Linking, Alliances, and Shared Space

Groups and the Psychoanalyst

Rene Kaes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367325343
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429915703
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents the general framework of the psychoanalytic approach to groups, describing the main elements of a psychoanalytic model of the group and of the subject within the group. It describes the various problems posed by extending the field of investigation and practices of psychoanalysis.

1

How the question of the group was posed in psychoanalysis

The group was first of all an “application” of psychoanalysis to subjects who were unable to benefit from analysis or individual psychotherapy in their classical forms. It appeared later that the group setting, by virtue of the processes that its specific morphological characteristics generate, was potentially of great interest in the treatment of subjects suffering from specific disorders: serious neuroses, psychoses, or borderline states. Another application of the group, employed notably by Bion, made it possible to treat, economically, psychic sufferings linked to current collective traumas—in this case, in wartime.

To these three best-known applications may be added another, where the group setting is used for the purpose of personal training in “group phenomena”, especially through experience of the effects of the unconscious that occur in such a situation. Another application with training purposes concerns the learning of a particular set of training skills, or the formation of a professional identity. This is the case when part of the supervision of psychoanalysts in training takes place in a group, when the group is a temporary stage in the training of psychoanalysts (the cartel had this function in the economy of the “pass” with Lacan), or when the group is used to structure the identity and clinical experience of doctors under the leadership of medical psychoanalysts (Balint groups).

All these practices have resulted in more or less precise theoretical elaborations, but these have generally not given rise to the debates they ought to have inspired in the psychoanalytic community, or at best they have remained marginal in the debates that have taken place. On the contrary, most of these practices have aroused, and continue to arouse, reactions ranging from silent indifference to mistrustful tolerance to violent, passionate rejection. For this reason, at least, it would be reasonable to examine how the group, as a configuration of ties, an object of investments (or counterinvestments) and representations, and as a means or tool for such practices raises such important issues for the identity, transmission, and institutions of psychoanalysis.

The first task of the group psychoanalytic theories that were developed in Europe, the United States, and Argentina was to conceptualize the group as such, independently of its constituent members—that is, the group as a whole forming a specific entity. This initial approach, centred on the group, was undoubtedly necessary to gain access to psychoanalytic knowledge of the psychic reality that is constituted in it. But it also posed the question of the legitimacy of this object with regard to psychoanalysis founded on the practice of individual treatment. The question of the individual subject in his relation to the group appeared only much later on and in a relatively marginal way. From this point on, other questions were asked, though they did not become a subject of debate. The fact is that the conception of the subject changes, and with it our way of thinking about the unconscious changes, according to whether one considers it in terms of the classical treatment setting or in terms of the group setting.

It is outside the subject and scope of this chapter to review the history of these developments. Nonetheless, it is useful to describe, not the events and their sequences but, rather, the principal orientations of the research, the accentuations and tendencies that finally constituted the elements of psychoanalytic thinking about the group. I will try in particular to show how the group poses a problem for psychoanalytic theory and practice, in the hope that, by identifying its contributions and its obstacles, issues for debate will emerge concerning the fundamental objects of psychoanalysis, the extent of its domain, and the frontiers that it sets for itself in its contemporary practice.

The group as therapeutic instrument in the tradition

When psychoanalysts found that they were faced with the necessity of inventing an alternative to the individual treatment, the group setting quite quickly appeared to be adequate for certain patients. The majority of these psychoanalysts were involved in situations where they had to deal with serious psychiatric problems, within institutional settings that aggravated them, and according to a crazy logic of the apparatus of madness, with teams whose primary task was, precisely, to treat such madness: this was the case with Enrique Pichon-Rivière in Buenos Aires. Many of them, like S. H. Foulkes in London, were obliged to look for alternative techniques in the face of the failure of standard analytic treatment: at the time the necessary modifications were difficult to conceive of and, given the theoretical-clinical gaps that they produced, to square with the categories of psychoanalysis itself. Others had to take charge of urgent situations such as the traumatic neuroses engendered by war, and they had to invent economic arrangements (in the financial and psychic sense of the term) in order to be able to treat them, discovering their efficacy in so doing: this was the case for W. R. Bion at the beginning of the Second World War. There were also some psychoanalysts who were very keen to take into consideration the imperatives of public health and the management of therapeutic resources. In France, at the end of the Second World War, the development of therapeutic group practices inspired by psychoanalysis came about largely as a result of the effect of the objectives set by the emerging Social Security system and the plan for reinforcing the processes of socialization undermined by the war and urbanization. Among other attempts, many formed part of the tradition that regards the group as an instrument in the service of social or pedagogical causes.

