychoanalysis as social and political discourse in Latin America and the Caribbean reviewed by Rodrigo Sanchez, Leadership, Psychoanalysis and Society reviewed by Chris Tanner and finally The Sound of the Unconscious: Therapy as Music reviewed by Debbie Vowles.