‘The Bad Enough Group Analyst’: Authenticity and Emotional Responsiveness in Group Analysis’. A Response to Farhad Dalal’s Foulkes Lecture

Abstract

The group can be a moral place only if it can contain moral challenges. For this, the group needs a sort of freedom to relate in which the group can move between poles of injury and regret, and between impassivity on the one hand and concern on the other. The emotional involvement of the all members with each other is a pre-condition for the ethical situation of the group. Emotional responsiveness entails authenticity. The authentic expression is spontaneous and unexpected (Nitsun, 1996). Sometimes it is impulsive, emotional, enacted and surprising. It can break through blockages of withholding. An authentic expression can be loving or hurtful. In group analytic psychotherapy, it is not only the excessive responsiveness of the therapist to the weakness and the suffering of the members which is the therapeutic factor. When each member is attuned to himself and to the other, the group fulfils its most important therapeutic quality. In this article I suggest that in order to develop these strengths the therapist must be able to be a ‘bad enough’ therapist with the group members. It would be better to claim that therapist non-responsiveness is necessary for the formation of the group, as a body which gives meaning to each one of the participants. In a certain way it invites each of the members to be present and in another way it creates a situation in which the members are nearly forced to be present through the responsiveness of each of them in the lack of a satisfactory individual response of the conductor. I suggest that the analyst’s authentic response corresponds with what Dr. Dalal calls ‘emotional responsiveness’. This is in fact the ‘bad enough participation’ on the part of the analyst, which leads to a breakthrough in the therapy. The morality of the therapist is expressed in his willingness to move from the neutral analytic position and see himself as a reason for part of what is going on in the group.