Now, psychoanalysis has a different objective: namely, to liberate the psyche from its psychic impediments. Group psychoanalysis forms part of this task: its objective is to loosen the intersubjective links that are a source of disturbances in linking and in the subjects of linking. By opening up the way to knowledge of this part of the individual psyche involved in the “group mind” and linked to it by formations and processes that transcend each subject, these psychoanalysts were confronted with clinical, methodological, and theoretical problems that led them to the boundaries of psychoanalysis with other disciplines. The latter, based on other conceptions of psychic life, worked with hypotheses that were bound, sooner or later, to prove to be in opposition to the constitutive hypothesis of psychoanalysis: that is, of a psychosexual unconscious of infantile origin, separated from consciousness but acting on it in a specific and constant way.

The first group psychoanalytic theories were, as we shall see, not all constituted from the outset on psychoanalytic bases. The importation of extraterritorial concepts into the field of psychoanalysis was carried out at the price of sometimes hybrid theorizations and ambiguous practices, but it was also an opportunity for naturalizing problematic issues that had hitherto been excluded from the field of psychoanalytic research: the concepts of intersubjectivity, belonging, and alienation emerged from this acculturation. Depending on their cultural heritage and the specific genius of their founders, the different currents or psychoanalytic schools elaborated theoretical corpuses to account for the formations and psychic processes of which the group is the locus. However, the construction of a metapsychology of intersubjectivity and a theory of the subject of the unconscious, insofar as he is equally a subject of the group, occurred at a later stage. This is the direction that my research has progressively taken.

The pioneers of the psychoanalytic invention of the group

Enrique Pichon-Rivière and the operative group

In Argentina, the first research studies by Pichon-Rivière into the use of the group as an instrument of training and therapy preceded the initiatives of Foulkes and Bion by a few years. The initial idea had its source in his practice as a psychiatrist faced with institutional hospital dysfunctioning: he himself experienced the group as a powerful means of social action and a remarkable therapeutic instrument for the individual. This action gave rise to several practical and theoretical concepts, notably that of the operative group.

Pichon-Rivière defined the operative group as

a group centred on the task of learning to think in terms of resolving the difficulties created and manifested in the group field, and not in each of its members, which would be an individual analysis in a group. Nor is it centred exclusively on the group as in Gestalt conceptions, except that in each here-now-with me of the task, one is working in two dimensions, realising to a certain extent a synthesis of all the currents. We consider the patient who speaks about what happens in the group as the speech-bearer for himself and for the unconscious phantasies of the group. [Pichon-Rivière, 1971, p. 128]

Commendng on this definition, Bernard (see Pujet, Bernard, Chaves, & Romano, 1982) clearly shows the importance in Pichon-Rivière’s work of the reference to North American social psychology: for instance, the use of group concepts centred on the task and social learning. However, with the notion of the work here-now-with me, Pichon-Rivière takes into consideration the dimensions of the transferential field, already recognized by Foulkes, when he distinguishes between horizontal (group) transference and vertical (individual) transference.

The guiding principles of his thought only emerged later on. Pichon-Rivière’s model proposes an understanding of the group in terms that are marked more by psychoanalytic social psychology.¹ These lines, written in 1972 (in collaboration with A. de Quiroga), recapitulate rather well the principal hypotheses of his research:

The social psychology that we have in mind is part of a critique of daily life. What we are concerned with is man immersed in his daily relationships. Our awareness of these relations loses its trivial character to the extent that the theoretical instrument and its methodology enables us to investigate the genesis of social facts. … The social psychology that we are postulating has as its object of study the development and transformation of a dialectical relation which is established between the social structure and the unconscious phantasy of the subject, and rests on relations based on the subject’s needs. In other words, it is a question of the relation between the social structure and the configuration of the subject’s internal world, a relation that is approached through the notion of linking [vinculo].… The subject is not only a subject in relationships, he is also a subject produced in a praxis: there is nothing in him which is not the result of the interaction between individual, groups and classes. As this relation is the object of social psychology, the group constitutes the privileged operational field of this discipline. This is due to the fact that the group makes it possible to look for the interplay between psychosocial (internal group) and sociodynamic (external group) dimensions by observing the forms of interaction, the mechanisms by which the roles are attributed and accepted. It is by analysing the forms of interaction that we are able to establish hypotheses concerning the determining processes. [Pichon-Rivière, 1980, pp. 205-206]

One can clearly see here Pichon-Rivière’s attempt to articulate, rather than to synthesize, certain psychoanalytic hypotheses with others that are borrowed as much from psychology as from various philosophical currents: the Gestalt school, the psychology of learning, group interactionism, Marxist and Sartrian dialectics. As for psychoanalysis, several concepts are inspired by the thinking of Melanie Klein and that of Susan Isaacs, notably when he borrows certain characteristics of her conception of phantasy, though modifying it considerably. Pichon-Rivière explicitly defines the objective of the operative group as one of identifying and interpreting the underlying and emerging unconscious phantasies of the manifest task, which are condensed in the group in the form of specific fears—namely, attacks on the ego (paranoid anxieties), the loss of the object (depressive anxieties), and resistances to change. However, for Pichon-Rivière, these phantasies do not originate in the drives: they are the result of the relational experiences of the members of the group. There is an issue of debate here between this, let it be said in passing, inventive and innovative author and some of his contemporaries and successors.

