On Group Analysis and Beyond

Group Analysis as Meta-Theory, Clinical Social Practice, and Art

Anastassios Koukis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429916946
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

By extending the views of Foulkes, Bion, Freud, and Klein, this book draws the outline of a group analytic theory and meta-theory by studying the paternal and maternal functions as expressed by the conductor and the group analytic group respectively and extrapolating them to the psychoanalytic aspects of Lacan and the structuralism of Levi-Strauss's anthropological views. From this perspective, it investigates major group analytic phenomena, such as the role of money, envy, scapegoating and the regular or early ending of group therapy by patients with neurosis and borderline personality disorders. Part of the book is devoted to analyzing how eating disorders or depression in psychosis can be effectively treated and how the defective function of dreaming in psychosis can be reconstituted through group analysis, and stresses the need for research into the neural correlations of dreaming. The book further explores the ways in which group analysis can be used in the domain of the social unconscious by probing the dialectic of desire and despair in the post-modern world.

Part I
In Search of a Theory and Meta-Theory of Group Analysis

CHAPTER ONE
Principles of the group-analytic group: towards a meta-theory

Introduction

The establishment of group-analytic group therapy on the principles of a meta-theory and epistemology, implying a coherent theory that is differentiated from the principles on which psychoanalysis is based, has constituted a major quest in group analysis and psychotherapy since the era of Bion (1946, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1970, 1992), Foulkes (1948, 1964, 1990), and Foulkes and Anthony (1957), to whom we owe the first attempts in this regard. The reason is obvious. Whereas, on the one hand, the theoretical and epistemological approach to clinical experience frequently alludes to some distancing from the latter, on the other hand—as is obvious particularly in an age characterised by rapid advances in science and knowledge—clinical experience cannot be utilised effectively in treatment unless it is founded on a credible epistemological paradigm (Lo Verso, 1996). In this chapter, an attempt is made to indicate the direction our thinking should take in the search for principles on which to build a meta-theory of group analysis. And, paradoxical though this may sound, it does not seem to be heading in the direction of contemporary postmodern group-analytic thought, but, rather, towards the thinking of Bion, Foulkes, and even Freud (1900a, 1912–1913, 1914c, 1915e, 1921c, 1930a, 1937c), many of whose valuable writings remain unutilised. In other words, we are heading towards a positive re-engagement of psychoanalysis, and even of group analysis, as established by Foulkes. This re-engagement, in correlation with the re-evaluation and re-establishment of the main axes of the paternal function as expressed in psychoanalysis and particularly in group analysis, which will be the theme of the second chapter of this book, constitute, in our view, the two major cornerstones on the basis of which an epistemological group-analytic paradigm could begin to be constructed.

Sociality as a common denominator in group analysis and psychoanalysis

A thorough search of the literature leads directly to the realisation that many modern theoreticians and clinicians in group analysis are seeking this foundation through a new epistemological model that is radically distanced from the psychoanalytic model, which still provides it fundamental support, despite the equally radical change brought to the psychoanalytic process by group analysis, in terms of both context and therapy direction. The theoreticians and clinicians in question seek to establish a radical differentiation between the group-analytic epistemological model and the psychoanalytic one, mainly in the difference between psychoanalysis and group analysis as a distinction between intrapsychic individualism and a transpersonal or intersubjective field, or between the individual and the social, the person and the group (Brown, 1994; Cohn, 1993; Dalal, 1998; Lo Verso & Profita, 1991; Schulte, 2000; Stacey, 2000, 2001; Weegmann, 2001). Psycho analysis thus takes on the spurious nature of a limited and diminished form of reality, in that it dwells upon psychic conflicts of an intrasubjective nature, which are, at most, reduced to a personal Other, maternal (pre-oedipal level) or paternal (oedipal level). On the contrary, group analysis constitutes a much richer and more fertile means of approaching and decoding reality, as it reduces psychic conflict to psycho-social and socio-political conflict in the creation of which an important role is played by the social Other.

