Longing / Belonging – Just Places

Between us, the address is always moving.

As the last Large Group in GASi’s Autumn Workshops the 8th – 9th November, came to a close, the word Rockstar slipped into our reflections — unexpected, slightly ironic, and tinged with absence. It surfaced in relation to Earl Hopper’s legacy, and perhaps to the empty space left by his departure — the sudden vacancy of his chair.

The word caught a fragment of night: my daughter coming to me in the dark. As a parent, my eyes still open before my mind does, sensing her small steps on the floor, and as her shadow moves closer I lift the covers.

Come, lie down. Did you dream?

It had been a while. I had missed her beside me — the warmth, the ordinary gravity of closeness. I wiped her silent tears.

Little friend, tell me.

“All the parents have their own space by a star in the universe, and the children have numbers. When I push the numbers you come forward and we’re together. But when you said you were tired, that you might not return to the box at your star, I was scared — if you disappeared into the universe, how would I ever find you again?”

It was  not the mother fearing the loss of the child, but the child fearing the mother’s drift into a dark, unlocatable universe. The child carries the anxiety of the mother dissolving, without address, into space.

A reversal. A confusion of roles, dependencies, and longings — precisely the terrain Earl was so attuned to. Those unstable relational edges where containment shifts direction from moment to moment; where presence flickers; where absence speaks as loudly as closeness. As Earl often reminded us, belonging is never fixed. It pulses. It moves between the star and its shadow.

Group psychotherapists live and work in these in-between places — as we did in the Autumn Workshop’s Large Groups, where longing itself becomes a form of connection. Perhaps this is where belonging begins for group analysts: in the tension of finding and losing — in the shared wanderings between ritual, dialogue, and reflection.

Perhaps this is what Earl meant: that belonging and disappearance are not opposites, but twin movements in the same field.

Silje Klippen, Co-editor