The One and the Many

Relational Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis

Juan Tubert-Oklander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921612
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents a selection of papers on the subjects of Relational Analysis and Group Analysis, written in the ten-year period that goes from 2002 to 2012. It deals with the problems of interpretation from the hermeneutic, psychoanalytic, and group-analytic points of view.

CHAPTER ONE
Beyond the individual and the collective: the new widening scope of the field of psychoanalysis

Introduction to Chapter One

This introductory chapter deals with the main subject of the book, a theme that has occupied me since the beginning of my analytic studies in the early 1970s: that of the relation between the individual and the group, which is perhaps more accurately stated in terms of individual and collective mental processes. Although I began, as was usual at the time in Buenos Aires, by studying Freud, I soon entered a training course in group psychotherapy, at the Argentine Group Psychology and Psychotherapy Association. There I became familiar with socio-psychological theories and the theory of communication as a necessary complement to the psychoanalytic approach. One consequence of this was that, as I went on studying psychoanalysis and later had my formal psychoanalytic education in Mexico, I unwittingly found myself learning something quite different from what my teachers were trying to convey, since I automatically translated psychoanalytic theories into another epistemology, which was unlike that of traditional psychoanalysis. Hence, I always felt identified with those psychoanalytic theories that included a consideration of actual relationships with other real people, such as Object Relations Theory (in the British Independent tradition) and Self Psychology, and I wondered why authors such as Sullivan, Fromm, or Horney were thought to be non-psychoanalytic or even anti-psychoanalytic.

As years and decades went by, I approached, over and over again, the theoretical and clinical problem of how to articulate individual and collective mental processes, and wrote quite a few papers and a couple of books on the subject. For the past twenty years, I have shared this enquiry with Reyna Hernández-Tubert, and together we wrote extensively about this, as even a cursory look at this book’s reference list will surely show.

After having thought through these ideas and discussed them with many colleagues and students, I wrote, in 2008, a paper intended for a psychoanalytic audience, in which I summarised my position on the matter and argued that including the social, institutional, and political perspective, far from representing a departure from psychoanalysis, is a must, if we are to continue developing the exploration of the unknown continent that Freud opened for us. The present version has been revised and enlarged in order to include more of the group-analytic perspective, that was only barely introduced in the original text, which was addressed to a group of Freudian psychoanalysts, while in the present context I feel that I may well take for granted a previous knowledge of group analysis in my readers.

A new dimension for psychoanalysis

In 1954, the New York Psychoanalytic Society convened a symposium in Arden House on “The widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis”. The lecturers were Leo Stone, Edith Jacobson, and Anna Freud (Stone, Jacobson, & Freud, A., 1954). At the time, the widening scope referred to the possibility of treating severely disturbed patients, who had not been previously considered adequate for a psychoanalytic treatment. Nowadays, we have witnessed a new widening of the scope of psychoanalysis, which can be seen in the themes proposed by most recent psychoanalytic conferences, which have striven to include a discussion of social and cultural phenomena, albeit most frequently from the perspective of an individual psychology. Such revived interest in things social refers, not only to the dire necessity of responding to the impact that the new circumstances and life conditions have on our daily practice, but also to a serious attempt to use our instrument in order to attain a better understanding of, and even intervene with the aim to somehow change, the process that generates such circumstances and conditions.

This is, of course, what Group Analysis¹ has been doing all along, ever since its inception by Foulkes (1948, 1964a, 1975a, 1990), in Britain, and Pichon-Rivière (1971a,b,c, 1979; Tubert-Oklander & Hernández de Tubert, 2004), in Argentina, but it represents a truly revolutionary development for psychoanalysis, which had been traditionally defined as “the study of the intrapsychic”. This implied leaving aside the whole interpersonal, group, institutional, cultural, political, and social dimensions, which were summarily discarded as something “external” and “merely conscious”. Indeed, most schisms in the psychoanalytic movement were derived from divergences about the influences on and the role played by environmental and social factors in psychic life (Hernández de Tubert, 2006; Tubert-Oklander, 2006b).

The unyielding position taken by orthodox psychoanalysts on the matter may be ascribed to their confusion about the meaning of “intrapsychic”, as suggested by Foulkes and Anthony (1965), when they wrote: “To us intra-psychic does not convey … ‘intradermic’, and we look upon the dynamic processes in the group not from the outside, but from inside, as intra-psychic dynamics in their interaction” (p. 21).² If this is the case, perhaps we are witnessing a reunion of two estranged members of a same family—something like the attempted rapprochement between the Anglican and the Methodist churches—but it may also be thought of as a much-needed evolution. This is the point of view that emerged in a conversation I had with Malcolm Pines, during an interview Reyna Hernández-Tubert and I had with him in 2005 (Tubert-Oklander & Hernández-Tubert, 2011), as can be seen in the following fragment:

Juan: I have a feeling that group analysis is what psychoanalysis should have been, but never was …

Malcolm: (assenting) I always said that psychoanalysis is slowly moving to where it should be, which is group analysis, and, through relational psychology and self psychology, it’s moving in that direction. (p. 10)

This opinion is, of course, open to criticism, since it may well be interpreted as an expression of bias by two group analysts considering psychoanalysis—even though both of us are also psychoanalysts. But, when we take into account the passionate rejection that the psychoanalytic community has shown, throughout its history, towards the attempts to enquire the relevance for psychoanalysis of the study of environmental and social factors, we cannot avoid considering the hypothesis that some unconscious dynamic factor may be in operation in this matter.

