ABSTRACT
The group provides the opportunity for all members to escape confined mindsets and find their own voice, but as people know, groups breed conformity and seek a leader to follow. Given their professional histories and identifications, therapists may enter group with an idealized leader in mind or a composite of the valued individuals they have read, worked with, or who have guided them. Whenever a group convenes, the leader should be warm and hospitable, but not overstay a welcoming process by being too friendly, too sensitive, or too empathic, qualities that are symptomatic and represent a contribution to the pool of paranoid and depressive anxieties. Therapists must possess “a certain amount of cruelty” and not be “too nice,” Carl Jung declared. To avoid naive historiography, the therapist must get close, feeling in body, affect, and reverie the disavowed symbiotic, sexual, masochistic, aggressive, fratricidal, patricidal, matricidal, and cannibalistic urges that cluster at the nucleus of the here-and-now.
