Sibling witnessing in analytic group therapy

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In this chapter, I would like to examine the therapeutic influence of group participants' witnessing of wrongdoings or injustices caused to one of the members as traumatic repetition that occurs in group therapy. I propose the term 'sibling witnessing' to refer to this form of witnessing.

"I had a dream about our group last night", said Rina, a woman in her forties whose youngest son died from cancer. "And in my dream", she continued in a deep voice, without looking at any of the group members directly, "we were all sitting in this room in a circle, when suddenly a little boy, named Ben, entered. He is an unruly boy, who can't sit still like other children. Every few minutes, he gets up and wanders around the classroom and doesn't listen to instructions. In the dream, I'm very angry with you, I know that he is a complete mismatch for our group and I don't understand why brought him here. I want to tell you this, but I can't get a word out of my mouth. Then, I notice that Natalie is angry with you, too, and it makes me feel stronger, like maybe this time I could have the courage to express my criticism directly and speak up about things I have kept inside for years. You, the conductor, spoil the group for me by bringing this new kid, jeopardizing the one place where I can really speak. For the first time, I'm seriously considering leaving the group. We can't both be here – it's either him or me".

This dream was presented in the beginning of a group session that took place four months after the arrival of two new group participants, Natalie and Avi, to a group that had been in the midst of its fifth year. During the silence that prevailed in reaction to this dream, I suddenly remembered the moment in which my firstborn son realized that his baby brother was going to stay with us for good. He walked towards me decisively and demanded that we return the baby to the hospital, "where he was born and where he belongs!", he said angrily. When he heard my explanation that his brother is our child, too, and that our home is his home, his face fell and he burst out crying.

Does the arrival of new participants cause the group members pain similar to that which was experienced by my firstborn son when his brother was born? I wondered to myself. Was I insensitive to invite two new participants at once, when one of them immediately started challenging the group order?

Natalie broke the silence in the room: "Rina, I think that I understand why you dreamt of this boy. Only two weeks ago, you said that you miss dreaming of your son who died. You said how unruly he had been and how much you miss him". "Rina, did you notice that in your dream, you were angry with the conductor?", said Hadas, " In real life, you're never angry with her".

Rina: "That's true, I really did manage to be angry with the conductor, but it was possible only thanks to Natalie, who had been angry with the conductor in the dream. I wouldn't have dared to be angry alone".

Avi (the new participant who came to this session after a three-week-long absence): "I didn't think that my presence had been such a threat for you, Rina. I realize that I am the "Ben" in your dream. Natalie and Hadas also said that they have a difficult time with me because I travel and leave the group immediately after we have an intimate session. I'm not sure that that's always true, sometimes it's just circumstances".

Yael turned to Avi and said to him vigorously: "this behavior of yours really is annoying, you come and go as if we're a train station and not a therapeutic group". "I've stopped paying attention to Avi,"

Maya said to Yael, "if he doesn't care about us, why should we care about him? As far as I'm concerned, he's an empty chair."

I saw the growing anger with Avi and the attack on his lack of commitment and devotion to the process. I thought about defending him, but this time, decided to wait. In the past, my protection did not only not help but elicited more aggression towards him for receiving special treatment from me. "Trust the process", I thought to myself, remembering Foulkes's (1948) words, that helped me to stick to silence as a group intervention. Foulkes called the group a "social microcosmos" in which one can revisit and cope with issues of vulnerability, deviation from the norm and achieve reparation. He believed that the group cocreates the matrix in which each individual establishes his own personal identity and unique subjectivity. According to Foulkes, "the basic law of group dynamics", states that "the deepest reason why group patients can reinforce each other’s normal reactions is that collectively they constitute the very Norm, from which, individually, they deviate.” (Foulkes, 1948, p. 29). Therefore, the group is a setting that, among other things, recreates traumatic and victimized experiences in its dynamic matrix (Foulkes, 1957) and constitutes an alternative space in which "relationship disorders" (Freidman, 2013) are expressed, but it also creates the most effective ground for their reparation.

Still, I was terrified that the group would turn on Avi and sacrifice him for all the abandonment and injustice it had experienced in the past. What about Avi made him so intolerable for the group? Would, I too, have preferred that he left the group? During my silence, I examined my own feelings. The air in the room became thick just before Omer started talking.

Omer, who until that point used to fall asleep every time a confrontation evolved between Avi and the group, called out: "are you serious? Why are you turning all against him? Avi, what made you think that you were the boy in Rina's dream? I'm not at all sure that that was about you!"

