Witnessing—a group-specific factor and its importance in times when facts and truths are challenged

Abstract

‘Facts matter’, stated Miriam Berger in her Foulkes Lecture (Berger, 2023). They matter because, in the human world, they happen to somebody. So if they do not matter, somebody does not matter. I postulate that witnessing, as it is defined by Miriam Berger, is a group-specific factor whose value lies in allowing the emergence of ‘moments of meetings’—moments in psychotherapy changing the intersubjective architecture of the relation. The capacity to validate somebody’s experience seems to be more crucial nowadays when disregarding facts and truth has reached such an extent that it has a name: the ‘post-truth’ era. But, ‘witnessing is not a given’, says Miriam Berger. Whether this emergent property of the group will be used for ‘re-humanization in therapy and beyond’ (Berger, 2023) depends on how the conductor handles the facts: Do they matter to her/him or not? I will also reflect on what shapes the attitude of the conductors toward the facts.

Response to John Schlapobersky’s lecture ‘From toxic bonds to healing relationships. A journey through group-analytic theory and practice’: Can different paradigms and Weltanschauungen meet in ‘magic circles’?

“…Is it the narcissism of minor differences (Freud, 1930(Freud, [1929): 305) that 'plays' with the 'clashes' between the self and the other, between sameness and otherness, between too much me-ness and too much we-ness in Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification oscillations (Hopper, 2003)? In this direction, we ask in which ways the dynamic principles of group psychotherapy-finding a voice, bearing witness to other's voices, and coming out of the shadows in and through the group work (Schlapobersky, 2021;Berger, 2023;Skowronska, 2023)-and the challenges of the different forms of speech and their psychologies discussed by Schlapobersky for 'a group of strangers' in the group work meet the ethical challenge posed by the biblical injunction, 'love one's neighbour as oneself" (Leviticus,19: 18).…”

Editor’s Introduction

“…the Polish border through an activist member whose work brought them into direct contact with that fact. She writes: 'The painful feelings experienced in the face of wrongdoing to the Other (in our name) could be experienced in the presence of others so that denial and distortion of the facts could be avoided' (Skowronska, 2023).…”