On Making A Home Amongst Strangers: The Paradox of Group Psychotherapy

Abstract

This lecture explores how the ambient network amongst group analysts has grown from Foulkes' own biography through figurations of home in group psychotherapy where members' attunement and alignment transpose longing into belonging. The three underlying dimensions of group analytic psychotherapy-the relational, reflective and reparative-are described and illustrated with clinical vignettes and music. These dimensions are found working in the current, transference, projective and primordial domains of small therapeutic groups and in the large group dynamics of the lecture's audience.

Black Power–White Halos. A response to Guilaine Kinouani’s ‘Silencing, power and racial trauma in groups’

“…John Schlapobersky in his Foulkes lecture, Making a home amongst strangers (Schlapobersky, 2015) indicates the extent to which group analysts may have come to group analysis in search of a home, and for whom the group analytic community has come to be that home. It has moreover, become a home in which conflict is extremely difficult to manage and is frequently avoided.…”

Positions and figurations in group analytic psychotherapy: an account of therapeutic processes in the individual as part of the group

“…that give rise to it (Schlapobersky, 2016: 37)'. In his Foulkes Lecture (Schlapobersky, 2015) he demonstrates its relationship to other group analytic concepts, applying it to clinical material to illustrate how thematic content, resonance and relational patterns in groups are interwoven. His account deepens not only our appreciation of group dynamics but also of the idea of thematic content itself, highlighting as it does the fact that any theme operative in a group-'home' or 'nourishment' for example-cannot really be said to ever exist independently of resonance and relational 'patternings' (figurations).…”

Strangers and Angels: A Response to John Schlapobersky’s Foulkes Lecture May 2015

“…It is always an honour to be invited to be a respondent to an eponymous lecture; but for me it has been a particular privilege to be invited to be the respondent to John Schlapobersky’s 2015 Foulkes Lecture. Like many people in the audience, I was a student of John’s at the IGA, benefiting from his generosity, wisdom and academic rigour as I prepared my dissertation.…”