Response to Nina K. Thomas and J. Scott Rutan: Is the Personal Political? And Who Benefits From Believing It Is Not?

Abstract

reading Thomas’s and Rutan’s responses to “ConsciousnessRaising in a Gender Conflict Group” (this issue) raised many thoughts as well as the urge to answer every comment in detail. Instead, I discuss the deeper issues I think Thomas’s and Rutan’s comments touch upon, namely, complexity and multiplicity in groups and issues of power. Although the original article was written by both Dana Yarimi and me, we decided that only I would respond here because the model was developed by me and because, of the two of us, only I have led such groups. There are different types of groups and, as pointed out by Thomas and Rutan, consciousness-raising gender conflict groups are different from psychodynamic therapy groups in their aims, the setting, the style of group leadership, and the relations between the group leader and group members outside the group. Yet, some processes are common to all groups, even if they are not in their focus. I argue below that just as “all new groups have to say ‘hello,’” as Rutan nicely puts it, all group members, including group leaders, belong to social categories (e.g., gender, race), and these affect their perceptions, feelings, and reactions. Ac