In the English countryside there is a mock-Tudor manor with a room containing eight strangers and ten chairs and a big clock on the wall. I walk in and take the ninth chair.

When the second hand hits the hour, a staff consultant enters and sits. We wait, but she stares at the blue carpet and says nothing. As the minutes pass, it becomes clear that she has no intention of calling this session to order. One of us will have to talk. The air in the room feels like gelatin: no one wants to make the first move.

After a few minutes of painful silence, one of us suggests introductions. We are a psychoanalyst, a bank manager, three organizational consultants, an artist, a pediatric oncologist, a prison executive, and me, a freelancer who has cobbled together several grants to cover the staggering cost of sitting in this circle. I am the second-youngest in attendance and a rare novice.

For the next fourteen days, forty-eight strangers and I will spend twelve hours a day sitting in groups like this, talking about nothing in particular. It is a prestigious social experiment, run every year by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a British research and consulting organization. Of the many conferences like it held all over the world, this one, the Tavistock conference, is by far the oldest, longest, and most intense. It is the ultimate pilgrimage for devotees of the practice known as “group relations,” a subculture obsessed with studying the unconscious dynamics of groups.

Technically, I came to this conference for dissertation research. While deciding whether to go to grad school, I had read “Experiences in Groups,” a 1948 work on group psychotherapy by the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion, who studied small groups at the Tavistock Institute starting in the 1940s, when it split off from the NHS-run Tavistock Clinic. In the psychoanalysis world, Bion is the patron saint of group relations, and “Experiences” is its sacred text. Many of Bion’s intellectual predecessors thought that groups dulled individuals’ capacities (Gustave Le Bon, observing the French Third Republic) or that being in a group was like being hypnotized (Freud, observing the rise of Lenin). Deriding groups became a favorite line of cold war anti-revolutionaries, who panicked about “collectivism” as though it would melt Americans into soup like popsicles in the sun. Capturing a fear of groups that persists today on the right and center, Barry Goldwater called collectivism a “swampland” in which the nation would “stagnate.”

By contrast, Bion argued that a group is a sophisticated form with a subtle psychic logic of its own. Moreover, group life is inescapable: “No individual, however isolated in time and space, can be regarded as outside a group or lacking in active manifestations of group psychology.” At the Tavistock Institute, Bion and his colleagues devised a method: put a bunch of people in a room and give them no clear agenda, formal roles, worldly project, or facilitation. If you want to efficiently create a swamp, you start by creating a void.

This is what we are here to do. We pass the first ninety minutes chuckling and smiling, trying to get to know each other. There is a scheduled thirty-minute break, and then we return to our circle of chairs.

“I’m feeling a little competitive with Paul,” says one woman. “I know he has a lot of experience.”

“I’m feeling a little competitive with you, too,” says Paul. “You seem like an expert.”

“What are you competing at?” I ask. “Is there a way to be good at this?”

“No,” says Paul.

“Well . . .” says the Expert, who does seem like an expert.

“I’m also feeling competitive with our consultant,” says Paul, looking at the staff consultant. “I want to make the smartest observations.”

The consultant has been hired for these two weeks to occupy the role of an authoritative presence at the conference. Her job is akin to that of an orthodox psychoanalyst: she will listen, occasionally share an observation, and remain as inscrutable as possible. In normal life she is a distinguished neuroscientist.

Carl, the psychoanalyst, also looks at the staff consultant. “I feel worried about her,” he says. “It must be hard to be brown and a woman and hold authority in this space.”

The room seizes up. “She doesn’t need you to patronize her,” a woman snaps. “She has a PhD.”

“Yeah,” say four of us.

“I feel defensive of Carl,” says Patty. “It is extremely difficult to be a white man right now.”

“I feel annoyed,” I say.

We will go on like this for two weeks, some of us losing our minds through sheer proximity to other people. The conversation eventually devolves into a kind of libidinal dodgeball; we pelt each other with hurtful mischaracterizations and pleas for connection.¹ The goal, though, is neither conflict nor catharsis but understanding. At conferences, you build the skill of detecting the dynamics that characterize groups in real time; once back in the real world, the more you can perceive, the more choice you will have about how to respond.