S. H. Foulkes and the current of group analysis

In London at the beginning of the 1940s, S. H. Foulkes, John Rickman, and Henry Ezriel laid the foundations of what was to constitute the current of group analysis. This current shares the structural perspective of Gestaltism. Trained in Frankfurt, Foulkes retained the central idea of the structural approach to behaviour inaugurated by Goldstein, and he applied it to his conception of the individual and the group. At the risk of simplifying, this perspective can be characterized by three propositions: (1) the group is a totality, and the totality precedes the parts; (2) it is more elemental than they, and it is not the sum of its elements; and (3) the individual and the group form a whole of the figure-background type; the individual in the group is like the nodal point in the network of neurons. Theoretico-clinical priority is given to the group as a specific entity. These three propositions present the group as a precession of the individual and the latter as an element of the group, not as a subject participating in the construction of the group. My conception differs from Foulkes’s on this point.

From these three propositions, Foulkes derives the proposition that the group possesses specific therapeutic properties. He thus justifies the practice of group analysis, which he elaborated in London at the beginning of the 1940s:

the idea of the group as a mental matrix, the common ground of operational relationships, comprising all the interactions of the individual group members, is central for the theory and process of the therapy. Within this frame of reference all communications take place. A fund of unconscious understanding, wherein reactions and communications of great complexity take place, is always present. [Foulkes, 1964, p. 110]

Foulkes (1964, p. 292) considers that every illness is produced within a complex network of interpersonal relations; and in this sense he considers that “group psychotherapy is an attempt to treat the total network of disturbance, either at the point of origin in the root or primary group, or through placing the disturbed individual under conditions of transference in a group of strangers.” The group possesses specific therapeutic properties that are expressed by the five fundamental ideas of Foulksian group analysis: (1) the choice of listening, understanding, and interpreting the group as a totality in the “here and now”; (2) only taking into consideration the transference “of the group” onto the analyst, and not the lateral transferences; (3) the notion of unconscious phantasy resonance between the group members; (4) the common tension and the common denominator of the unconscious phantasies of the group; (5) the notion of the group as a psychic matrìx and frame of reference for all interactions.

In the broad sense, group analysis is a method of investigating the psychic formations and processes that develop in a group; its concepts and technique are based on certain of the fundamental facts of psychoanalytic theory and method, and on original psychoanalytic elaborations required by the fact that the group is considered as a specific entity. In a more restricted sense, group analysis is a technique of group psychotherapy and a means of acquiring psychoanalytic experience of the unconscious in the group situation.

Wilfred R. Bion and group mentality

At the same time as Foulkes was inventing group analysis, and in the same hospital at Northfield, Wilfred Bion proposed another original conception of group formations and processes. Like Foulkes, who was seeking an alternative to the limits of individual treatment, Bion counted on the specific mobilization of group processes for the treatment of certain traumatic, borderline, and psychotic pathologies. Bion (1965) founded his analysis on central categories of psychoanalysis when he distinguished two modalities of the psychic functioning of small groups: (1) the work group, in which the processes and requirements of secondary logic prevail, organizing the representation of the object and of the group objective, the organization of the task, and the systems of communication that permit its realization; and (2) the basic group, in which primary processes predominate in the form of basic assumptions in tension with the work group.

The group mentality is the mental activity that is formed in a group from the unanimous and anonymous opinion, will, and unconscious wishes of its members. Their contributions to the group mentality, which constitutes the container for them, permit a certain satisfaction of their impulses and their wishes; they must, however, be in conformity with the other contributions of the common fund and be sustained by it. The group mentality thus guarantees that the life of the group is in line with the basic assumptions that organize its course.

The three basic assumptions (dependency, fight-flight, pairing), which describe the different possible contents of group mentality, represent three specific emotional states. They play a decisive role in the organization of a group, in the realization of its task, and in the satisfaction of the needs and wishes of its members. They are, and remain, unconscious, express unconscious phantasies, and are subject to primary processes. They are used by the group members as magic t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOANALYSIS LIBRARY
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• Introduction
• 1 How the question of the group was posed in psychoanalysis
• 2 The epistemological problem of the group in psychoanalysis
• 3 The group as a psychoanalytic situation
• 4 Clinical psychoanalytic work in the group situation
• 5 The group as an intrapsychic formation: psychic groupality and internal groups
• 6 Forms and processes of group psychic reality: the group psychic apparatus
• 7 Associative processes in groups
• 8 Phoric functions: speech-bearer, symptom-bearer, dream-bearer
• 9 The common and shared dream space: dream polyphony
• 10 Unconscious alliances
• 11 The subject of the unconscious, the subject of linking
• Epilogue
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX