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Permission to Narrate: Explorations in Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis, Culture

Martin Weegmann ends his book with a quote from Jackson Browne, “The next voice you hear will be your own.” Permission to Narrate is written with the hope of helping clinical and theoretical thinkers find their own voice.The title comes fromEdwardSaid, aPalestinianAmericanacademic, who contributed to helping traumatized people find a way to tell their story. Permission tonarrate is an important dimensionofwhatwedo inour group and individual work: We permit a counternarrative to be told, one that can lead to greater freedom. Weegmann makes his argument introducing resources that are infrequently mentioned in the group world. He begins with a review of a modern theory of rhetoric that looks at how we shape and give voice to our experience. Beginning with Aristotle’s argument that rhetoric “should not be counterposed to knowledge or truth” (p. 3) as Plato thought, he develops Foulkes’s idea of the group analyst as poet through a deep exposition of modern theorists of rhetoric. Weegmann then explores positioning theory and the theory of the “dialogical self.” He sees the self as a “theatre of voices” which is envisioned from a variety of positions in which “we act out a complex psychic repertory” (p. 33). Moving from the multiplicity of the self, he explores monsters like Frankenstein and individuals characterized as “freaks” like the Elephant Man as exemplars of what we are not. This leads to an excellent and International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 70: 139–140, 2020 © 2019 The American Group Psychotherapy Association, Inc. ISSN: 0020-7284 print/1943-2836 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207284.2019.1676643