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Two months earlier, in June 2024, I installed myself in a tent on my employer’s lawn as part of a collective attempt to persuade the university to stop bankrolling genocide. We were a bunch of relative strangers, getting no sleep while Zionist frat bros encircled the camp with boom boxes and baseball bats. On the second day of the encampment, we listened to the Hind’s Hall WKCR broadcast on a speaker powered by our moody generator. Before long, I couldn’t stand to stay away from the quad for more than a few hours — the camp seemed to have a magnetic field, as if the unconscious minds of hundreds of protesters had begun to vibrate at the same frequency. The encampment had generated a “we” so powerful that it warped space. When friends invited me to parties and readings a few blocks away, they seemed to be contacting me by postcard from across oceans.

Our “primary task” was “to study the taking up of roles and the exercise of authority in groups” — a stew of abstractions that at first seemed to mean nothing.

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On the left we believe in collectivism, but it’s rarely easy. Groups are incubators for social anxiety. They tend to have problems. For instance: you designate leaders, and then people scapegoat the leaders when things go wrong. Or you don’t designate leaders, and a charismatic narcissist ascends de facto. People on the margins complain that decision-making is concentrated in a small, powerful in-group; others complain that the so-called “powerful in-group” is a bunch of burnt-out husks who would love to unload responsibility but can’t find anyone trustworthy to take it. You try for more transparency and have bloated, contentious meetings; you wind up getting infiltrated, and the group splits. People fight over whether to squander hard-earned leverage in the name of political purity or to make dubious sacrifices in the name of pragmatism, and the group splits again. Someone makes someone else uncomfortable in a way that may or may not be abuse but is certainly not good; this has to be efficiently adjudicated, but because, say, your small organization has become a decentralized semipermeable militant residential phenomenon literally overnight, there is no protocol.

For the first forty-eight hours of the Gaza solidarity encampment, newcomers floated around hungry for roles, signing up for five trash disposal shifts, making sure the candy jar at the welcome tent was full of Starbursts, finding ways to tether themselves to the group. I scrambled to develop a relevant skill to offer.

Within a few days I was taking back-to-back marshal shifts. I felt relief about being useful, as well as terror that I would fail to de-escalate a threatening outsider or misinform the crowd in the heat of an action, and someone would get hurt, and I would be outed as incompetent. Fear made me a quick learner: I knew where the cops were at all times, and what to do when a strange man wandered in and started asking people about the “location of the camp’s vital functions.” Even so, when I did sleep, my dreams were full of botched conflicts that morphed into scenes of tearful childhood birthday parties — a collapse of politics into psychology that made me embarrassed for my own unconscious.

On the eighth night, the cops violently raided the camp, ripping up tents to expose a ruined lawn, which lasted until the grounds team trucked in fat rolls of sod that afternoon, erasing all the evidence that we had existed, at which point I totally unraveled. For days I trudged from one debrief to another, unable to speak to anyone who hadn’t been there, desperate for contact with people who had. Meanwhile, as the university focused on keeping the grass green, Israel invaded Rafah.

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And then I was in the English countryside, desperately hoping group relations could help me understand what had happened. At the conference’s opening plenary, a row of staff members sat facing us like a pantheon of gods. Participants, known as “members,” were prompted to see ourselves as a team of scientists out to generate and collect data about this “temporary institution,” insights we could then take back to our real lives. The staff consultants, who were largely clinicians and organizational development professionals when not at conferences, would write case studies. The director told us that our “primary task” was “to study the taking up of roles and the exercise of authority in groups” — a stew of abstractions that at first seemed to mean nothing. What she meant was that the group was supposed to work together to explore all the ways groups avoid working together.

Group relations is essentially a petri dish, as if you could take a sample of the swamp and model group behavior in vitro. The specific protocol of the study has been honed over decades to create the ideal sterile conditions for observing the unconscious in a group setting. We moved from one carpeted meeting room to another at ninety-minute intervals, stomping back and forth across the large manor lawn between different “study groups.” Small study groups met between 9 and 10:30 AM and always had the same nine to twelve assigned members. In large study group, which met from 11 AM to 12:30 PM, all forty-nine members sat in a customary inward-facing spiral of chairs, a social hierarchy in the shape of a cinnamon roll. In the afternoon there were sessions of the intergroup event, in which people self-selected into subgroups and chose a topic to explore together (Envy; Outsiders; Fucking and Fighting), forming affinity-style groups that competed and collaborated. After dinner, there were ninety minutes of debrief with a five- or six-person review group, and then, exhausted, everyone would return to their hotel rooms and struggle to sleep. There would be a day off in the middle, and a dance party at the end.

The feelings you develop for people in an environment like this are both personal and not. You map your pasts onto one another, following the same logic of transference that, according to psychoanalysts, colors any new situation. We all, constantly and unconsciously, populate any new dynamic with templates from past relationships, “invent[ing] each other according to early blueprints,” as Janet Malcolm wrote. (“A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form,” she added.)

Psychoanalysis works by illuminating these early blueprints, as the analysand plays out old patterns anew by mapping past relationships onto a mysterious, authoritative conversational partner. Building on Freud’s greatest intervention — the idea that to understand the individual you need to put them in relation with a second person — Bion suggested adding a few more. Group relations insists it is not therapy, despite its close ties to psychoanalytic theory; it is just “learning.” Still, at the conference, the unconscious made its influence known. Within the experimental enclosure, suspended in a web of hallucinated relation, you say things you didn’t think you could possibly say. Then you see others see you saying them, and then you do it again.

I had developed a fantasy that becoming a group relations expert could help me become useful in either totalitarian circumstances or state collapse.

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In study groups, you don’t talk about what happened last night or last year; you don’t discuss art or TV or the news. Instead, it’s customary to speak about the “here-and-now,” to try to pin down your instantaneous emotional response to the room. In response to a comment from a neighbor, you might turn to him and say, “I’m jealous of how everyone just listened when you talked,” or “You remind me of my abusive stepfather.”

The point of sharing your experience is to learn about the group as a whole: by speaking this way, you offer up your feelings as a collective resource for everyone’s observation. Even so, many of us fantasize that the ability to detect and name trickier feelings will prepare us to handle ourselves better in other, less experimental group settings, as though group relations were a kind of boot camp for self-awareness — “CrossFit for group life,” as one member described it. Once you’ve seen yourself project your feelings onto others in the closed environment of a conference — and been used as a screen for others’ feelings — it’s easier to spot these phenomena in the wild, and to take things less personally.

But speaking in the here-and-now is also dangerous work, likely to draw blowback. There’s a reason most meetings in real life involve so much hedging, distraction, and passive aggression. Three days in, the forty-nine of us were crying so much that little packs of tissues became a form of currency. By the fifth day, our conversations would begin to feel like séances dredging up unhappy ghosts. Around the start of the second week, the pediatric oncologist in my small group described the conference as “World War III.” Despite the hanging planters of petunias and baskets of Biscoff cookies, a psychoanalyst in the large group called it “a concentration camp.”

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Group relations was built for wartime, its experimental protocols germinating amid British imperial and military activity. During World War I, Bion had led tank squadrons, learning how groups behaved when enclosed in machines that might explode at any moment. In World War II, charged with selecting cadets to train as officers, Bion observed how individuals behaved in unstructured groups, inventing the prototype of the small study group. Working at British military psychiatric hospitals, he turned his method of passive observation into a treatment: refusing to actively facilitate his therapy groups, he waited quietly, unperturbed by his squirming patients. When they would complain that they weren’t receiving therapy, he would genially offer a hypothesis about how the group was behaving at that moment.

From his observations, Bion theorized that groups under pressure tend to regress to earlier developmental stages. Just as individuals regress into neurosis or psychosis, regressed groups unconsciously gravitate toward one of three counterproductive psychic states Bion called “basic assumptions.” In a “dependent group,” members seek sustenance or security from the group, often attributing omnipotence to one member, as in an academic seminar or a family. A “fight-flight group” attributes its bad feelings to an internal or external enemy. Finally, in a “pairing group” — the weirdest of the basic assumptions — the group fantasizes about being rescued from its problems by some unconsciously idealized future event, such as a pair of members giving birth to a messiah (Bion’s archetypal example). Each of these states alleviates some anxieties and provokes others, so groups cycle between them, unconsciously using one basic assumption to fix the problems posed by another.

