Northfield flashback

GASI is the Group Analytic Society International - and it has a regular schedule of well-attended meetings, conferences and workshops, mostly in Europe. It also is reputed to have the scariest on-line email discussion forum of any professional society.

Wish you were here

Then and now

This January, its annual Winter Workshop was held at what was the 'Northfield Military Hospital' (in the Second World War) - to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the group therapy experiments that happened there - and led to all sorts of relevant things since.

What was then one of the four large psychiatric hospitals of southwest Birmingham (Hollymoor by name) is now almost entirely modern rows of housing with hedges between neat green lawns and cars in the front drive which one imagines are washed every Saturday. The mighty water tower, with its copper cupola that is a landmark that can be seen for miles - is listed and remains; a few scattered old buildings from the old site have also found modern NHS uses.

Through the work of the officers there, particularly Bion, Rickman, Foulkes, Main and Bridger, the whole field of 'Group Analysis' was founded (and thence GASI itself), the mental health Therapeutic Communities were developed, and many other spin-offs started and grew, particularly in the world of group theory, such as the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. 

The format of the two days was thoroughly groupish, apart from the four short plenary presentations by various experts: two ninety minute median groups for eighteen people - in the very building where the wartime experiments took place, and two ninety minute large groups to close each day, with a little under a hundred people.

The median groups - or at least the one I was in - seemed to be a good place to feel the cold (the heating was broken) and imagine how much worse it probably was in the winter of 1943. Also, to have various conversations linking members' lives and work to the thoughts and feelings that arose from the other parts of the workshop. As described by Pat deMare, who worked with some of the Northfield pioneers and wrote extensively about groups:

GASI median group room.
Bion and Foulkes stalked these corridors:
did they hold groups in this room?

The avowed purpose of the median group is to encourage members to learn to talk to each other, to learn to dialogue so as to humanize society, and to transform frustration and outrage into the positive energy required to think (de Maré, 1990). Thus, the median group as socio-therapy is a tool that fosters the societal and community life of the citizen, familiarizing its members with democratic principles, while serving as a platform to practice democracy in action. 

As well as having a scary internet forum, GASI is famed for its large groups, which are well documented to be crazy places. This workshop did not disappoint. With nearly one hundred people from all over Europe and a few from beyond, assembled in two concentric circles, plus two conductors, and no set agenda, we went all over the place. Fascinating, enraging and frustrating - occasionally warm and enabling, even sexual - but powerful emotional statements from the regulars seemed to keep us newbies rather quite. I understand from some others there that some of the overt topics might now have moved from Palestine and Israel to British colonial atrocities and the Balkans. But highly recommended as a profound challenge to how you think and feel in groups, even if you can't participate much.

If only they got to understand more about modern TCs and where it is all going. But the air was full of closures, destruction and betrayal (not to mention the terrors of war) - without much space for hope, optimism and playfulness.
So be it - there are other shows in town...