Accordingly, the distinction in question is between the intra personal and social Other, between the psycho-biological, psychophysical and psycho-social, between the unconscious and conscious, or the Freudian unconscious, and, at most, the social unconscious, between pre-oedipal and oedipal relations (transference) and interrelations or relatedness (Brown, 2001; Dalal, 1998; Hopper, 2001; Lo Verso, 1996). This leads people whose thinking ranges within the framework in question to seek the epistemological foundation of group analysis in long-term borrowings of principles from across virtually the entire spectrum of philosophy, sociology, and neurology (Brown, 1994; Cohn, 1993; Dalal, 1998; Karterud, 1998; Powell, 1991; Schulte, 2000; Stacey, 2000, 2001), since the biological factor never ceases to allude with certainty to a “scientific” foundation. It is characteristic that an effort has recently been made to base the social nature of the person on an ambivalent and nebulous semi-social and semi-biological notion of a social function that is considered to be a kind of social instinct (Ormay, 2012). For the present, all these borrowings enter and remain in the field of group-analytic thought as metaphors (Stacey, 2000).

It is true that Foulkes and many other contemporary group analysts (Brown, 2001; Hopper, 2001) do not present this distinction in a disjunctive (either/or) manner, but in a supplementary (both–and) one, a manner which, as Stacey (2001) points out, originates from Kant’s thought. The difference is that in Foulkes, supplementarity serves continuity in a centripetal way: despite the clear precedence of the social over the individual and the concomitant establishment of new semantics and a new therapeutic framework, group analysis remains within the epistemological universe of psychoanalysis. However, among the theoreticians who follow a post-Foulkesian perspective, and frequently adopt a dividing line between the orthodox and radical Foulkes (Dalal, 1998), disjunction or supplementarity serves continuity in a centrifugal way, that is, in a new epistemological plan beyond the psychoanalytic. Despite which, there are no grounds for this distinction, because it rests on the unstable base of an epistemological vacuum, which is suppression of the fact (in the sense of “I don’t want to know”) that psychoanalysis, from Freud’s founding act (to which the influence of Kant’s critical idealism undoubtedly contributed), far from being an intrasubjective and non-social activity, constitutes a social and political achievement of major importance. Thanks to psychoanalysis, the subject ceased to be the metaphysical and psychological abstraction to which he had been reduced in the centuries-old metaphysical tradition and ideology, as a result of which, through the philosophy and ideology of western liberalism, he was shown for the first time to be a specific psycho-biological, psychomental and psycho-social being. As crystallised in the ontogenetic unconscious, this subject constitutes a cross-fertilisation of the complex mechanisms, conscious and unconscious, created by the interweaving of the phylogenetic unconscious (which is primarily determined by the interrelation of the paternal and maternal imago) with the life of the subject in the group, as the latter evolved from prehistory through history, from the primal horde (first “family” group), to the totemic group and the fraternal clan, to the modern society and family (Freud, 1912–1913, 1921c).

Under these conditions, the distinction between psychoanalysis and group analysis is ultimately reduced to a distinction between two different versions of the social, or of groupishness. As recorded in modern group-analytic thought, the social appears to betray the idea of the unconscious interweaving of the maternal and paternal imago or, in Freud’s (1921c) terms, the “ideal ego” and the “ego ideal”, especially as they are represented by the group and the leader on the social level, respectively, with which the canvas of the social is woven in both Freud and Foulkes to a high degree. In essence, it betrays the Oedipus myth on which psychoanalytic thought is essentially founded and which, according to Bion, constitutes the cornerstone of “socialism”, or genuine sociability, conceived as the other pole of narcissism (Bion, 1992, pp. 105–106, my italics). Thus, it is in danger of being a philosophical idea whose epistemological validity could be seriously disputed. The idea that man, from an existential, anthropological, and political viewpoint, is a social being determined intrapsychically by a total of intersubjective relations with which his existence is involved constitutes, to use Kant’s (2004[1783]) terms, an a priori “analytic judgement”, that is, a tautological judgement whose predicate concept adds nothing new to our knowledge, in contrast to an a priori “synthetic judgement” whose predicate concept does add something new to our knowledge. A new epistemological group-analytic model, founded on the idea of intersubjectivity (interpersonal, transpersonal, social, intercultural, and intergenerational relations, etc.), by adding something new to our knowledge about the nature of sociality, in other words, by using sociality as a synthetic judgement instead of considering it a tautological analytic judgement, would have to discuss and overcome the tautological gaps inherent in the thinking of Freud, Foulkes, and Bion.