In the 1950s and ’60s, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the British government, Bion and his colleagues honed their research through consulting projects with Shell, Bayer, Glacier Metal Company, Unilever, the Ahmedabad Manufacturing and Printing Company, and the National Coal Board. Today, consultants in the Tavistock mode of systems psychodynamics — an interdisciplinary field closely related to organizational development — work with branches of the NHS, Whole Foods, the London School of Economics, American Express, and the UK prison system.

If McKinsey-style management consulting is cognitive behavioral therapy for organizations, Tavistock-style consulting is psychoanalysis for organizations. Consultants in this mode enter workplaces using their minds and bodies as weather vanes, and read their own responses as symptoms of structural flaws. Regarding a dysfunctional organization, they might ask themselves how “the unconscious is at work,” deploying the vocabulary of psychoanalysis to spot flaws in the group’s collaboration that thwart productivity. Rather than providing justification for mass layoffs, they offer insights like “The teachers at this school are overreacting to students bullying each other because they feel bullied by the principal.”

Group relations conferences remain laboratories for Tavistock-style consulting techniques. Today they brand themselves as leadership training, draping their websites in stock images of boardrooms and pantsuited young professionals. Even though many conferences are becoming weirder and more progressive, making the Tavistock conference look stodgy and elitist by comparison, most of them still cling to the legible imagery of “professional development.” Luckily, a broader range of acolytes has seen through the branding. Andrea Fraser, the iconic performance artist who founded institutional critique, directed a handful of conferences, turning them into an art world trend. Friends of mine who first encounter group relations through films and installations tend to think of it as a strange pseudoscientific playground for artists, or the therapist Olympics, or an unusually high-octane DEI training — an arcane hobby.

But group relations has a more bizarre history, and a wider reach, than they imagine. In 2000, Navy psychiatrists used Tavistock methods aboard the USS Cole while the crew waited weeks for a tow post-bombing. (Dozens of military personnel attend US conferences annually.) For decades, group relations missionaries have brought the practice to other nations, establishing self-sustaining programs in business schools, in health-care systems, or as freestanding nonprofits. Because conferences encourage challenging authority, their global spread has an American cold war soft-power flavor. China and Russia both have thriving group relations programs; in post-Soviet Lithuania, conferences were used as sandboxes for creating public institutions in a culture “very suspicious” of authority. When a social science department started hosting conferences in Chile in 1986, Pinochet shut them down and “humiliated” the faculty involved — but he permitted the same major university to host conferences in the business school; he thought it might help the economy.

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We struggled to understand each other. “There is so much anger in this room,” said a member from China in small group, crying.

“I can’t understand anything you say,” said a member from England, fuming.

“I can’t understand anything you say,” said the member from China, crying harder.

In large group, an Australian life coach didn’t like that we were sitting in a spiral, because he could not see and hear everyone. He proposed we all stand up and move all the chairs around. “Oh shut up,” said the Expert. I offered to switch with anyone who could not see, and the life coach took me up on this. “Now a white girl has given a white man a better position,” complained a member.

Afterward, a stranger approached me in the lunch line. “Don’t mind them,” she said. “The chair play will stop once people start really caring what each other think.”

“Why do we sit in a spiral?” I asked, like the youngest child at a seder.

“It creates a strange hierarchy by making it hard to see,” said the stranger.

The more experienced attendees explain that here, one’s individual experience is seen as a symptom of the group’s dynamics. If someone is physically ill, it is because the system needs to eject someone; if someone feels rejected, it is because the group needs a scapegoat to hold everyone’s feelings of shame. If you act out or say something inflammatory, it’s because you’ve been unconsciously mobilized by others. Everything means something: if you close a window, you are trying to protect the group. If you’re sleepy, it’s because the group is making you sleepy. You do not have food poisoning; you have group poisoning.

“I want to know what everyone thinks of me,” said another member from China, prone to relentless soliloquies.

“You’re the voice in my head that never shuts up,” said a member from the US.

“There is a conflict going on between China and the US,” said a consultant.

