Learning and Hating in Groups

Abstract

Being part of the transactional analysis community can provoke the challenge of living in groups and can provide the means of growth into viable, satisfying membership. The author considers how this cultural aspect of transactional analysis—its demands and its gifts—contributed significantly to reversing his own lifelong habit of withdrawal and cutoff from group life.

In Conflict and Community

“…In “Learning and Hating in Groups,” he described his experience:Rather than talking generally about the hatefulness of groups, I will describe what I hate about them.…[what] I fear and detest…[including] the boredom of the group’s resolute avoidance, the tensions, the threat of being killed or humiliated (social death), the passivity, the entrenchments, the slowness of deliberation (compared to the quickness and surety of my own mind), the magnification of meanness.…Frustration, uncertainty, contagion, threat—at such times, groups seem hardly worth the effort. (Landaiche, 2012, p. 191)Having written this, he then noted that in a quick count of that week in his work at a university counseling center, he participated in 19 groups of one kind or another. Love them or hate them, groups are hard to avoid.…”

“…Rather than talking generally about the hatefulness of groups, I will describe what I hate about them.…[what] I fear and detest…[including] the boredom of the group’s resolute avoidance, the tensions, the threat of being killed or humiliated (social death), the passivity, the entrenchments, the slowness of deliberation (compared to the quickness and surety of my own mind), the magnification of meanness.…Frustration, uncertainty, contagion, threat—at such times, groups seem hardly worth the effort. (Landaiche, 2012, p. 191)…”

Looking for Trouble in Groups Developing the Professional’s Capacity

“…In many contexts and areas of application, group work has played a significant role in the transactional analysis tradition (for an overview, see Landaiche, 2012, pp. 186-187).…”

“…It would be more accurate to say that I love the mastery that comes after I have gone through the often-miserable process of learning it. Learning in groups has been especially difficult for me (Landaiche, 2012). I have sympathy for members who share that challenge as well as envy and admiration for those who learn in groups with more grace or apparent enjoyment and ease.…”

Relational Group Process

“…Where, I wonder, is the room for hatred, envy, contempt, indifference, differentness (Landaiche, 2012; Nitsun, 1996; Schermer & Pines, 1994)? Stern (2013) argued thatthe atmosphere of safety also has a dark side: it is defined partly by patterns of relatedness that represent the mutually constructed avoidance of aspects of relatedness that we unconsciously fear would be unacceptably uncomfortable if we experienced them more openly or directly.…”