The unresolved Kantian antinomies of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus myth

The above analysis has indicated that the psychoanalytic (Freudian) epistemological universe is fundamentally a social one. It is also, despite its antinomies (in the Kantian sense) and its inherent indeterminacy, or, rather, because of them, a universe structured and unequivocal. More precisely, although it mainly constitutes a psychological theory, psychoanalysis is, from a philosophical viewpoint, an epistemological universe disposed mutatis mutandis chiefly towards the principles of Kant’s epistemological universe.

1. As in Kant (2004[1783]), there are boundaries between the finite and the infinite beyond which we cannot see things without the intermediation of the human eye, that is “noumena”, so, in Freud, there is a limit to knowledge of the unconscious (“the dream’s navel”) which we cannot unravel because it coincides with the “unknown” (Freud, 1900a, p. 525).
2. In Kant (2004[1783]) psychological, cosmological, and theological ideas are interwoven with a number of antinomies (thesisantithesis) that are ultimately resolved in the a priori synthetic judgement, whose predicate concept confers something new to our knowledge. The two major synthetic judgements are those of God and of moral freedom (autonomy of the will). Similarly, in Freud (1912–1913, 1921c), post-psychological (ontogenetic unconscious), historical, anthropological (phylogenetic unconscious), and social (social unconscious) ideas are interwoven in the antimony that fundamentally characterises paternity and maternity:
   • Thesis: the father (totemism, paternal imago, ego ideal, social group, leader of the group, oedipal level) takes precedence over the mother (exogamy, maternal imago, ideal ego, natural and social group, pre-oedipal level);
   • Antithesis: the mother takes precedence over the father.

The antinomy to which this relationship is subject is partially resolved through what could constitute an a priori synthetic judgement, that is, through the Oedipus myth in the light of which the maternal and paternal imagos create a relationship of equality and self-rule on the prehistoric (pre-oedipal) level, in the sense of the common wellspring of totemism (civilisation, social group) and exogamy (nature, natural/social group), identification of the primal father/leader with the archaic mother/group (Freud, 1912–1913), and on the historical (oedipal) level in the sense that, on this level, the father and mother have differentiated themselves in terms of their gender and contribute self-sufficiently to the subject’s access to the situation and to resolution of the Oedipus complex, but with the catalytic triumph of the father/leader, since the nature of the mother/group is chiefly preoedipal (Freud, 1921c, 1926d, 1933a). The idea that the Oedipus myth is an a priori synthetic judgement whereas sociability is an a priori analytic judgement, although implied in Freud, is mine. Freud attributes to the Oedipus myth the place that Kant attributes to the categories as well as to the a priori representations of space and time. Through them, perceptions, as daily subjective experience, which is personal clinical experience in this case, take on a sensible character in the form of a “schema” and are transformed into an objective experience (Kant, 2004[1783]). More precisely, Freud maintains that the Oedipus complex “relates to the phylogenetically inherited schemata, which, like the categories of philosophy, are concerned with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived from actual experience” (Freud, 1918b, p. 119).

Despite the solid and mostly valid theoretical knowledge and anthropological foundation of Freud’s principles, the Freudian psy cho analytic epistemological model, as we will see more analytically in the next chapter, has always presented two main weak points in the context referred to here.

