Let the Bone Sing: Group Analytic Reflections on the Depressive Position, Bodily Truth, and the Stories We Tell

When the Body Won’t Stay Quiet

Fairy tales say things our theories often cannot. They bypass the defended mind and speak in symbols, archetypes, and the secret language of the body.

Lately I have been thinking about a lesser known fairy tale: The Singing Bone. Collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, it is not a story of heroism or redemption. But of betrayal, lies, and what happens when a group mistakes performance for truth.

To me, the singing bone is not merely a metaphor. It is a description of memory: a symbol of the body’s unspoken knowledge. When that knowledge is denied or ignored by the group, it will eventually emerge: sometimes in destructive or unexpected ways because the body cannot remain silent.

In group analytic terms, this is not only a story of individual trauma, but of what groups do with pain, ambivalence, and truth. It shows how collectives defend against the depressive position: clinging too quickly to thought, rather than staying with where feeling takes us. It is a story of how the idealisation of narrative, group morality, and the performance of happiness can displace discomfort. And of how bodies, inevitably, bear the cost of language that works to silence their signals.

It is a story about systemic narrative betrayal. Of what happens when a group, or a family believes the wrong story. And of what it takes for a silenced body to finally be heard.

The Tale Retold

A wild boar terrorises the land. Two brothers set out to kill it. The younger is kind, devout, and successful. He kills the beast with the help of a magical spear. But his older brother, having spent his time drinking to muster courage, murders the younger on their return journey and hides his body beneath a bridge.

The older brother delivers the boar, claims the victory, and marries the princess.

Years pass. A shepherd, unknowingly carving a mouthpiece from a white bone beneath the bridge, blows into it. The bone sings:

“I killed the wild boar, and my brother slew me,

And gained the princess by pretending ’twas he.”

The king hears the truth. The crime is uncovered. The elder brother is punished. The younger is finally buried with honour.

But long before justice, there is a sustained group failure: a collective refusal to see what is real. The system accepts a false story because it is more comfortable: symbolically tidy, morally reassuring. The truth is too disturbing, too complex. And a body had to be buried to maintain that comfort.

When Groups Can’t Bear Ambivalence

Melanie Klein’s depressive position describes a hard-won psychological capacity: the ability to tolerate complexity, contradiction, and guilt. It allows us to acknowledge that the same person or experience can be both good and bad, loved and hated at once.

But in group life, this position is often too much to bear.

Groups frequently abandon the depressive position in favour of comforting coherence. They split, idealise, and disown. They reach not for truth, but for certainty. Not because it is safer, but because it feels reassuring, more comfortable, more narratively satisfying.

But certainty is dangerous. It closes down thought. It discredits those who don’t fit. It rewards alignment and punishes nuance. In such systems, people who embody contradiction: who bring pain, uncertainty, or unspeakable truths are often rejected, scapegoated, or silenced.

Certainty feels like safety,

But it operates as control.

When Certainty Masquerades as the Right Questions

Certainty doesn’t always declare itself as a fixed answer. In clinical work, it more often arrives in the form of “the right questions to ask.”

We may comfort ourselves that we are holding complexity by reaching for our GRaCEs (Burnham, 2012), for intersectional maps, for critical theory, for ever more sophisticated frameworks that “centre the unconscious” or “consider power.” We name all the categories, honour all the identities, and feel we have mapped the territory.

As if the terrain of the unknown ever came with a map.

This is another form of psychological comfort disguised as thoughtfulness. It’s a way of feeling competent in the face of unformulated experience. It tells us we are engaging with complexity, when what we might actually be doing is constructing a fortress of language around our fear of not knowing.

This is not an argument against systemic theory or social context: those are vital. But it’s a caution: that we do not confuse referencing a compass with having a map and then again sitting in the terrain. Or mistake our conceptual labour for psychic contact.

The singing bone doesn’t appear on any map.

It only emerges when the shepherd wanders off the road. The bone was being used for something quite different than excavation. It was being used in creative play, presumably to alleviate boredom or hone skill.

In The Singing Bone, the group embraces the elder brother’s story not because it’s true, but because it’s complete. It ties up the narrative. It spares the court from grief, guilt, and the unbearable knowledge that they’ve celebrated a murderer.

LUUUTT: Systemic Silencing of the Body

The LUUUTT model (Pearce & Pearce, 1998) helps map how stories function in groups:

• Lived stories: what actually happened

• Untold stories: what we choose not to say

• Unheard stories: what we try to share, but no one listens to

• Unknown stories: what is deeply felt in the body but cannot be named

• Untellable stories: what feels dangerous or socially unacceptable to speak

• Telling: how we shape and present our experience

• Stories told: the accepted group narratives

In The Singing Bone, the group embraces a “story told”: the elder brother’s triumph. While the “lived story” remains buried.

Unknown Stories: What the Body Knows but Language Hides

Unknown stories are not absent, they are embodied.

They are lived through the flesh, but are misnamed, dislocated, or entirely overwritten.

We see this powerfully in addiction.

A person may destroy their body, drink themselves into oblivion, or numb out with substances. Yet this is called:

• “blowing off steam,”

• “letting loose,”

• or even “self-care.”

Beneath these social scripts, the body is acting out a truth that the group (and the person) cannot name: self-hatred, shame, trauma, isolation.