"Omer", Hadas called out, "how can't you see that Avi is the 'misbehaving boy' in Rina's dream?! His absences and his lack of commitment to the group hurt us all"

Natalie, who hasn't looked at Avi from the beginning of the session, joined the discussion: "I don't understand you, Omer, how can you defend him? He does whatever he wants around here, without thinking of anyone else".

Omer: "Natalie, you're attacking Avi. Actually, not just you, all of you are. Like he is the only one here who had abandoned. You're making me so angry! What do you mean, Hadas, when you say that "Avi really is the misbehaving boy??" I, too, had left the group and disappeared for three months. I didn't even come here to explain to you guys what had happened to me, and I could not have imagined how much I had hurt you all, and you turn all your anger only at Avi. It's not fair!"

In that moment, in which Omer rose against the group's attack on Avi, defending him with his own body and testifying of the injustice the group did to him, at the risk of rejection, it felt to me as though the spell we have all been under has dissolved. Omer awoke himself and the group and stopped Avi's scapegoating. Through this act of "sibling witnessing" in the group "here and now", he stopped the projection of rejected parts onto Avi and led participants to share responsibility for abandonment and aggression.

Based on Bromberg's (2003) view on the patient-therapist relationship in psychoanalysis, one can conclude that participants' trauma, as pathological as it may be, would present itself on the stage of group relationships, thus providing a rare opportunity to build emotional resilience and reparation. Berger argues that the witnessing of such reparation in the group matrix builds an experience of meaning and resilience and significantly decreases feelings of exclusion, rejection and loneliness, when the process of "talking it out" constitutes a part of the participants' struggle to become realer and more visible and present people in their lives (Berger, 2016). We might say, then, that for Avi, Omer's behavior served as "witnessing". What is that witnessing? What is witnessing in a therapeutic group, really, and how is it different from witnessing in individual therapy? This chapter will address these issues.

Psychological trauma and its implications

Psychological trauma is damage that is caused to the psyche by a single or recurring event in the individual's life. It puts him in a state of shock, in which he is unable to cope with the situation and with his feelings. "What happened – did not happen". Berger (2017) stresses that traumatic experience is often experienced as an attack on sanity. She argues that unvalidated and unconfirmed factual reality may receive a quality of "unreality". It is as if it is erased from the recording of the events that "did happen", both in the internal world and in the external reality. This state of "nonrecognition" and "unknowing" becomes a ghost-like experience, in which personal and collective events turn into a "non-presence" and even to "non-existence". Berger argues that this state defiles the individual's psychological existence, confuses him, freezes traumatic areas in his psyche and may eventually weaken his ability to survive. "Unwitnessed trauma" continues to resonate in the individual's body and to sneak into reality unconsciously due to the lack of voice or expression during or after the event (Laub, 2008). "The mumbling symptom" (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957) brings to the room unconscious materials through stubborn repetitive behavior, pattern or phrase – that don't seem to have any special meaning in the real, concrete world – but in the consulting room, they consistently mark the trauma or injury that still cannot be verbalized or mentalized.

Witnessing in psychoanalytic therapy

Witnessing in therapy, as opposed to legal witness testimony – which is a passive action performed from an observer or hearsay position – is an active, vital and intersubjective action that involves both patient and therapist. According to Berger (2017), witnessing is a vital part of the therapeutic process, one that provides validation, confirmation and recognition of both external reality and one's subjectivity; psychological witnessing is a vital part of mutual recognition, since it involves the responsibility to tell the truth and the willingness to face its consequences.

Berman (2017) describes the dynamics of witnessing in psychoanalytic therapy and argues that it follows a clear order of actions. He believes that in post-traumatic 'selfstates', it is essential that the therapist first establish his position as a 'sympathetic witness', before expressing any form of 'otherness', and that after such expressions, he should return to the initial position of 'sympathetic witnessing'. In other words, Berman suggests that the therapist should first establish concordant identification, before moving to complementary identification, and return to it after expressions of otherness in the relationship.

Witnessing in analytic group therapy

Berman (2017) believes that the group can create a temporary collective or society of sympathetic witnesses. He believes that at first, a group member who sees himself as a victim is accepted by the group members, who support and protect him and show compassion to his condition. However, in later stages, that member begins to face other reactions. He eventually meets the "otherness" of the group, which is sometimes experienced as painful and frustrating. Berman argues that there is an order to the witnessing process in a group, in the beginning of the group life. Empathy and identification with the victim's pain are the first to emerge, and only in later stages, the encounter with "otherness" becomes possible. I disagree with Berman's view of witnessing in the group space as an organized mechanism. I believe that, as opposed to individual therapy, one of the unique characteristics of group therapy is the multiple simultaneous identifications that do not necessarily emerge according to the stages of group development. I believe that the group allows one to experience concordant and complementary identifications simultaneously, whereas therapist's witnessing in individual therapy tends to oscillate from concordant to complementary identification. I posit that this situation provides conditions that are less secure for working with traumatic experiences, as opposed to individual therapy, or as Berman (2008) defined it, "the group is a semi-secure space" (Berman, 2008). Still, this process allows reviving and reliving difficult events in the group hall of mirrors, when each participant has a clear role in the reenacted drama, while offering an opportunity to discover and experience new reparative experience. This process requires courage and changing of past patterns, and thus allows a curative process for both protagonist and participants.

