It’s All About “Me” (Behold the Leader)

Abstract

The group beholds its leader: a looming figure of fantasy, an emerging figure of reality. Psychic patterns that play out in group cohesion, culture, conflicts, and process are rooted in interaction with this combined object. I describe a two-day conference on relational group psychotherapy. An assemblage had beheld “me,” a visitor with gifts of knowledge, initially welcomed with collective expectation. Rivalrous and acquisitive desire (Girard, 2004) set group process in motion, involving scapegoating and open conflict, but also, self discovery and mutual appreciation. Confronted with “me,” the representative, messenger, even embodiment of truth, the group had to deal with feelings, fantasies, and thoughts that were “not nice.” There were moments of fear for the safety and survival of our group, yet I did not comprehend the extent to which envy, in tooth and nail, with devouring hunger tore into every aspect of our mentalities. Under its catabolic force, I was captured and I could not articulate to myself the sense of what it was, until the group shifted and released me from envy’s intersubjective captivity.

In group, whatever is being talked about—whoever is reacting to whom or to what—the group’s focal conflict, predominating basic assumption, developmental level or stage, its regressions and progressions, dyadic interactions, subgroupings, and so forth, I now assume that on one level, it is all about “me.”