This paper is a reflection on the context from which group analysis emerged in Britain during the Second World War. Edward Glover’s objections to the work of army psychiatry in a radio broadcast in November 1943, and the difficult collaboration between the War Office and psychiatrists as they sought to develop officer selection and training procedures, influenced developments in psychoanalysis, including the emergence of group analysis. It considers the response of the British Psychoanalytical Society whose members were engaged in army psychiatry work alongside colleagues from the Tavistock Clinic. Bion’s and Rickman’s collaboration and the experiments at Northfield were an outcome. The abrupt ending of the first Northfield experiment, and the development of psychiatry more broadly, prompted serious questioning within the Society about its isolationalist policies. The Society’s move to develop its training role, and to participate in post war health, mental health and welfare services was a result. Not only did it ensure the Society’s survival, but enhanced the emergence of group analysis as a discipline within the psychoanalytic project.

This paper explores insight and the development of the thinking voice in the psychoanalytic process. It begins with music and images, narrating an important Australian historical event. The composers have created a dreaming space, and for this paper, a metaphor for the analytic space and the creative process. At once physical, aural and visual, it also exists within and reflects the patient's and analyst's shared historical and cultural frame. It is a liminal space, for exploration, crossing, and a product of the alchemy created between patient and analyst. Pickering's (2016) and Grier's (2019) consideration of musicality as an essential part of the analytic experience assists recognition of the multidimensional nature of the space created between patient and analyst. Ferro and Civitarese's (2015) conceptualization of the space where patient and analyst dream one another, and Baranger and Baranger's (2008) discussion of the bi personal field are pertinent here. Symington's idea of insight as an essential ‘thing in itself’, within the individual patient helps articulation of insight as a product of an internalized linking, or parental intercourse, enabling movement to a separate third position.

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