1. The special dimension taken on by the Oedipus myth weakens its pre-oedipal prerequisites in such a way that the ideal of the father or the leader of the group (“ego ideal”) displaces that of the mother or the group (“ideal ego”) (Freud, 1921c) and does not take advantage of the latter’s nature as a “container” of the infant’s or the member’s psychic, mainly unwanted, reactions as projected to her or the group (Bion, 1962, 1963, 1970). In other terms, on the group level, the group/mother is not considered as a mothering soil based on the intercommunication of the group members in the context of the group matrix conceived as a highly social network in which the individual, including the leader/ father, is simply a nodal point (Foulkes, 1964). As a result, oedipal relationships as expressed on either an individual or group level cannot be unravelled in such a way as to avoid splitting the cohesion of the group and wasting its emotional richness, and, thus, lead to an imaginary/archaic re-experience of the oedipal situation. The group’s emotional richness is spent on the idea of an archaic father/leader who is considered as the main cause of the formation of the group and society. The leader of the group is an outstanding, “absolutely narcissistic” and “self-confident” personality and, as such, he “himself need love no one else”. The group’s and society’s members, on the contrary, “stand in the need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader” (Freud, 1921c, pp. 123–124). This is the reason why they give up their “ego ideal”, by separating it temporarily from their ego, and substitute for it “the group ideal as embodied in the leader” (Freud, 1921c, p. 129). By putting “one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal” they can then identify themselves “with one another in their ego” (Freud, 1921c, p. 116, original italics) by reinserting the “ego ideal” as paternal (leader) or maternal (group) ideal in their ego, and, consequently, with the leader/ father as a common shared “ego ideal” on an archaic imaginary level. In this sense, the leader/father of the group (“ego ideal”), who is nothing but a version of the father of the primal horde, remains an illusion of the group on the imaginary level, and the group/mother (“group ideal”), which is conceived as “a revival of the primal horde” and as a narcissistic extension of the primal father (Freud, 1921c, p. 123), represents an imaginary and hallucinatory entity.
2. The fundamental idea on which the Oedipus myth rests is that the primal father, the father of the primitive horde, who is first introjected by infants or primitive men in their imagination as an omnipotent and permanently “living” (immortal) father, or, in Lacan’s terms, as an imaginary father, returns, cleansed of his primality, in the form of what Lacan (1981, 1994, 1998) calls a symbolic father in his archaic dimension because the child “kills” him by internalising him as a “dead” father. Thus, the sons of the father of the primal horde reach a resolution of the oedipal com plex and later become the new fathers themselves (Freud, 1912–1913). However, this idea seems to refer to a closed and self-sufficient, psychotic-like system of paternity, which turns into a vicious circle. More specifically, Freud’s idea of the oedipal myth further weakens the strength of the mother/group on the symbolic or imaginary level, while paving the way for the highhandedness of the idea of a leader/father who, even though he is conceived as more symbolic and less archaic than his predecessors due to his stronger identification with the idea of a “dead” father, and a better resolution of the oedipal complex, risks being no more than a continuation of the primal father as imaginary father (Freud, 1912–1913).

With these premises, the need is to further extend and enrich the oedipal myth, which remains a very useful tool in psychoanalysis and group analysis, by exploiting the ideas of Foulkes and Bion regarding a group-analytic frame of reference with the aim of starting to construct a new, more integrated e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I IN SEARCH OF A THEORY AND META-THEORY OF GROUP ANALYSIS
• PART II GROUP ANALYSIS IN OPERATION: SOME FUNDAMENTAL ASPECTS AND PHENOMENA
• PART III GROUP ANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY AS A TREATMENT OF MAJOR DISORDERS
• PART IV GROUP ANALYSIS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SOCIAL UNCONSCIOUS AND ART
• EPILOGUE
• REFERENCES
• INDEX