At the beginning, I couldn’t stand the hermeneutic mania, this very literal reading of the room. And then, over the course of days, as I heard myself speak in group, I became aware of a slippery agency inside me that was not entirely mine. My dreams felt like they weren’t my own. I dreamed that the conference was taking place in my parents’ house, which had been vastly expanded into a massive plexiglass ant farm; we were forty-nine human-size ants carving tunnels for one another as we slowly chewed through our environment. In large group, people shared dreams like these, treating them as a common resource from the group’s conjoined unconscious. One member dreamed he was having diarrhea all over the manor, admitting that in actuality he was severely constipated, holding in his shit, fantasizing about spreading it all over the system.

The group develops its own internal logic. One person projects a quality onto another, and treats them accordingly, making them a magnet for similar projections from others. Over time these congeal into larger-than-life reputations: You’re crazy and we are normal; you’re brilliant and we are mere mortals; you’re needy and we are capable of providing; I’m not crying — you’re crying. You feel yourself taking on some social roles and not others.

Unfortunately I became everybody’s daughter. On the third morning, Patty told our small group that I was only pretending to be nice. Patty was around my mother’s age; in the opening plenary she had told the whole membership that she had originally worn pants that morning but changed into a floral dress to feel less masculine. Why had she told us this? I didn’t like her. Now she informed the small group that although I came across as sweet, I hadn’t replied when she said hi to me at the breakfast buffet, revealing that I looked down on everyone. “Which is the real Lily?” she asked. I opened my mouth to tell her I’d been wearing noise-canceling earbuds, then remembered that the convention in these rooms was to name my immediate experience, which was that I felt like a child put in time-out for something I didn’t do.

I made friends: a quiet Lithuanian psychoanalyst-in-training with a bottomless arsenal of perfect metaphors; an ingenious American artist who had discovered group relations during a studio visit with Andrea Fraser; a professor of economics with spangles in her hair; a web developer in her late twenties who wore band T-shirts to group. I did not get especially close to the prison executive in our group, but I asked her over dinner how she’d picked her career. “Back in college I got fascinated by the concept of a total institution,” she said.

I finally understood what projection meant: we needed her to fall apart so we could feel put together by comparison.

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People tell you what you’re like. My Lithuanian friend told me I reminded him of Alice in Wonderland dressed up as Xena the Warrior Princess. An Irish psychoanalyst told me nothing I said made sense because it was cloaked in intellectualisms. “Your projection onto me is so interesting,” Patty told me four separate times. “BORING BORING BORING,” one of the psychoanalysts yelled over Patty while she tried to tell yet another story about her childhood. “You are the angry woman of the system,” said a chipper Scandinavian businessman to the Expert at lunch. He turned to me. “And you look lost. But maybe you are holding the part of me that is lost.”

On the sixth day, I learned that I reminded Victoria, who had just finished her PhD in cultural studies, of her abject middle school self. I thought of Patty. No one wanted to sit with her at lunch. Some people, in group relations language, get “loaded up” with projections, taking on more bad ones than others. Exclusion, in groups, is contagious: one person becomes the receptacle for everyone’s shame. The system’s choice of scapegoat can reflect broader social dynamics. It’s typical at conferences for members of color to get mobilized to field the group’s overt or covert racism; women and queers and trans people get hystericized; older members get dismissed. White people get taken to task for their whiteness and don’t like it; men get taken to task for their masculinity and don’t like it. Rumor has it that when straight couples go to conferences together, which is probably not a good idea, the woman always loses it. We were meant to study all of this, too.

With Patty, it didn’t feel political — I simply didn’t like her. Or I was being mobilized by the group to not like her. What if the group likewise mobilized against me? I complained to another member that I was afraid of becoming the next Patty. “Just tell Victoria to take her shame back,” they advised, as if suggesting I cast a spell.

“Take your shame back!” I told Victoria in review group. I got scolded by the consultant, who happened to be a priest — we were supposed to be taking a break from the here-and-now — but for ten minutes I felt total relief. Shame, I realized, was just a hot potato.

Right then came a series of loud, irregular thumps. Someone got up and opened the doors of our review-group room onto the entryway, where the source turned out to be a member’s body repeatedly colliding with a whiteboard. The member — a person who, in the past days, had cried in every large group — was throwing herself at the conference noticeboard in great running jumps, as if it were a portal to her home world. The analyst-in-training and the priest both rushed out, calling her name, arms wide as if preparing to hold her; she began flipping a cluster of heavy tables. I stood frozen in the doorway. The director arrived and, calmly but firmly, collected her.