In this context, it is important to emphasize another phenomenon that is unique to group therapy. Witnessing in therapeutic groups offers a unique opportunity to "witness the witnessing of the other" and thus turns witnessing into a public and shared process. This position allows the group members, according to Slan (2001), to "witness the witness", a situation that, of course, is impossible in individual psychoanalytic therapy. This opportunity allows one to emerge from stagnation and to overcome dissociative barriers that the trauma had left in the psyche, thus motivating new movement in which the witnessing of other witnesses increases the effect of the resonance of traumatic experiences and further validates the testimony.

Similarly to Foulkes's (1983, 2013) view, Hoffman argues that occurrences in therapy do not necessarily constitute transference of participants' past relationships. He argues that reality is structured by the dyad and is not only a repetition. This idea applies to both transference and countertransference. Hoffman believes that both of these processes are not one-directional repetitions but mutual influences related to a unique encounter of two subjects.

Hence, the injustices in the group result from past repetitions, as well as from a "new situation" that is created in the meeting of different subjects. Participants' witnessing of both past and present restores the individual's hope and faith in caring and "basic humanity" and increases feelings of recognition and belonging. However, we know that destructive, anti-group forces are also active in psychoanalytic groups, threatening to take the group apart; these forces can attack the individual in the midst of his sharing, as part of the repetition of traumatic experience (Nitsun, 1996). As Mitchell argued, if we want to be a part of the solution, we have to agree to be a part of the problem; thus, we enact it in the therapeutic relationship (Mitchell, 1997).

I believe that this condition, in which the group serves as means to relive and repeat past experience, a state in which constructive and destructive forces are both active, the group members' witnessing is of special importance to the curative and reparative processes of the individual. I call this form of witnessing "sibling witnessing", to note its special characteristics that distinguish it from witnessing in individual psychoanalytic therapy, as I will now describe.

Sibling witnessing

"Sibling witnessing" is witnessing that is expressed publicly by the "group siblings" regarding injustices that occur in the group "here and now", both as reparation of the patient's past experiences and as witnessing of injustices that take place in a "new situation", in the unique encounter of different subjects.

The word 'sibling' refers to one of few offspring who share one or two parents. It is used in social sciences, medicine (for example, to refer to siblings who share the same sperm donor), biology (in the studying of animal behavior) and so on. (Derived from the academy website).

In the context of this paper, I use the word sibling to refer to horizontal relationships between the participants of a specific group.

Sibling witnessing has two unique characteristics that distinguish it from witnessing in individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The first is that witnessing is offered regarding injustice or wrongdoing in the group "here and now", and it occurs publicly, in the presence of "real others". This publicness serves two functions at the same time. One is the "witnessing of witnessing", that is, the witness witnesses other witnesses, and the second function allows witnesses a multiplicity of voices. The diverse voices that witness trauma from different perspectives provide, in my view, a "multifaceted" reparative experience of past experiences in areas in which the trauma has not been witnessed.

I believe that the witnessing group members offer to each other is perceived as more "experience-near" to the protagonist's authentic experience, since their relationship is one of "group equals", and it is sometimes even more powerful due to the lack of a financial aspect to their relationship. For example, in his many studies of groups, Yalom discovered that the group members' words to each other were remembered as more constitutive moments than the conductor's words (Yalom, 2006). It is understandable since participants' words are probably perceived as more neutral, since they do not derive from the "conductor's" role but are provided as part as participants' free flow of associations.

The second characteristic of sibling witnessing is that this witnessing takes place as protest against authority figures, other group members or against the group as a whole in the past, present, or both. Such sibling witnessing demands a courageous action on the part of the witness, who is required to rise against the occurrences in the group reality, express his voice and offer his testimony despite the risk and price involved. Thus, sibling witnessing in the group not only allows recognition of wrongdoings and confirmation and validation of injustices that have occurred, but necessarily involves transition from a passive listener stance to a "live presence" (Alvarez, 2005) facing the symbolic group "siblings", and thus involves a risk to the witness's own status.

