The Offer of Group Therapy: EGPS Graduation Address, June 15, 2022 Robert Grossmark I want to say how honored I am to be invited to speak to you today; to celebrate you, the graduates; and to thank all the faculty who have created this wonderful program and keep it flourishing year in and year out. I also want to thank all the graduates’ families and significant others. I know that you have all supported, tolerated, and hung in there as these students have taken time, energy, and emotional commitment to do the work that this program asks of everyone. Without you and your support, the program wouldn’t exist. So thanks to you all. It is especially meaningful for me to be talking to you today as, after many years, I am finishing up my time on the teaching faculty and, together with Robin, Marie, and Alan, will be moving along. We have wonderful new codirectors, Virginia and Joan, and new deans, and I feel like this is a poignant moment to think about why we do this and why, I believe, group therapy and the whole ethos of the EGPS program are now more important than ever. As graduates of this program, you will carry with you knowledge and ideas about working with groups and about how to help people heal their psychic and emotional pain in your groups; you will carry specific techniques about how to start a group and how to deal with all kinds of situations and patients in group. I know that you will all help many people and will make a huge difference in many people’s lives. And in addition to the techniques you have learned, you will carry an ethos, a way of thinking and being, into your work with groups and with your individual patients. That ethos is at the heart of what we offer our patients. It seems to me that at the center of the EGPS consciousness and that of all group treatment is a seemingly simple idea that infuses all others, and I quote the British [End Page 11] psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: “An emotional experience cannot be conceived in isolation from a relationship.” Simple. Yet not so simple. We are always connected. Our experience, our very being, is created by and simultaneously creates the relationship and the context. Hence every group is a living, breathing entity that is constantly changing and forming; it has an ongoing and profound impact on the members, and they on it: The members create the group, and the group creates them in every moment. For instance, if someone is isolated in group, they are not simply isolated; they are communicating and sharing an experience of isolation. If they are absent, they are creating an experience of absence in the group. Every act is an act of creation, and the group therapist, whatever their approach, participates themselves in these ongoing moments of creation. My approach tends toward a kind of fertilizing and shepherding of these creative capacities of the group and always looks at the potential of any given moment in the group, but I think that regardless of particular approaches, the basic elements of what we group therapists offer are more important than ever in our current moment. We offer relation and connectedness. Your acts—we effectively tell group members—are embedded and meaningful in relation to others. You are a part of something. Your suffering is seen and heard. Your pain can be shared. Your fears can be understood and detoxified. Your rage is a communication that needs to be received, and your hurt resonates with others. We cannot take these aspects of life for granted. We are assailed with troubling and even terrifying news of what happens when people are left to disappear into isolation and lack of connectedness. We witness appalling violence and shootings of innocents when psychic isolation and disconnectedness deepen and congeal into psychotic rage and hatred. We offer communion and community. In a world and society that overvalue individual achievement, wealth accumulation, and its expression, seemingly above all else, you graduates will carry a sensibility that values the common, the shared, and the intertwined. The word community...