Analytische Gruppenpsychotherapie: Widerfahrnis als Quelle für Veränderung / Analytic Group Therapy: En-Counter (Widerfahrnis) as a Source of Change

Summary Analytic Group Therapy: En-Counter (Widerfahrnis) as a Source of Change For an investigation of change processes in analytic groups, I take Foulkes's observation that both repetition of old behaviours and new experiences are effective in the clash at the unconscious levels in the group. The German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels gives a synoptic view of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He conceives of the unconscious as a form of the foreign. Encountering one another includes aspects of being reshaped. He discusses phenomenologically the "figures of the in-between" as parts of the structure of any encounter. In this way he captures the uncanny experience of the self, which becomes alien to itself when confronted by the foreign other. The Argentine psychoanalyst and group analyst Janine Puget questions a psychoanalytic and narrow conceptualisation of becoming a subject through internalised self-object representations alone and focuses instead on the great importance of the present (here and now) experience for psychological change processes. Her perspective on intersubjective and interactive links points to the unavoidable process of living through completely new experiences involving the imposition on each other, exposure to mutual misunderstanding and disorientation. Her appeal to think of the experience of the foreign parts in the other or in an external event like the pandemic, not only as something that should not have happened, could open a space for a new orientation. Her careful distancing from an intersubjectivity that is essentially thought of as a shared experience, and as an affectively coordinated change in "now-moments" according to Stern, is explained. Scenarios from an outpatient analytic group, which were exposed to the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrate processes of change with reference to here and now effects. Especially in the group setting, analytic work requires, in addition to the promotion of communication and the interpretation of psychodynamic representations, an increased attention to the restlessness and change-initiating presence of the unfamiliar in the encounter between the self and the other. Failure and success are unavoidable and not mutually exclusive.