Duh in a Group

• Roadblocks in Therapy by Don Nathanson, 7/20/97
  
  

Don,

I can't bear to see your invitation unanswered any longer, so here goes. As you know I am not a therapist, though many years ago I trained in clinical psychology. My empathic blunder comes from an experience in leading a group. It was a residential "T-Group" which I conducted for students at a college in 1964, my first solo performance as a group facilitator.

During graduate school I had the good fortune of working with Elvin Semrad for several years. He was a fabled senior clinician at what was then called Boston Psycho and is now the Mass Mental Health Center. Semrad, who was a psychoanalyst, conducted a year long T-Group with a group of psychiatric residents. The group was valued very highly by those who participated in it and was admired by the entire Boston professional community. I believe it was the first such group for residents and later I conducted a group something like it for the residents at Einstein for more than thirty years.

Whle a graduate student I was the research assistant on a project directed toward understanding how and why the Semrad groups worked so well. I was responsible for setting up the tape recorder before the meeting early on Saturday mornings and then I sat in the corner of the room as "part of the furniture" during the meeting itself making check marks on a research instrument. Each week's session was transcribed and I attended a weekly meeting with Semrad and the senior researchers during which we reviewed the session. The discussants included sociologist Ted Mills, psychologist David Shapiro and other very smart people would join by invitation. A lot of the discussion centered on why Semrad had done what he had done that week and often why he had done nothing at all. Now Semrad was a clearly gifted and equally unusual person. In the Semrad groups, he spoke hardly at all, though at the end of a session he generally offered a title for the session which captured poetically session's main theme.

Those regular sessions with Semrad played a large part in shaping the way I work with groups, though it is difficult to articulate that approach very well. One Semradism that stood out is the mantra, "the leader is the completer". By that he meant that the group is fully responsible for itself and its development, thus there is little for the leader to do EXCEPT (and as you see it is a large exception) to supply any essential missing ingredients. My experience with Semrad sparked my interest in working with groups. As an only child and one who had few friends till high school I was particularly ill at ease with groups of strangers, but encouragement from Semrad and some others led me to an internship at National Training Laboratories, which was the center in the US at that time for experiential eduation and of the use of unstructured groups to foster growth and change in organizations and communties.

Fresh from an intensive summer-long training experience, I found myself sitting alone with that first group. Lacking natural social "poise" and anxious as hell, there I was defining myself in a new role. Now I was aware of another Semrad dictum about how to conduct groups, "you gotta grow your own". Of course I knew what he meant is that one's style of leadership had to grow out of one's own personality, but under the circumstances all that seemed possible was to do it the way Semrad would. It went badly. My worst memory of that experience was the moment when an enormous, though obviously harmless bug appeared suddenly at my feet. One co-ed, this was 1964 remember, began to shriek and jumped up on one of the beds in the hotel room which was our meeting place. Her behavior was contagious. We had an emergency. And there was I Semrad-like, buddha-like some would say, unreponsive in any visible way to the presence of this disruptive bug. Suddenly, like a knight in shining armor, one of the male students rose, rushed across the room and crunched the bug with a mighty stomp, tossing me a look, visible to all, of utter contempt.

Looking back on that humiliating moment it is clear what a fine opportunity for all to learn resided in it. However, stuck as I was in my Semradian posture (Semrad never explained anything in a simple linear fashion, thus neither could I) I was unable to do anything constructive with that group event and in the end the group was not a "good" one.

Eventually I got to be pretty good with groups, but not until I was able to grow my own approach. That approach is based on an understanding of the depth of anxiety that people feel in unstuctured groups, so rooted in my own experience and the approach makes full use of my substantial skill in articulating what is happening in a group and why, begining with my own behavior, and its consequences.

For those contemplating making their own "confessions" here, let me encourage you to do so. In my case it didn't hurt much. At least it didn't now.

-Gil

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