The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (70 page)

The group met twice weekly. The participants were young, ranging in age from twenty-five to thirty-five. At the time we join the group, two women had recently graduated, leaving only four male clients. Bill, the male lead in the drama to unfold, was a tall, handsome thirty-two-year-old divorced dentist and had been in the group for about eight months without making significant progress. He originally sought therapy because of chronic anxiety and episodic depressions. He was socially self-conscious to the degree that simple acts—for example, saying good night at a party—caused him much torment. If he could have been granted one wish by some benevolent therapeutic muse, it would have been to be “cool.” He was dissatisfied with work, he had no male friends, and he highly sexualized his relationships with women. Though he had been living with a woman for a few months, he felt neither love nor commitment toward her.

The group, waiting for new members, met for several sessions with only the four men and established a virile, Saturday-night, male-bonding subculture. Issues that had rarely surfaced while women were in the group frequently occupied center stage: masturbatory practices and fantasies, fear of bullies and feelings of cowardice about fighting, concerns about physique, lustful feelings about the large breasts of a woman who had been in the group, and fantasies of a “gang bang” with her.

Two women were then introduced into the group, and never has a well-established culture disintegrated so quickly. The Saturday-night camaraderie was swept away by a flood of male dominance behavior. Bill boldly and brazenly competed for not one but both women. The other men in the group reacted to the first meeting with the two women members in accordance with their dynamic patterns.

Rob, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student, arrived at the meeting in lederhosen, the only time in eighteen months of therapy he thus bedecked himself, and during the meeting was quick to discuss, in detail, his fears of (and his attraction to) other men. Another member made an appeal to the maternal instincts of the new female additions by presenting himself as a fledgling with a broken wing. The remaining member removed himself from the race by remarking, after the first forty minutes, that he wasn’t going to join the others in the foolish game of competing for the women’s favors; besides, he had been observing the new members and concluded that they had nothing of value to offer him.

One of the women, Jan, was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old, divorced woman with two children. She was a language professor who sought therapy for many reasons: depression, promiscuity, and loneliness. She complained that she could not say no to an attractive man. Men used her sexually: they would drop by her home for an hour or two in the evening for sex but would not be willing to be seen with her in daylight. There was an active willingness on her part, too, as she boasted of having had sexual relations with most of the heads of the departments at the college where she taught. Because of poor judgment, she was in deep financial trouble. She had written several bad checks and was beginning to flirt with the idea of prostitution: If men were exploiting her sexually, then why not charge them for her favors?

In the pregroup screening interviews and preparatory sessions, I realized that her promiscuity made her a likely candidate for self-destructive sexual acting-out in the group. Therefore, I had taken much greater pains than usual to emphasize that outside social involvement with other group members would not be in her or the group’s best interests.

After the entrance of the two women, Bill’s group behavior altered radically: he disclosed himself less; he preened; he crowed; he played a charming, seductive role; he became far more deliberate and self-conscious in his actions. In short, in pursuit of secondary sexual gratification, he appeared to lose all sense of why he was in a therapy group. Rather than welcoming my comments to him, he resented them: he felt they made him look bad in front of the women. He rapidly jettisoned his relationship with the men in the group and thenceforth related to them dishonestly. For example, in the first meeting, when one of the male members told the women he felt they had nothing of value to offer him, Bill rushed in to praise him for his honesty, even though Bill’s real feeling at that moment was exhilaration that the other had folded his tent and left him in sole possession of the field of women. At this stage, Bill resisted any intervention. I tried many times during these weeks to illuminate his behavior for him, but I might as well have tried to strike a match in a monsoon.

After approximately three months, Jan made an overt sexual proposition to Bill, which I learned of in a curious way. Bill and Jan happened to arrive early in the group room, and in their conversation, Jan invited Bill to her apartment to view some pornographic movies. Observers viewing the group through a one-way mirror had also arrived early, overheard the proposition, and related it to me after the meeting. I felt uneasy about how the information had been obtained; nonetheless, I brought up the incident in the next meeting, only to have Jan and Bill deny that a sexual invitation had been made. The discussion ended with Jan angrily stomping out midway through the meeting.

In succeeding weeks, after each meeting she and Bill met in the parking lot for long talks and embraces. Jan brought these incidents back into the meeting but, in so doing, incurred Bill’s anger for betraying him. Eventually, Bill made an overt sexual proposition to Jan, who, on the basis of much work done in the group, decided it would be against her best interests to accept. For the first time, she said no to an attractive, interested, attentive man and received much group support for her stance.

(I am reminded of an episode Victor Frankl once told me of a man who had consulted him on the eve of his marriage. He had had a sexual invitation from a strikingly beautiful woman, a friend of his fiancée, and felt he could not pass it up. When would such an opportunity come his way again? It was, he insisted, a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Dr. Frankl—quite elegantly, I think—pointed out that he did indeed have a unique opportunity and, indeed, it was one that would never come again. It was the opportunity to say “no” in the service of his responsibility to himself and his chosen mate!)

Bill, meanwhile, was finding life in the group increasingly complex. He was pursuing not only Jan but also Gina, who had entered the group with Jan. At the end of each meeting, Bill struggled with such conundrums as how to walk out of the group alone with each woman at the same time. Jan and Gina were at first very close, almost huddling together for comfort as they entered an all-male group. It was to Bill’s advantage to separate them, and in a number of ways he contrived to do so. Not only did Bill have a “divide and seduce” strategy, but he also found something intrinsically pleasurable in the process of splitting. He had had a long history of splitting and seducing roommates and, before that, of interposing himself between his mother and his sister.