One interesting example of this is the episode Donald Winnicott recounted to John Padel (1991), from his analysis with Joan Riviere, one of Melanie Klein’s earliest and staunchest followers:

I said to my analyst, “I’m almost ready to write a book on the environment.” She said to me, “You write a book on the environment and I’ll turn you into a frog!” Of course she didn’t use those words, you understand, but that’s how what she did say came across to me. (p. 336)

A possible explanation of this intense and continuing conflict may be found in the origins of psychoanalysis. Freud’s (1896c) first theory of neurosis was an environmental one, since it sought the cause of mental disturbances in the mistreatment and abuse of children by the adults who were in charge of them. Hence, it could well serve as a basis for a stern social criticism, since it called into question the alleged benevolence of parents and adults towards the dependent human beings who were their charges, this being the imaginary foundation of all social and institutional authority. It therefore generated a widespread and intense hostility and an absolute rejection, towards both the theory and its author.

Freud, on his part, started feeling uncomfortable with a point of view that could not but call into question his own life and family relationships, both with his father and with his daughters, as it soon emerged during the hard process of his self-analysis (Jones, 1953).³ Finally, in 1897, he decided to abandon this theory. This was partly due to his impression that some of the dramatic episodes of childhood sexual abuse recounted by his patients could not have actually happened, at least as they had been told. One may wonder why the very person who had created the concept of screen memories (Freud, 1899a) did not consider the possibility that an overtly dramatic pseudo-memory might be a symbolic synthesis that both concealed and expressed the hidden memories and aftermath of some subtler form of abuse that had been repressed (indifference, abandonment, rejection, incestuous strivings, death wishes, or lack of love on part of the parents or other adults in charge of the child). But Freud rather chose to take this as an evidence of the fact that his patients had been “lying” all along. In this there must have been some influence of the violent attacks he had received and of his own ambivalence towards the whole matter.⁴

Be that as it may, he found a revolutionary solution for this theoretical dilemma, when he introduced the concept of the psychic reality of wishful fantasies, which would then acquire an aetiological effect. This opened the way for the whole research project of enquiry of the individual’s inner world, that would occupy psychoanalysis for the next hundred years. But we may also infer that both the episode of the so-called “seduction theory”—a veritable euphemism, since it was really a theory of the pathogenic effects of childhood sexual abuse—and the circumstances that led to its abandonment remained as a repressed traumatic experience in the nascent psychoanalytic community, an essential part of its social unconscious (Hopper, 2003a,b). Consequently this social group has ever since shown a clear tendency to repudiate any attempt to revive the traumatic theory of neurosis—as happened with Ferenczi (Balint, 1968; Borgogno, 1999, 2004)—and to mistrust any reference to society or the environment in the study of mental processes.

Malcolm Pines (1989, 1996) suggests yet another hypothesis. Freud, who had had youthful dreams of studying law and following a political career, later abandoned them and turned to science, in order to reach that high position that his family had envisioned for him, when he was born at a moment in which, for the first time, a young Jew could aspire to posts that had been unthinkable before. The new wave of anti-Semitism in Austria later became an obstacle for his aspiration to become a university professor, as he openly shows in the self-analysis of his dreams (Freud, 1900a). He now aspired to become a great man on account of his unique contributions to universal knowledge. But it was essential for him that psychoanalytic knowledge be nothing but universal. Any suggestion that the social, cultural, and political context might have a bearing on his discoveries would open the way for a criticism in such terms as “this happens only to Jews”. His worst nightmare was that psychoanalysis should be seen as “the Jewish psychiatry”. Being a member of a generation that had staked for assimilation as a way to transcend the limitations imposed on Jews on account of their being a different other, he rejected the very idea that cultural differences might have something to do with psychic reality.