After the session ended, we slumped into wicker patio chairs, staring out at the manicured lawn. “Some people come to a safe place to have a breakdown,” the director had told us witnesses. At some point, the Expert, a member of my small group, came up to me. I was glad to see her. She was fierce in the here-and-now, but had hugged me with real warmth after I cried in group — she had talked about her son, who was around my age; I had talked about my mother. We took a stroll, walking at a clip over narrow cobbled streets, and I told her about the portal jumper. “She was holding too much,” the Expert said. “We did this to her. We put her in the patient role and then overloaded her.” By thinking “at least I’m not crying as much as she’s crying,” we had made it her job to cry. I finally understood what projection meant: we needed her to fall apart so we could feel put together by comparison.

This kind of breakdown at a conference is extremely rare. When the portal jumper left the manor, it threw the system into disarray. “A role is like a knot in a net of social relationships,” wrote Charla Hayden and René J. Molenkamp, both of whom have directed conferences. “When the net is pulled on or moved, all roles experience a shift.” Those mistrustful of authority started to doubt the staff. Others worried the group would “overload” someone else. I understood this better now. I understood several things better now, I realized — certain hollow abstract nouns had filled up with meaning. Words like authority, task, and role became sacred sensemaking tools to parse the chaos.

After the portal-jumping incident, I found that the Expert had a gravitational field. Like most experienced group relations practitioners, she had a way of speaking plainly that easily earned trust — even outside of conference contexts, the real experts can tactfully name their envy, their fantasies, their irritation just as they arise. I considered her skillful approach to brightly colored clothing and her copy of The Third Reich of Dreams (pre-reprint), and everyone else started to seem a little desaturated by comparison. In small group, I heard myself telling her “I desperately want your care and approval” in front of nine relative strangers. She looked at me blankly, a psychoanalytic thousand-yard stare, and said nothing. The room was silent.

After group I ran out of the manor and cried on a bench. At home, I might have called my feelings about the Expert a crush, and her response a rejection — an embarrassingly public one. But here, I saw that what I was experiencing did not strictly belong to me. The Expert, I realized, probably saw me as expressing something on behalf of the whole group: we had all, under stress, projected our strength, anger, and skill onto her. As the least experienced member of the group, I did this with particular intensity. Perhaps the room had mobilized the Expert and me into what Bion would call the pairing group, trying to reconcile our fierce, competent parts and our tender, childlike parts — the parts that wanted to be there and the parts that wanted a portal out. When I looked at her, what I was really seeing was the fun-house mirror of transference, a distorted version of my own reflection.

And then I realized I had done it — I had described what I saw, named my own projection, and contributed to everyone else’s understanding of the group. I felt like Mario running around with an invincibility star, background music playing double-time.

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At the goodbye party, the shit-dream psychoanalyst and Patty and I flailed around to Charli XCX. “Lily, you must stay for ‘Dancing Queen,’” said the director, no longer stoic, when I tried to get some fresh air. I sobbed in Heathrow airport, wearing a shirt the Expert had given me. All summer I had been grieving the encampment; now I was heartbroken over a miscellaneous group of corporate-coded professionals.

I felt split open, which I was told was a good sign. For Bion, the mind is a kind of container, able to safely hold a certain intensity of feeling and complexity of thought without rupturing. When the container breaks, you regress. But like a muscle, the mind grows stronger and larger by trying to hold too much, ripping, and then knitting itself back together. We use groups to support our containment when it inevitably fails. You need to regress to grow, to feel shame to learn, and for this you need others.

This promise of growth was what had brought me to group relations. In my admittedly reductive and desire-clouded reading of Bion, I wanted to recreate myself as a kind of bunker for feeling, or at least to be able to handle and respond effectively in the here-and-now to anything thrown at me in a group situation. If I was deft enough, I thought, I could avoid ever feeling alone.

In the fall I moved to a new city, leaving all my old groups behind and spending most days working on my laptop in my bedroom. I began to wonder whether I actually wanted to write a dissertation chapter on social movement groups and management theory or just permanently take up residence in a swamp of togetherness. In October, I attended a three-day group relations conference at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and in November, another at Columbia Teachers College. At home, I missed having a role.

