The Bifurcated Self in Space and Time: A Brief Self Psychology Men’s Group

Men remain underrepresented in psychotherapy and may experience emotional disclosure as a threat to self-cohesion, autonomy, and social belonging. This study describes five adult men who participated in a six-week men’s group guided by self psychology and group-as-a-whole theory. Session narratives were examined using Vulnerability–Responsiveness Relations (VRR) to organize speaker vulnerability, listener responsiveness, and group belonging during the intervention. The narratives suggest that a brief, structured men’s group can function as a temporary selfobject environment in which mirroring, twinship, validation, and optimal frustration are distributed among group members and the leader. Symptom scores changed minimally across several measures, while selected narratives illustrated reflection, disclosure, responsiveness, and perceived group belonging. Bifurcation describes a temporal divergence between observable psychological processing of self-experience and minimal change in symptom scores. These findings are interpreted as descriptive observations rather than evidence of efficacy and have implications for time-limited men’s groups in clinical social work and psychoanalytic practice.