She entered one group in emotional turmoil unfamiliar to us. “I just received an invitation to my niece’s wedding; I didn’t expect one and don’t know what to do.” A panoply of tears, worry, and hatred followed.

Ignoring Jocelyn’s confession, the group went to work, offering solutions to how she could go while saving face and maintaining dignity no matter how her brother behaved. Or maybe she should not go? This really wasn’t about the niece, who should be mature enough to understand, everyone agreed.

Over many years in our group, Jocelyn played out her fear of undefined danger by “living under the radar,” as she put it. Her timidity did not match her position in her adult family as a matriarch and successful career woman. “Who are you afraid of here?” we would ask.

I was okay with that too, but not with her unwillingness to extend her self-understanding. I found myself inviting her to speak in every session – not always nicely, granted – and nursing her along when she did. Sometimes the group complimented her efforts. Their positive feedback and encouragement got us nowhere. I found her paranoia suspect and felt her resolute victimhood was as a cover-up and not a true emotional reveal. She stubbornly refused to take responsibility for her unconscious and its group derivatives. Like all of us, she had access to “radar” and unshared information. At times, it can be therapeutic to disrupt narratives of established patterns of victimhood, even when they represent significant trauma. My counterforce of skepticism and unwillingness to sooth her surrender to her wordless terror seemed to offer possibilities, whereas encouragement, explanations, and profusions of caring did not. I dramatized my impatience or satirized her excuses for not participating. What surprised me was that the group found me to be unusually patient and welcoming, even when being an “s.o.b.” I suspected that she did too. Lacan (1977) advised establishing a “controlled paranoia” (p. 15) with certain individuals: “We must bring into play the subject’s aggressivity towards us, because, as we know, these intentions form the negative transference that is the initial knot of the analytic drama” (p. 14). In being a s.o.b. and someone she could “tell off,” I was the most knowable and safest member of our group.

I was heartened by Jocelyn’s miseries. At last a view into Jocelyn’s psychic interior: feelings of love and hate that I did not wish to disturb or close off. I wondered whether my pleasure in her distress symptomatized spiteful retaliation for “forcing me” to do the kind of supportive work that I did not want to do and hadn’t been very successful in doing. Apparently, in being an “s.o.b.” I filled the role of the spite-filled father/brother and gave Jocelyn some freedom to play safely with their split-off representations.

Her facile paranoia relied on a manic defense: a refusal to feel and work through what she was capable of knowing. In a maturational working through process different developmental epochs align, often painfully so. To reach an integrating “depressive position” Jocelyn would have to surrender the fraternal idealization and “situate herself in relation to different moments of her history” (Faimberg, 2005, p. 29). He who had been an amalgamation of the loyal big brother and the best qualities of what was mostly missing from her father (and mother) had become successively someone else: a distancing college student; a striving business partner to an unethical father, a bully, and a greedy heir.

In this significant session, Jocelyn acknowledged the true target of her fear, displaced from father to brother to our group: