Experiences in Groups
November 20, 2025 at 10:04PMI enjoyed Lily Scherlis’s piercing essay in Harper’s, in which she revealed the empty core of the alleged “soft skills crisis” in America workplaces. Her latest, for n+1, floored me. Scherlis takes on group relations, the study of the “subtle psychic logic” of groups. She immerses herself in a pricey two-week workshop whose participants offer “an instantaneous emotional response to the room,” revealing themselves and assessing their companions. The goal, writes, Scherlis, is to “offer up your feelings as a collective resource for everyone’s observation,” so that the group may better know itself. The directness of her companions is startling; their exchanges are frequently comic, and extraordinarily tense. (“I want to make the smartest observations,” says one.) A timely, challenging exploration of we come together and how we break apart—and the value of understanding why.
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.
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.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/20/group-relations-bion-tavistock/
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