How Café Psychologique works

Café Psychologique uses the principles of Group Analysis, with the whole group engaging in a free-floating discussion. A guest briefly introduces the theme in two or three minutes (five minutes at most) but everyone then engages in a large group conversation. The café conductor encourages everyone to contribute using the following guidelines, which are distributed to participants:

1. Everyone can talk

The café lasts for 90 minutes with a short break half-way. This means there is plenty of time for everyone to say something. Most people find they enjoy the café more and get more from it if they speak. People are often surprised to discover their contribution is valued and appreciated. The conductor encourages brief statements to give space to everyone.

It is particularly engaging when people speak from their own experience and feelings. There are plenty of sources for research data, and to hear what people think. However, only you know how the theme we are talking about affects you and your life. Everyone has expertise in their own psychology.

2. All points of view are valid

The best conversations are when people bring their personal experience and their understanding of it. A conversation about people’s different experience is much richer than similar people simply agreeing with each other. One of the hardest things about being human is dealing with difference. The café offers an unusual opportunity to talk and think about difference in a large group of people. There may be disagreement, but everyone’s contributions are always welcomed. There is clear encouragement for people to speak respectfully with each other.

Statements work better than questions

Café Psychologique, like Group Analysis, is built on the expertise contained in the group, not that of a guest speaker, conductor, psychologist or psychotherapist. Everyone is encouraged to contribute and to speak for themselves. It is tempting to question the guest who introduces the theme, creating a question and answer session, but that only allows us to hear one person’s thoughts, knowledge and experience. Instead, we encourage people to say what they think and feel, and what is true in their experience. This creates the opportunity for others to join in to enlarge on what has been said, to disagree from their own experience, or to take the conversation further on. Anxiety sometimes causes people to use questions so the conductor encourages people who ask a question to say something about what they think or feel about their question.

4. You set the agenda

The group analytic practice of free-floating discussion allows group to work out what it wants to talk about. That is hard to predict until it actually happens. So, although the guest will briefly introduce the theme, the conductor does not direct the conversation. There is space for people to talk about whatever they want in response to the theme. People will often take up something someone else has said, but they will also often take the conversation off in a new direction. This process of free-floating discussion can be thought of as giving room for unconscious processes in the group to be expressed. It can also be explained by the processes described by complexity theory as emergence and self-organization. In either case, it creates opporutnity for surprising conversations where things are explored and discovered that would not have developed by sticking to an agenda.

5. Drinking helps

Café Psychologique was created largely to bring the insights and methods of psychological therapies into accessible public spaces. The emphaisis is on creating the best conversation you ever had in a pub or café or bar, not in turning those spaces into a consulting room. Talking and drinking go hand in hand. Having a cup of coffee or glass of wine in hand can free up a quality of conversation and connection where people are able to talk, laugh, join in, think, respond, and make surprising connections with people they haven’t met before.