Permission to Narrate

Martin Weegman is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Group Analyst, with thirty years NHS experience. He is a well-known trainer, delivering workshops and lectures throughout the UK to a variety of psychology and psychotherapy organisations. Martin has written or co-edited four books, and published many book chapters and papers in a range of journals.

'These excellent and elegant essays extend the frontiers of group analysis, adding further depth and breadth, not to mention innovation, to our discipline andresearches.'- Malcolm Pines, group analyst, author of The Evolution of Group Analysis'Very original, imaginative and striking - a different point of view on what we do.'-- Liesel Hearst, group analyst, and co-author of Group-Analytic Psychotherapy'This book is a fascinating account through a series of essays, made more interesting still by its courageous self-disclosures and glimpses into the author's own history.'- Professor Edward Khantzian, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Harvard Medical School'Martin Weegmann further develops his acute understanding of analogy, rhetoric, metaphor and symbolism and the ways in which group and individual narratives interweave and influence each other, including novel insights into the formation and lure of psychoanalysis.'-Alistair D. Sweet, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Belfast'This beautifully written book is dizzyingly wide-ranging, its span including narrative and dialogical psychology, group analysis, rhetoric, literature, historical and political analysis, and even an excursion into the world of monsters, as well as the author's own clinical and personal experiences. We should be grateful to Martin Weegmann for giving himself the permission to narrate so broadly because the result is not just an invitation for a paradigm change in group analysis but a fine and evocative demonstration of the power of words.'- David Winter, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Hertfordshire'In recent years Martin Weegmann, a distinguished clinical psychologist and group analyst, has begun to share his rich clinical voice with colleagues in a host of intriguing and wise publications on the addictions and related topics. His most recent book explores the necessity of granting not only our patients but, also, ourselves the permission to transform our hidden narratives into words in order to obtain relief. Weegmann illustrates this most powerfully through a series of intelligent, literate, and historically deft chapters which range from a study of Alcoholics Anonymous, to the language of group analysis, to the life and work of Sigmund Freud. The author writes in a clear and inviting style - never pompous or bombastic - and one imagines that he creates a similarly welcoming atmosphere in his consulting room. One will finish reading this book feeling rather better educated about the entire panoply of psychotherapy.'-Brett Kahr, Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, in the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, London, and, Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health

• Foreword , Introduction , The rhetorical ground of group analysis , Taking position: what groups do we bring? , Remembering monsters , Naught but a story to tell*: Alcoholics Anonymous , Revolutionary subjects, bodies, and crowds , Psychoanalytic fascinations: my seven Freuds ... . , Discipline anxiety—time for paradigm change in group analysis? , Epilogue