The US is full of atomized individuals who feel tortured over their failure to find something like community. Some seek group feeling from an idea called America by policing its boundaries.

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If you get involved with something that sounds like a cult, you’re supposed to tell the story of your seduction and subsequent disillusionment. It’s hard to write about group relations without seeming like I’m writing a parodic cultural travelogue: I trekked through this strange, morally ambiguous epistemology so you don’t have to! But I could feel myself becoming almost spiritually devoted to the highly sophisticated technology at the heart of group relations — the “perfect geometry” of its simulations, as a friend put it.

Still, group relations is a morally fickle method, dominated by liberals and haunted by technocratic centrism. At nearly every conference I attended, a subgroup named itself something like Ambivalence and ran around preaching the virtues of both-sides thinking and bipartisanship. This was exactly the kind of messaging the university had sent about the encampment, and before it, the graduate workers’ union: that our perspective was not nuanced, that our militancy was not strategic, that our groupthink was preventing us from holding bigger groups in mind.

In 1984, a consultant vacationing in Israel suggested the Tavistock Institute bring group relations there. An Israeli professor of social work endorsed the idea, writing in a letter to the Institute, “You will understand that the Arab-Israeli issue is very much in our minds, and we are looking for ways of doing something in this direction.” Israeli group relations, as you might guess, continues to turn colonization into learning, epitomizing the “it’s complicated” narrative of imperial power in a place where the “here” in the “here-and-now” depends so very obviously on genocidal occupation. “Now, more than ever, we embrace the group relations methodology as a means to locate ourselves as we contemplate where to stand and how to proceed at this precarious juncture,” says the brochure for the Israeli Association for the Study of Group and Organizational Processes’s 2024 conference. An asterisked note below it reads “*The conference will be conducted according to the guidelines of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Home Front Command to ensure the continued safety of residents.”

Leaving the Tavistock conference, I had developed a somewhat embarrassing fantasy that becoming a group relations expert could help me become useful in either totalitarian circumstances or state collapse. I would become a sage navigator of the ant farm of the cadre, or the commune, or, if need be, the political prison. I’d read and loved an Endnotes essay that used Bion to analyze 20th-century schisms in the left, but, as far as I knew, no one had held group relations trainings specifically for leftists. Almost despite myself, I imagined that we could remodel a group relations conference for social movement work, sloughing off the buzzwords and making it aesthetically and politically palatable, spawning an elite corps of here-and-now experts. What if we could have pressed pause on the encampment and rearranged everyone’s camp chairs into a spiral? Group relations would be less destructive than Cesar Chavez’s experiments with Synanon attack therapy, less remedial than consciousness-raising, less stringent than unity-struggle-unity. Maybe if everyone at the encampment had done group relations, things would have gone a little better. We might have had a little more patience with ourselves and one another, a little more awareness about when our conflicts over strategy were alibis for emotional needs or our interpersonal squabbles were ways to avoid the daunting task at hand.

I don’t want to get too optimistic. Most group relations people I talk to do not believe that the method is a messianic vehicle for social repair. They do tend to believe that it’s a practice of penetrating any “very powerful silence that does not allow learning to move,” as one consultant put it — something many institutions could learn from, including group relations organizations themselves. When the New York Center for the Study of Groups, Organizations, and Social Systems put out a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, it faced immense blowback from the group relations community for contaminating the sterile laboratory conditions of the work with politics. Even groups of experts on groups can struggle to confront the here-and-now.

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Unfortunately, sharing the world with other people is inevitably a political activity. In the days immediately after Trump’s inauguration, I attended a five-day conference in Massachusetts, hoping that group relations would somehow help me to metabolize the news. I got to know a guy in my small group, a therapist I’ll call Will, who had been to six conferences. I noticed I envied his ability to smooth out group tensions, remediating attacks on his character with warm eye contact and thoughtful questions, as if he had stored his ego on a shelf out of reach. We developed a complex rapport built on gently taking each other to task.