He also made a wholesale rejection of politics. The historian Carl E. Schorske (1980), who had an important influence on Pines, made a study of Freud’s “Revolutionary Dream”—also known as the “Count Thun Dream”—showing how, in his analysis, he turned the political conflict generated in him by his chance meeting with the Prime Minister of Austria, in a situation that he felt to be humiliating for him, into a personal conflict with his father. This is how Schorske (1974) put it, in his own words:

In [his analysis of this dream] Freud adumbrated his mature political theory, the central principle of which is that all politics is reducible to the primal conflict between father and son (Freud, 1912–1913). The Revolutionary Dream, miraculously, contained this conclusion in its very scenario: from political encounter, through flight into academia, to the conquest of the father who has replaced Count Thun. Patricide replaces regicide; psychoanalysis overcomes history. Politics is neutralized by a counterpolitical psychology. (p. 54, my italics)

Pines (1987) expands on Schorske’s idea and formulates the limitations of Freud’s stance on the matter, in the following terms:

The story of what happens between people is replaced by the story of what happens within the isolated child. And indeed how isolated is that child without the nurturance and guidance of caretaking adults whose biology and culture shape their capacities to receive and to respond to their infant’s needs. (p. 124)

However, it cannot be denied that Freud actually had a great interest in the psychoanalytic study of society, and bequeathed to us a whole set of theoretical elements that were to become essential for our present enquiries. The series of texts that are known as his “social writings” (Freud, 1908d, 1912–1913, 1915b, 1921c, 1927c, 1930a, 1933a (Lecture 35—“The question of a Weltanschauung”), 1933b, 1939a) show, from my point of view, two main characteristics that relate to the subject of this chapter. The first is an oscillation between two contrasting points of view. On the one hand, there is the conception that only individuals are “real” and that social phenomena stem from the interaction between them, especially from their identifications. This perspective, which he develops in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) excludes, by principle, any concept of a “collective mind”, with its own processes and intentionality.

On the other, he embarks, instead, in an enquiry of collective mental processes. Thus, in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), he postulates “the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual” (p. 157). Although he recognises the problems generated by this hypothesis, he deems it to be indispensable, since “without the assumption of a collective mind, which makes it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by the extinction of the individual, social psychology in general cannot exist” (p. 158).

Many years later, in Moses and Monotheism (1939a), he continues the study of cultural evolution, which he understands to be a collective mental process that shows such striking analogies with the psychological evolution of the individual, that it might be thought that they are nothing but two aspects of one and the same reality (Hernández de Tubert, 2008). When we consider the existence of this second line of research of social phenomena, it is indeed striking to see that mainstream psychoanalytical theory has completely ignored this conception of collective mental processes and restricted its field of study to the enquiry of intrapersonal processes, while declaring anything “external” to be out of bounds (Tubert-Oklander, 2006a, see Chapter Two current volume).

However, it should be noted that, as Earl Hopper (2012) points out, Freud seems not to have been cognisant of the emergence of scientific sociology, especially in the work of his contemporary Émile Durkheim (1895). Hence, he could not conceive social facts as “real”; for him, the social part of the personality was never primary, but always secondary to psychological processes, conceived as something that happened “inside” the individual organism.⁵ From his materialistic approach to psychology, Freud could not conceive the very idea of a social fact, as a non-material reality that stems from the organisation of society and imposes constraints, both positive (injunctions) and negative (restraints), on the individuals’ behaviour, experience, and thought. This would have required a sociological approach that was at odds with Freud’s medical background.⁶

The second characteristic is a noticeable absence of social criticism. Freud, who was politically conservative, eschewed in his writings any questioning of the contemporary society in which he lived (Pines, 1998). Consequently, he focused in his social essays on examples taken from ancient times or anthropological studies of “primitive” peoples. Actually, he only treats three contemporary social problems: war (Freud, 1915b, 1933b), which he explains in terms of instinctual conflicts, “ ’civilised’ sexual morality” and its noxious effects (Freud, 1908d), and religion, which he considers, in a renewal of the previous criticisms by the Enlightenment authors, a primitive phase of Humankind, which should be finally overcome (Freud, 1927c, 1930a). Hence, our present attempt to use psychoanalytical concepts in a critical analysis of contemporary society represents a novel development in the Freudian field.⁷

The individual a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• New International Library of Group Analysis
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• NEW INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF GROUP ANALYSIS FOREWORD by Earl Hopper
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE Beyond the individual and the collective: the new widening scope of the field of psychoanalysis
• CHAPTER TWO The syncretic paradigm: the metapsychology of individuals and groups
• CHAPTER THREE Lost in translation: a contribution to intercultural understanding
• CHAPTER FOUR The icon and the idol: the place of Freud and other founding fathers and mothers in psychoanalytic identity and education
• CHAPTER FIVE A Hermes in London: the subtlety of interpretation in Donald Winnicott’s clinic
• CHAPTER SIX The clinical diary of 1932 and the new psychoanalytic clinic
• CHAPTER SEVEN Lazarus’ resurrection: the inclusion of political and religious discussion in the analytic dialogue
• CHAPTER EIGHT The matrix of despair
• REFERENCES
• INDEX