Learning from experience is fundamental in psychic growth. Often initiated in containing relationships with primary caregivers, this process continues into adulthood, where meaningful connections play a crucial role in digesting experiences. Yet, amid some adversities including socio-political oppression such relationships might lose their containing functions and even end up reenforcing the oppression. On these occasions, opportunities for containment and learning from experience can arise through engagement with films and television series.

In this presentation, I will present pieces of data produced from two Free Association Narrative Interviews with a woman in Iran. Through this data and drawing on a psychoanalytic theoretical framework, mainly of the British Independent group, I aim to show how moving images can transcend cultural boundaries, build connections, and foster containment for some spectators in the Islamic Republic characterized by oppressive state control and censorship.

Through this lens, I will illuminate the dual nature of cross-cultural spectatorship, which can both liberate and confine individuals. On one hand, cross-cultural spectatorship can create a deep sense of connection and recognition and even serve as a catalyst for political resistance, resilience, and informed activism. On the other hand, it can intensify the conflicts and alienation from the reality in which the spectator is living. Building upon these insights, I will highlight the complexities of cross-cultural moving image spectatorship, emphasizing the imperative need for holding and investigating the psychosocial tensions that arise.

This exploration aligns with the conference's overarching theme, which is learning and not learning from experience as I will illustrate how individuals can navigate the complexities of their lived experiences, creating/finding pathways towards emotional growth and societal change, using moving images from another culture for containment but at the same time feel more alienated by these watching experiences.

The famous statue of Laocoön, as he wrestles against the entwining serpents sent to punish his previous actions through his death as well as his two sons, has long been seen as despair caught in stone. Regardless of the conflicting aesthetic politics throughout its history, the statue has always been regarded as a consummate representation of suffering. Yet when we pay attention to Laocoön’s gaze it is not towards the direct cause of pain (the bite of the serpent), nor towards the plight of his sons; it is cast towards an invisibility, an unseen, the lacunal. The genuine source of Laocoön’s misery lies elsewhere. The paper explores the despairing gaze as a metaphor for the lacunae beyond cause and recognition. It takes up Ella Sharpe’s ideas on metaphor, psychical development, and the body, notably in how what she calls spontaneous metaphor “…can reveal a present-day psychical condition which is based upon an original psycho-physical experience”; and how metaphors “…reveal also something of the early incorporated environment”. Along with Lacan’s work on anxiety, Sharpe’s work will be employed to develop the idea that lacunal despair is a version of repression as it seeks to ‘escape’ the body, yet is so often not seen, just as Laocoön’s despair is located elsewhere. Sharpe and Lacan will be drawn on explore these relationships of repression, lacunae, and despair, incorporating ideas of metaphor and experience in these terms. Husserl’s phenomenological concept of embodiment will also be employed to work through experiential despair. In this sense, as much as Laocoön historically, aesthetically, philosophically, and psychoanalytically, stands as a metaphor for an almost universalizing anguish, it also reveals the complexity of managing to see what we are anxious about both individually and at a wider social level.

Possible theme area: The pathologizing and normalizing of despair

This presentation explores the theory and practice of Experiential Groups as a learning model within psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy training programmes. Drawing on the existing literature on Experiential Groups (Miller et al., 2004; Salzberger-Wittenberg et al. 1999), mainly underpinned by the work of W. Bion (1993 [1961]), we aim at challenging and expanding established notions of Experiential Groups as mainly grounded on psychoanalytical theories that place the unconscious dynamic at the forefront of these experiential learning tools. We would like to propose an alternative consideration of Experiential Groups as diffractive events drawing from Posthuman (Barad, 2007, 2012, 2014; Braidotti 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2019) and New Materialist (Bennett, 2010; Cole & Frost, 2010) theories highlighting the relational agency of objects, artefacts, materiality and other-than-humans at the core of experiential group dynamics.

By bringing together the lived experiences of tutors (Ellis & Bochner, 2016; Richardson & St.Pierre, 2005), the observations of Experiential Groups in practice, reflections on the materiality of rooms, and participants’ feedback, we attempt to rethink the Experiential Group as a space organized by individuals’ unconscious only. With the understanding of group dynamics as driven by psychosocial (Fang, 2023) and the consideration of non-human agents, we propose an alternative view of these experiential learning tools where the materiality of the environment and the agency of objects and of artifacts plays a crucial role in the being-doing-experiencing of the event.

During the presentation we would like to make the participants embody and explore the theory-practice of the Experiential Group by offering an opportunity to live-experience the Experiential Group as an embodied and diffracted activity where unconscious dynamics play a central role in the undoing of the event alongside the agency of the materiality of the event itself and the relationality across humans and other-than-humans participants.