Gina had, with the help of much prior therapy, emerged from a period of promiscuity similar to Jan’s. Compared with Jan, though, she was more desperate for help, more committed to therapy, and committed to a relationship with her boyfriend. Consequently, she was not eager to consummate a sexual relationship with Bill. However, as the group progressed she developed a strong attraction to him and an even stronger determination that, if she could not have him, neither would Jan. One day in the group, Gina unexpectedly announced that she was getting married in three weeks and invited the group to the wedding. She described her husband-to-be as a rather passive, clinging, ne’er-do-well. It was only many months later that the group learned he was a highly gifted mathematician who was considering faculty offers from several leading universities.

Thus, Gina, too, pursued secondary gratification rather than her primary task. In her efforts to keep Bill interested in her and to compete with Jan, she misrepresented her relationship with another man, underplaying the seriousness of her involvement until her marriage forced her hand. Even then, she presented her husband in a fraudulently unfavorable light so as to nourish Bill’s hopes that he still had an opportunity for a liaison with her. In so doing, Gina sacrificed the opportunity to work in the group on her relationship with her fiancé—one of the urgent tasks for which she had sought therapy!

After several months in the group, Jan and Bill decided to have an affair and announced to the group their planned assignation two weeks later. The members reacted strongly. The other two women (another had entered the group by this time) were angry. Gina felt secretly hurt at Bill’s rejection of her, but expressed anger only at how his and Jan’s liaison would threaten the integrity of the group. The new member, who had a relationship with a man similar to Bill, identified with Bill’s girlfriend. Some of the men participated vicariously, perceiving Jan as a sexual object and rooting for Bill to “score.” Another said (and as time went by this sentiment was heard more often) that he wished Bill would “hurry up and screw her” so that they could talk about something else in the group. He was an anxious, timid man who had had no heterosexual experience whatsoever. The sexual goings-on in the group were, as he phrased it, so far “out of his league” that he could not participate in any way.

Rob, the man in the group who had had worn lederhosen at Jan and Gina’s first meeting, silently wished that the heterosexual preoccupation of the group were different. He had been having increasing concern about his homosexual obsessions but had delayed discussing them in the group for many weeks because of his sense that the group would be unreceptive to his needs and that he would lose the respect of the members, who placed such extraordinary value on heterosexual prowess.

Eventually, however, he did discuss these issues, with some relief. It is important to note that Bill, aside from advice and solicitude, offered Rob very little. Some ten months later, after Rob left the group and after the Bill-Jan pairing had been worked through, Bill disclosed his own homosexual concerns and fantasies. Had Bill, whom Rob admired very much, shared these at the appropriate time, it might have been of considerable help to Rob. Bill would not at that time, however, disclose anything that might encumber his campaign to seduce Jan—another instance of how the pursuit of secondary gratification rendered the group less effective.

Once their sexual liaison began, Jan and Bill became even more inaccessible for group scrutiny and for therapeutic work. They began speaking of themselves as “we” and resisted all exhortations from me and the other members to learn about themselves by analyzing their behavior. At first it was difficult to know what was operating between the two aside from powerful lust. I knew that Jan’s sense of personal worth was centered outside herself. To keep others interested in her she needed, she felt, to give gifts—especially sexual ones.

Furthermore, there was a vindictive aspect: she had previously triumphed over important men (department chairmen and several employers) by sexual seduction. It seemed likely that Jan felt powerless in her dealings with me. Her chief coinage with men—sex—afforded her no significant influence over me, but it did permit an indirect victory through the medium of Bill. I learned much later how she and Bill would gleefully romp in bed, relishing the thought of how they had put something over on me. In the group, Bill not only recapitulated his sexualization of relationships and his repetitive efforts to prove his potency by yet another seduction, but he also found particularly compelling the opportunity for Oedipal mastery—taking women away from the leader.

Thus, Bill and Jan, in a rich behavioral tapestry, displayed their dynamics and re-created their social environment in the microcosm of the group. Bill’s narcissism and inauthentic mode of relating to women were clearly portrayed. He often made innuendoes to the effect that his relationship with the woman he lived with was deteriorating, thus planting a seed of matrimonial hope in Jan’s imagination. Bill’s innuendoes colluded with Jan’s enormous capacity for self-deception: She alone of any of the group members considered marriage to Bill a serious possibility. When the other members tried to help her hear Bill’s primary message—that she was not important to him, that she was merely another sexual conquest—she reacted defensively and angrily.

Gradually, the dissonance between Bill’s private statements and the group’s interpretations of his intentions created so much discomfort that Jan considered leaving the group. I reminded her, as forcibly as possible, that this was precisely what I had warned her about before she entered the group. If she dropped out of therapy, all the important things that had happened in the group would come to naught. She had had many brief and unrewarding relationships in the past. The group offered her the unique opportunity to stay with a relationship and, for once, play the drama through to its end. In the end Jan decided to stay.

Jan and Bill’s relationship was exclusive: neither related in any significant way to anyone else in the group, except that Bill attempted to keep erotic channels open to Gina (to keep his “account open at the bank,” as he put it). Gina and Jan persisted in a state of unrelenting enmity so extreme that each had homicidal fantasies about the other. (When Gina married, she invited to the wedding everyone in the group except Jan. Only when a boycott was threatened by the others was a frosty invitation proffered her.) Bill’s relationship to me had been very important to him before Jan’s entry. During the first months of his liaison with Jan, he seemed to forget my presence, but gradually his concern about me returned. One day, for example, he related a dream in which I escorted all the members but him into an advanced postgraduate group, while he was pulled by the hand to a more elementary, “losers” group.

Jan and Bill’s relationship consumed enormous amounts of group energy and time. Relatively few unrelated themes were worked on in the group, but all of the members worked on personal issues relating to the pairing: sex, jealousy, envy, fears of competition, concerns about physical attractiveness. There was a sustained high level of emotion in the group. Attendance was astoundingly high: over a thirty-meeting stretch there was not a single absence.