Jane G. Goldberg
Group analysis during COVID-19

The author makes the case that group analysis is essential to a comprehensive analytic experience and not an addendum to individual analysis.

Mead felt the first sign of civilization was compassion. We don’t learn compassion from being alone. We learn compassion, and all of our other uniquely human traits, from being with other humans. Being with other humans in ways that are emotionally balancing, cognitively stimulating, and linguistically rich gives us the opportunity to be the potentiated humans we can be—the top of our humanness game. My personal experience is that these attributes in me were first inserted by my loving family, most especially my mother, and then were later strengthened and developed more completely through my participation in modern group analysis.

Not group therapy, but also not a traditional classroom; more free-flowing, more learning through sharing. This was process teaching! The students and I were coping well enough, finding our footing with one other. And then it changed; it got worse; it became close to a nightmare.

It has been said that the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. Digital communication and connection are here to stay. Yet, even with the apparent depersonalization of the ubiquitous digital world, it is clear that we humans still need our contact with one another. The Internet constitutes the largest commune ever created in the history of the planet. But can it provide the same or good-enough connection?

digital group process—what it means for my past, as well as what it means for the future of digital group analytic practice.

Some have been in group for most of the decades since I started; many have been in group for over ten years; most have been disinclined to leave. It has become for us, as it was with my own group analysts, a commitment for life, ’til death do us part.

Animal sociability is limited to family and friends. What separates humans from all other species on our planet is our ability to connect not just with family and neighbors, not only with our “flock,” but potentially with strangers, as well. This is one of the primary aspects of our humanness that group analysis takes advantage of. We begin as strangers. We continue as humans flocking together, ultimately connecting together and functioning as individuals within one whole.

And with connection comes cooperation. All great achievements—from the building of the pyramids, to sending humans out to space, to unraveling the DNA code—required group cooperation and collaboration. our task in group, individually and collectively, is to listen, process, understand, and reflect back to one another understanding from analyst to all group members, and from group member to group member.

From the dawn of humankind, survival developed from a community of people putting their heads and bodies together; it came out of collaboration, from thinking and feeling and strategizing both with others and about others. BUT THEN CAME CIVILIZATION.

Born before full development had time to happen, newborn humans became entirely dependent on their mothers for survival. It took just as much work to at- tend to the needs of our ancestors’ babies as it takes today: a village to raise a human. The more friends and family our ancient ancestors had available as babysitters, or sharing in the work of food foraging, the greater the chance was that the infant would survive. The food issue was critical. Everyone needs and wants food. From then to now, we have a love affair with food because we die without it. In pre-agriculture times, foragers were out and about, actively looking for food.

And the odds for survival were better when the overriding principles were “stick together” and “share and share alike.” Evolution favored those who had others they could depend on. We’re alive today because we are descendants of earlier humans who had the advantageous attribute of liking other humans, and wanting to hang out with their fellow folk.

Togetherness is still keeping us alive and making us smarter too

On-going survival is not the only advantage of togetherness. The combination of staying together and fighting for survival as a group endeavor made each of us smarter than if we had been left alone to our own solitary devices. Better intelligence developed from a community of people putting their heads and bodies together; it came out of thinking and feeling and strategizing both with others and about others. Hanging out with each other created unprecedented animal intelligence.

 “Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social” (p. 37).

But whatever it is that we think, whatever we think we know, whatever we believe—our thoughts and beliefs arise, if not fully then certainly greatly, within the context of our interactions with others. Our thoughts will be either in harmony with, or in contrast or even contradictory to the thoughts of other humans.

As Daniel Coyle describes the Allen Curve, “proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up” (pp. 71–72).

My brain seemed to be wired to be sensitive to, to learn from, absorb, and adapt to emotional communication, and as well to the equally important phenomenon of blockage of emotional communication. My group experiences strengthened my brain in the ways that it already had a predilection for operating at a high level.

Many minds are better than one. We humans are smart because of how brains work together when they come together. This understanding of the collaborative processes of human intelligence is one of the most overlooked aspects of being smart. Intelligence is a team-sport. Human thought is a community event. THE NAZIS.

Intelligence is not the product of what happens in the individual brain—yours, mine, or Einstein’s. It’s a nice story to tell that Newton discovered the force of gravity by sitting alone in a field, watching an apple fall. But the story is apocryphal at best. Before that fateful day of imaginative inspiration that changed the scientific understanding of the force that keeps earth in place in relation to the other heavenly bodies, Newton had spent more than twenty years studying data that other scientists had collected pertinent to the orbits of planets.

The same was true with Einstein: as he was working out his theories, there was ongoing an international collaboration of laboratories studying the same problems, and only from considering others’ mathematical theories on the nature of curved space was Einstein able to formulate his theory of relativity.

it is the group-mind-space from which all great events in the history of mankind have happened, and from which the most significant discoveries have been made.

The neuroscientist Oliver Sacks asked: “Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?” (Hayes, 2017, p. 87). My answer to the esteemed Dr. Sacks is: we can think and we can visualize without words; but we can’t know our thoughts in a clear, precise and uniquely human way without words. Language separates thought from non-thought.

It is not the analyst who leads the patient; the patient leads the analyst.