My first experience of group analysis

Abstract

This article will explore and examine group analytic theory through the lens of one author’s felt experience as a participant in a professional experiential group. With the assumption being that our most useful psychotherapeutic tools are born from the therapist’s own introspection, the idea that our existential and individual fear of annihilation is intimately fused with our need to belong and connect, is explored. This article routes around in the murky unconscious of how the subject of racism is held in the body of the author and that of the group and how she as a psychotherapist navigates and works alongside what is unearthed. A semi-academic clinical vignette to position theory in a practical understanding and felt sense of a psychotherapist where the colour of her skin provokes the psychotherapeutic.