Engaged Research: Encountering a Transactional Analysis Training Group through Bion's Concept of Containing

Abstract

The author describes his experience of observing a transactional analysis training group focused on work with highly challenging clients. This encounter precipitated his inquiry into the nature and effect of researching. Drawing on Bion's psychoanalytic concept of “containing”–with its aspects of receiving, thinking, and interpreting–the author hypothesizes how an engaged approach to research into human functioning might actually be therapeutic or growth-enhancing for the individual or group being studied. Such engagement requires the researcher's ability to structure experiences both bodily and mentally on the path to understanding and affecting human capacities.

Failure and Shame in Professional Practice

“…When in our work we inquire after the particulars, we invite their potential impact. I think of this as “engaged researching” (Landaiche, 2005, p. 153), which describes how some of us learn the nature of a client’s or student’s struggle by its particular feel, sometimes unbearable and seemingly unprocessable, at least at the start.…”

Looking for Trouble in Groups Developing the Professional’s Capacity

“…I am also interested in what makes being a human so difficult, so disruptive to growth and potential. I have written about what I see as the sometimes considerable trouble of having a human mind with its human body (Landaiche, 2007(Landaiche, , 2009 and about the difficulties that this condition presents for the work we do as human relations professionals (Landaiche, 2005(Landaiche, , 2009. In my view, the troubles that bring people for help and that make helping difficult can usefully be traced to two basic, interrelated human challenges: (1) our capacity for thinking what is not necessarily real and (2) our incapacity for bodily affect and responsiveness to living.…”

The Group Quest

“…He adds, “An additional task of the group psychotherapist is to facilitate group members in inquiring about each other’s phenomenological experience and to draw out those who are not actively participating or may be reluctant to talk about what they are feeling” (p. 269). In contrast, I think that my task as a group therapist in this context was to be receptive to the communication from the group as a whole, to hold it and understand its nature, and eventually to “speak to the truth or fact of that communication” (Landaiche, 2005, p. 150).…”