Teaching Group Process with Group: The Schopenhauer Effect
Over the past year, I worked with a small team of experienced group therapists using the film Group: The Schopenhauer Effect, a drama set within therapy sessions, as a medium for teaching about group process through workshops and experiential learning labs. Our team was convened by Dr. Elliot Zeisel, a group psychoanalyst who also plays the role of the group leader in the film. This work took the form of Reel Connection, Real Resistance: A Film-Based Group Leadership Learning Lab, a two-day experiential learning program presented at the American Group Psychotherapy Association annual conference in New York and with the Austin Group Psychotherapy Society in Austin. The film grew out of the earlier drama series Group: The Series, in which the groups are led in a Modern Analytic tradition.
In our teaching, we developed a framework for approaching the film through the concepts of containment, immediacy, and resistance. This work highlights the deliberate craft involved in creating an environment in which members are invited to speak directly to one another in the moment, within a contained emotional space that makes it possible to say more and notice what gets in the way.
In both the film and the learning labs, it becomes clear that groups of this kind make it possible to notice habitual ways of relating and viewing the world as they take shape in the moment, and to explore what else might become possible—often with a degree of immediacy and movement that is difficult to encounter elsewhere.
The groups I lead in my practice grow out of this background and many years of leading and participating in ongoing groups.
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