At this conference’s self-selected intergroup event, Will joined a group titled Bros and the Women Who Love Them, which had decided to explore masculinity. The group included a few other men who turned out to be his buddies, therapists who came to group relations conferences the way other groups of guys might go to Vegas, plus two women. In our forty-person large study group that morning, one Bro had looked me in the eye and said, “You have a very expressive face and dark forearm and leg hair and I am turned on by you.”

Meanwhile, twelve of us — disproportionately queers and members of color — formed a group we called Chaos. Over the next few days, we wreaked a little havoc to see what would happen, spreading false rumors and messing with the space, experimenting with the group relations equivalent of starting riots. Our behavior made the three other groups surprisingly angry — most of all the Bros. One Bro told the membership that if he was the CEO of the system, he would carve out Chaos like a tumor.

In the last of our assigned small group’s six sessions, Will told us that he supported Trump.

“I feel left behind by the world,” he said.

Speaking earnestly, he expressed fear about how metropolitan intellectuals would treat him if he lived in a big city. He explained that in his view there was a war going on between “intersectionality” and “individualism” — between, as he seemed to understand these terms, people who wanted the world to be an inverted caste system with white men at the bottom and people who wanted a raw meritocracy. He turned to me with his warm therapist eyes and asked me to receive him as an individual, not an example. “Can’t we just say what matters is that you’re a solid person and we connect?” he asked.

Despite myself, I was disappointed that conferences had not fixed Will’s politics, even though I was also a political deviant in the world of group relations. I asked him later what group relations did for him, if he was so attached to an ethos of individualism. “I was kind of hoping that some version of the Trump stuff would be projected on me,” he admitted. He was curious about whether being a MAGA proxy would “feel true internally.” At past conferences, he had often wanted to defend himself when members called him racist or sexist, but in his view group relations was a practice of suspending one’s defenses to try to learn. At the same time, he told me, “If you want me to be the villain, I guess I’d rather be that than this guilt-laden weak man. I think that that’s what the left is asking of men.” In my fantasy of group relations, it was a training ground for interdependency and solidarity. In Will’s, it was a way to learn to hold himself together under any circumstance whatsoever: to belong enough to the group called “men” to open his arms to that great enemy of masculinity, emotion.

In 1996, three post-Bionian authors added a new tendency to Bion’s list of “basic assumptions”: in some groups, each member imagines themselves superior to group life. This is group membership without group solidarity. Today one sees this basic assumption everywhere on the right and center, which are full of groups that come together based on a shared fantasy of avoiding groups. Some say the right runs on coercive groupthink, others say on toxic individualism. But it also consists of toxic individuals who long to lose themselves in groups, and of groups who long not to be groups at all. The US is full of atomized individuals who feel tortured over their failure to find something like community. Some seek group feeling from an idea called America by policing its boundaries. Some read Bowling Alone and proclaim that groups are an endangered species, rare and miraculous superorganisms in a world of self-contained individuals wandering the marketplace, unbothered by the needs of others. But the truth — what group relations recognizes and tries to address — is that you cannot not be in a group.

A year after the encampments, it feels like people in my life — largely cultural workers who live in big cities — are all feeling political, but many of them seem to feel surprisingly alone in it. Some feel left out, certain the real resistance is taking place in someone else’s friend group; others get burned by left groups that form quickly and flame out. They show up to a protest or spend an afternoon canvassing, briefly feeling like a real part of the large group that is the left, and then slip back into the fog of atomization. Other people are fighting to stay loyal to disappointing groups, feeling trapped or overburdened or scapegoated, liable to try to jump through an imaginary portal out of the group and get hurt on the way out. When I find myself feeling one way or the other, which happens often, I think of a question the Expert asked in large group: “If I don’t have a role, do I still exist?”

To feel left out or pushed out of a group is itself a role in that group — one form of belonging, a symptom that you are doing something on behalf of everyone else to help the group survive its own conflicts and contradictions. So is abandoning a group. Whether group relations can or cannot repair existing institutions, it can teach us to detect the overt and covert roles we play in the many groups that structure our lives. It can teach us how to leave, if we want to leave, and stay, if we want to stay. Groups are the infrastructure of political work. To keep going, we will need to learn to tolerate the grating emotions they bring up. Rather than resist the swamp, we should learn to live in it.

1. I’ve changed the names here for privacy, and reconstructed scenes, but the events are true to memory. ↩