Because the group reflects back only the surface story (“We all do it! It’s fun!”), the deeper narrative remains unknown: even to the person living it. And so, the self-harm continues, falsely branded as pleasure.

This is what happens when group processes collude to not only keep pain invisible. But to keep people trapped in it. Individuals get

more and more lost, until finally their misery is undeniable but so misatteibued the group can blame it on something else. But as the fairytale suggest the body holds the truth, it is the group that permits the lie.

Happiness as a Defence Against Complexity

In many cultural and institutional contexts, happiness and choice are used to silence the body. If someone says they are happy, then any lingering grief, pain, or ambivalence is framed as illegitimate.

We do this particularly to women:

• The “happy prostitute” narrative reframes exploitation as empowerment.

• The “child sex worker” oxymoron erases criminality by inserting agency.

• The working mother who misses her baby is told she shouldn’t—because she “chose” this life.

But as group analysts know: choice is not the opposite of ambivalence. And happiness can be both real and incomplete.

Take Kim, a young mother returning to work. She feels intense relief at being away from her child and is told this proves she made “the right choice.” But that relief is not simple. It is not resolution. It is the ambivalence that marks all attachment. The love/hate, desire/exhaustion dynamic that defines being human.

We must stop forcing feelings into binaries. Feelings change. Reality is their anchor.

To care, as a group or society, is not to tell people they made the right choice. It is to create a space where their body is not asked to lie for the sake of a story.

Caring in Theory, Cruelty in Practice

When we perform care without making space for the body’s truth, we enact moral sadism. A kind of clinical or institutional cruelty that hides behind reassurance, empowerment, or progress.

Groups often believe they are being kind when they:

• Promote a single “healthy” narrative

• Discredit ambivalence

• Rush to affirmation

• Reward coherence over honesty

But this is care in theory. In practice, it is violence by comfort. The kind of comfort that insulates a group from grief, but isolates the person in pain.

The body remembers what the group cannot name. And eventually, it sings.

The Shepherd and the Animal Body

In The Singing Bone, it is the shepherd, not the king, not the priest, not the hero who plays the bone.

This is no accident.

The shepherd is a figure of animal attunement. He spends his life among creatures. He knows hunger, weather, wildness, rhythm. He is not severed from nature. He is part of it.

And that is what allows him to hear the song.

Humans are unique among animals not because of our language or tools, but because we can deny pain, ours and others’. We can override the body’s signals. We can suppress grief, fear, longing. And we can do so collectively, in groups, exponentially, to devastating effect.

But the pain doesn’t disappear. It is swallowed. It is displaced out of language and into bodies, into behaviours, into the silences between people. Into bones.

Social Constructs as Survival Tools: Until They Become Corrupt

Social constructs aren’t the problem. They are essential. They evolved to help us survive. They anchor us to one another, offering shared meaning through which we make sense of the body’s experience:

• Rituals for mourning, to honour grief

• Stories of transformation, to survive loss

• Cultural scripts for motherhood, illness, ageing, pain

When these constructs are working well, they help us see ourselves reflected in each other. They mirror and metabolise what we feel, keeping us grounded in the truth of our animal bodies.

But when social constructs are corrupted, when they are used to deny rather than express the body, they become dangerous. They float above us, severed from the earth.

We become a species disoriented from our biological reality. The pain is left untethered.

Denial and the Trauma of Disembodiment

Denial can sometimes be adaptive. As Kalched wrote, “trauma is what happens when reality breaks the heart.”

Sometimes we need to not know. Sometimes we need to float a little above our pain just to survive.

But when this becomes a group norm, when denial is institutionalised, politicised, pathologised, or idealised, it becomes a kind of collective dissociation. And the cost is borne in the bodies of those who are no longer allowed to feel what they feel.

This is where therapy begins.

Beneath the Bridge: What Groups Try Not to Cross

The bridge in fairy tales often marks a threshold: a crossing point between worlds, states of being, or levels of consciousness. It connects, but it also conceals. In The Singing Bone, the murdered brother is buried beneath the bridge. He is under the very socially constructed technology meant to carry others forward. His body becomes the unseen foundation of the group’s progress.

Water flows beneath it, a symbol of the unconscious, of feeling, of what cannot be pinned down. The group walks overhead, on dry land, pretending stability. While beneath, the truth lies submerged.

In group analytic terms, to “bridge” is to enter a relationship between parts of the group that have been split, denied, or kept apart. It is the work of integration: between ideal and shadow, self and other, narrative and body. But if the group is not ready to metabolise what the bridge crosses over, it risks burying its pain in the process.

To uncover the truth in a group is not to dismantle the bridge, but to look beneath it. To wonder: what had to be silenced for us to feel coherent? What lies in the water we refused to wade through?

The shepherd’s discovery tells us: the buried return. The water eventually sings.

Therapy Is Not Affirmation. It Is Orientation.

Therapy is not about affirming a preferred construct. It is not about validating the story that helps us stay numb.

It is about orienting us back to the truth of the body: gently, slowly, and with care. It is about returning us to the shepherd’s position: in contact with the natural world, with what we’ve disowned, with the song that won’t stop just because we pretend not to hear it.

The group analyst’s work is not to resolve the story, but to create a field where the real can re-enter: even if it breaks the group’s heart. Even if it breaks our own.

Because that is how we heal. Not by staying above the pain.

But by letting the bone sing.