Back to the aforementioned session

Following Omer's words, I said to the group: ""Ben" in Rina's dream can represent any of the group members for each one of us, here. He represents fears and parts that we don't want to see in ourselves and prefer to get rid of, this time, by rejecting Avi and kicking him out of the group circle. Omer, you have risked yourself to defend Avi and thus allowed all of us to connect to areas that we tried not to face".

"It's true", Hadas said quietly. "Omer, until you mentioned it, I didn’t remember your abandonment. I was angry only with Avi. I couldn't face what you, Avi, represent for me, which is avoidance of intimacy, deviancy and loneliness. I felt like I couldn't "digest" you, but actually I could not accept our resemblance. I wanted you to disappear. I could see how you sabotage relationships, how you reject others or run away when people try to come closer. I'm just like you, I don’t let anyone in or near, but it's easier to hate that about you".

Rina continued Hadas's words and said to Avi: "you really are that boy in my dream. Your presence is difficult for me because of the attention you draw from the conductor and group, just like my younger brother, who gets all the support from my parents because he cannot stay out of trouble throughout his whole life. But now I realize that I, too, want to have such support and attention. I want to know how to speak up in the group, instead of waiting for others to ask me. You always say that you're intimidated by others, like I am, but in the group you're not afraid of fighting and saying what's on your mind, and I'm paralyzed even by watching that. I'm simply jealous of you".

Discussion

Rina's dream revealed an important group theme related to experiences of rejection, abandonment and jealousy in the group. In the beginning of the session, the participants attacked Avi and grouped against him. They tried to get rid of him, along with all that he represented for them, all that they could not tolerate in their encounter with themselves in a relationship. Omer's standing up against the group was a constitutive moment, one that, in my view, demonstrates sibling witnessing in a group. This mobilization of dormant and paralyzed areas of the psyche does not only save the witness who gives his testimony before the group – using words or through the traumatic repetition – but saves all the participants in the current scene, in which victims are no longer sacrificed on the altar of repression.

In the subsequent sessions, Omer, who used to "fall asleep" every time the group attacked Avi for his deviations, said that he experienced similar paralysis when his parents kicked his sister out of their house because of her extrovert, rebellious and deviant behavior. He said that he did nothing to stop them and said nothing to her defense. Two years after she was kicked out of their house, his sister started doing drugs and their relationship cut off for good.

"I was there and I chose not to see it", Omer said about a month after the session in which he defended Avi. "I didn’t try to do anything, I didn't realize the danger she was in, and I didn’t rise to protect her from my parents. They sent her to a sure death and I was a silent witness. To this very day, I'm ashamed of my silence and I cannot find peace. Here, too, I dissociated and fell asleep when you all tried to kick Avi out from the group. Here, too, I remained outside the situation until I couldn’t take it anymore… Now, I'm no longer willing to stay silent".

Omer rose against the group to protect Avi from becoming a group scapegoat and being rejected by the group, and in that action, he emerged from the paralysis and passivity Avi's situation had put him in, which resembled the paralysis he had experienced in the past regarding his sister. While Omer was not the one who kicked his sister out of their house, but his passive position and inaction made him feel guilty for abandoning her, guilt that persisted many years later.

Avi was a single 50-years-old man, who hasn't had an intimate relationship for many years and avoided social interaction in general. He described consistent experiences of rejection by his family, his alienated relationship with his mother and the complete breaking off of his relationships with his siblings in a monotonous, detached tone. "She cancels on me without caring at all, and every time I try to engage, she makes feel like I don’t belong in the family", he told in a cold voice.

It seems that in the group, Avi repeated his mother's patterns by canceling and being absent from sessions every time the group members engaged with him. As long as he managed to remain emotionally distant from the participants, he would come regularly, but in moments in which his shield cracked and group members' words penetrated his external envelope, he would run away and disappear. I understood this as intense fear of intimacy due to his fear of getting hurt in intimate relationships given his life story, and as an act of identification with the aggressor, as part of which he enacted in the group the role of his abandoning mother, and experienced rejection through the participants' reactions in a painful role reversal. Avi desperately sought the participants' witnessing of the severe rejection he experienced from his mother throughout his life, but instead, enacted that rejection repeatedly by disappearing in reaction to participants' engagement with him.

Until Omer rose against the group, the group itself became the "rejecting mother" and thus recreated Avi's family situation, which became intolerable due to the long period he occupied the role of the rejected. The group experienced my defending of Avi in two ways: as protection of the weak who cannot take care of himself (a child), and alternately, as my favoring him over the others (the favorite child) – which aroused in them feelings of jealousy and rage at him.

