On no longer being a trainee group analyst

For the last year I’ve had this sentence on my about page:

He’s currently training as a group analyst and he’s specifically interested in questions of reliance, dependence and addiction in relation to everyday use of social platforms and LLMs, particularly amongst young men.

I recently removed it because I’ve realised I can’t feasibly continue. I’m just about to complete the Foundation Course which is the first year of IGA training. It’s been a remarkable experience which has left me seeing the world and my life through a new lens. I’ve always seen groups as basically quite threatening, in the sense that I neither understood nor felt comfortable with group dynamics. Over the last year I’ve now been inducted in how profoundly healing groups can be, as well as how the same characteristics I found threatening are the foundation for the capacity for healing. The group exceeds its members, it holds its members, it reflects its members. There’s a quality of ‘groupiness’ which I now have a quite fine grained vocabulary for pointing to in my experience of groups. It’s left me with intellectual resources and practical strategies for negotiating my own relationship with groups.

The problem is that the diploma is significantly more onerous, let alone the qualifying course. I’ve realised that realistically I don’t have time or energy to continue, prompted by starting a new leadership role in August which is going to further squeeze what I can do. I rarely work on weekends now (apart from reading and writing which honestly don’t feel like work) and I’d like that to continue. The priority is going to be protecting work on my books for the next three years which means that I’ve got to let go of my ambition to be a group analyst.

I tried really hard to displace this decision. I thought about joining a work reflection group for a year or even going into group analysis myself. I realised that I was kicking the can down the road because I didn’t want to make the choice that I was stopping this. But realistically the current time pressures continue for at least the next three years so I had to make the decision. It’s a category of decision making I’ve often really struggled with in the sense that it involves opportunity costs. It’s not “do I want to do this training?” but rather “do I want to use the time and energy on this training more than on writing and enjoying life outside work?”. It goes deeper than this though to questions of identity I thought it was worth reflecting on.

I realise there was an intellectual identity in describing myself as “currently training as a group analyst”. I’d already encountered a bit of psychoanalysis as a social theorist who reads relatively widely. But over the last three years I’ve worked voraciously through Bruce Fink, Irving Yalom, Christopher Bollas, Mari Ruti, Alenka Zupančič and a whole range of others. Increasingly these are my go-to reference points in a way I wouldn’t have expected even just a couple of years ago. Describing myself as ‘training’ confers a sense of respectability on what otherwise feels slightly uneasily autodidactic to me. I have no formal training and yet I’m now (co)writing a book about psychoanalysis. It also expresses a commitment to practice. One of the things I’m convinced of is that social and literary theory often mangles psychoanalytical theory by losing the clinical register. It’s necessary to see these ideas in terms of the interventions they respond to and structure in order to adequately grasp them. Indeed I’d suggest that psychoanalytical theory which is detached from that clinical register is only loosely speaking psychoanalytical. I liked the identity of ‘currently training’ because it affirmed this outlook while also legitimating it.

I realise that I also quite sincerely wanted to help people. The “questions of reliance, dependence and addiction in relation to everyday use of social platforms and LLMs, particularly amongst young men” was about moving through my own experience of these challenges and wanting to help other people with theirs. I think there’s a huge vacuum here which is going to get worse in the coming years and I wanted to make some contribution to addressing it. But again… time and energy. In my new role I’m going to be able to scratch the itch to be helpful, albeit in a very different register. Crucially I guess it enables me to do it in a way which leverages my most developed capabilities in the context of my actual career, as opposed to learning new capabilities for a new and parallel career. It’s definitely the right decision but it’s one that certainly feels like a loss which I’m marking with this post.