Complicity in Groups That Do Harm; or, The Messiah Comes the Day After You Don't Need Him Anymore

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Complicity in Groups That Do Harm; or, The Messiah Comes the Day After You Don’t Need Him Anymore Robert S. Pepper1 issn 0362-4021 © 2018 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 42, No. 4, Winter 2018 351 1 Director of Training, Long Island Institute of Mental Health, Rego Park, New York. Correspondence should be addressed to Robert S. Pepper, PhD, CGP, 110-50 71st Road, #1E, Forest Hills, NY 11375. E-mail: DrRobertSPepper@aol.com. As a graduate student majoring in sociology, I was fascinated by the power of groups to affect members’ perceptions. Experiments like Solomon Asch’s (1951) “Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modification and Distortions of Judgment,” Stanley Milgram’s (1963) “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” and Philip Zimbardo’s (2007) “The Stanford Prison Experiment” come to mind as outstanding examples of a group’s power to define reality. Books on the subject of the power of groups and culture to shape reality that immediately come to mind are Benjamin Whorf’s (2015) Language, Thought, and Reality, Erich Fromm’s (1941) Escape From Freedom, and my own book, Emotional Incest in Group Psychotherapy: A Conspiracy of Silence (Pepper, 2014). In my way of thinking, the expression “seeing is believing” should be the other way around: “Believing is seeing.” The Whorf–Sapir hypothesis states that language itself shapes our view of reality. Without the word for a phenomenon, we cannot see it. All groups have inherent tension between belief systems and reality. When a group’s perception of reality conflicts with reality, reality gets trumped. While groups differ in terms of their values, groups are remarkably similar in the means that they use to keep members from straying too far from the group view of the world, with concomitant consequences for those that stray too far. This is even the case in group psychoanalytic institutes, which is the subject of my book. In recent days, the headlines have been rife with explosive stories about the abuses of power at the hands of misogynistic men who run the movie and TV industries. 352 pepper While these revelations are egregiously shocking, they are nothing new, as tales of the casting couch go all the way back to the beginning of the motion picture business . And, as is the case with all businesses, making money is the highest priority. One consequence of money as the ultimate reality is that people become objects, to themselves and to each other. But more of that later. Although many people inside these organizations have publicly reacted with shock and surprise and say, “We never knew!” the rest of us are incredulous and wonder, “Who are they kidding?” or “Are they lying?” or even “Are they so naive not to see what’s right before their eyes?” Truth be told, the conflict between belief systems and reality is a dynamic that characterizes the social structure of many groups in the present, and indeed has existed throughout history. In light of these recent accusations of abuses of power and the concomitant conspiracies of silence tacitly protecting the abusers, and even more recently the conspiracy of silence within the White House itself, an age-old question can be raised: Why do group members, who are free to leave, choose to stay with leaders whose groups do harm? The answer probably lies within the purview of theories in sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Ironically, we need look no further than our own profession of group psychotherapy for an answer. The community of analytic group psychotherapy training institutes across the country that establish dual relationships promulgate an environment that by definition sets the stage for abuses of power. When senior group leaders are in multiple role relationships with their trainees, that is, when they are simultaneously their group therapists, supervisors, teachers, administrators, friends, and even relatives, and patient/trainees are in complicated multiple role relationships with each other, as colleagues, friends, fellow group therapy patients, and fellow training group members, the boundaries between transference, countertransference, and reality are so contaminated that the treatment is virtually worthless. According to my research (Pepper, 2014) and the research of others (Temerlin & Temerlin, 1982), the existence of dual relationships at analytic training institutes...