All my previous attempts to make the group share responsibility for the occurrences and interpret the attack on Avi as a desire to sacrifice him due to a wish to project onto him their intolerable parts of "self" failed. However, Omer's rising to Avi's defense and testimony on his behalf in the group "here and now" led to a shift: Omer chose to rise against the group position; it was as if he rose against the mother who rejected Avi or who in his history, rejected his sister. He was no longer willing to shut his eyes and cooperate with the injustice that was happening. In this act, Omer recognized the injustice Avi had experienced in the group, while taking on himself the risk involved in rising against a group consensus that sees Avi as a "problematic, deviant boy" that needs to be expelled.

In this act, Omer protected Avi from the group's attack and asked himself and others to take personal responsibility and own their projected materials. In the session I have described, Avi reexperienced a traumatic experience of family rejection, but this time, there was an opportunity to create alternate reality in which "sibling witnessing" allowed siblings to protect each other. Later in that session, Avi stopped being aggressive. His body language relaxed, the tone of his voice softened, and it seemed that he was letting himself be soothed in the group matrix that created for him a new experience of "sibling witnessing".

People tend to unconsciously reenact relationships, mostly traumatic ones, that originally occurred in a different time and place (Hopper, 2003). The vignettes described in this paper show a process in which the group as a whole and each of its members relived traumatic past experiences and got caught in their intense fear of rejection. The desire to belong and to be included is, without a doubt, one of our deepest wishes and drives, and it is closely tied with rejection, exclusion and abandonment anxieties, so that the very definition of belongingness necessarily includes in it those who do not belong.

The discussion of the vignette demonstrates a process in which the group freed itself from a position that sacrifices its members as "scapegoats" using the "sibling witnessing" group function. As one can see, sibling witnessing is an active act, and the witness (another group member) is required to choose it even at the cost of self-risk, as Omer chose in the session. I would like to argue that the witnessing process in groups is "semi-controlled", since reactions to group occurrences arise spontaneously and unconsciously. In addition, the sibling witnessing function is not gradual, as in individual therapy, and it involves witnessing that results from multiple simultaneous identifications, as opposed to the alternate identifications of individual therapy. This state of affairs makes the group a "semi-secure" space (Berman, 2015) and requires special alertness from the group therapist, due to the multiple roles that are unconsciously "enacted" in the drama that is being relived in the group.

Whereas in individual therapy the therapist has more control of the pace in which he reveals his otherness, which is impossible in group therapy, in the analytic group, some participants express otherness and some express identification with victimized selfstates or with witnessing states; in other words, witnessing meets otherness, as well as concordant identification.

In conclusion, this chapter showed how the therapeutic group holds the "aggressorvictim" drama along with the protagonist, when all participants play a role in the enacted drama. The repetition involves destructive processes that constitute an inseparable part of the group reality. The group creates a situation in which the protagonist's trauma is repeated in the group "here and now" and other participants play active roles in it. These roles are not strange to the participants, they are "played" in accordance with their own personal experiences of trauma and victimhood. Therefore, when the group "succeeds" in sacrificing its "scapegoat", all the group members suffer from this action: they all realize that they can be the next in turn and this realization undermines their trust and security. In contrast, sibling witnessing is an ethical position that does not only recognizes injustices and validates past wrongdoings, but is necessarily involves stepping out from a passive listener's position towards a "live presence" (Alvarez, 2005) that rises against present injustices. Sibling witnessing is an expression of one's psychological development through the relationship with the siblings and not necessarily with authority figures. This position of "I am my brother's keeper" regarding the authority or other participants, from a position of "symbolic group siblings" and at the risk of endangering the witness's own status, constitutes an "Act of Freedom" (Symington, 1983) for all the group participants.

References

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Berman, A. (2015). What is the group entity in group therapy. Group analytic therapy in the land of milk and honey. Kiryat Bialik-Ach. (In Hebrew).

Berman, A. (2017). Post-traumatic victimhood: a therapeutic-psychoanalytic perspective. Victimhood, vengefulness and the culture of forgiveness. Kiryat BialikAch. (In Hebrew).

Hoffman, E. (]1983] 2013). In: The patient as an interpreter of the analyst's experience. In: S. A. Mitchell & L. Aron (Eds.). The emergence of a tradition: relational psychoanalysis. Translated by: I. Rilov. Tel Aviv: Bookworm. (In Hebrew).

Yalom, I. & Lescz, M. (2006). Group therapy: theory and practice. Jerusalem: Kineret & Magnes. (In Hebrew).

Laub, D. (2008). "Testimony". Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history. Resling. (In Hebrew).

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