Object Relations, The Self and the Group

Charles Ashbach, Victor L. Schermer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415112178
• eBook ISBN: 9781134831845
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This established text presents a framework for integrating group psychology with psychoanalytic theories of object relations, the ego and the self, through the perspective of general systems theory. It defines and discusses key constructs in each of the fields and illustrates them with practical examples.

Part 1

Elements of a paradigm

The great extension of our experience in recent years has
brought to light the insufficiency of our simple
mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has
shaken the foundation on which the customary
interpretation of observation was based.

Neils Bohr
Atomic Physics and the Description
of Nature (1958, p. 2)

Chapter 1
Introduction and overview

This monograph introduces a paradigm for the understanding of group phenomena based upon the development of object relations, the self, and the ego. From this perspective, groups, in their evolution, embody and recapitulate the symbiosis/separation-individuation process (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975). The child’s inner life and interaction with the environment are repeated in groups and form a conceptual model for a process in which the group forms a cohesive entity, defines boundary conditions and roles, and copes with issues of power, task, and intimacy. Such a view is complementary to the Oedipal perspective (Freud, 1913, 1921) in which group dynamics are seen predominantly as a function of the members’ transference to the leader as a ‘father-figure’ and totem object.

In the newer paradigm (Kuhn, 1970), group life develops as an ambivalent movement towards separation-individuation, achieved through internalization and externalization as defensive and adaptive maneuvers, the management of anxieties related to fragmentation, object loss, and the diminution of ego boundaries, and the need to preserve and modulate narcissism and self esteem. It may be said that groups exhibit three predominant levels of social organization reflecting conditions of psychic integration: part-object pre-Oedipal, Oedipal and object-constant, and mature self reflection and self criticism.

The paradigm further defines the way in which psychoanalytic object relations theory and self psychology illuminate the group entity and vice-versa. Individual mentation and group activity are points along a continuum. Object relations theory asserts that mentation is established in interaction with significant others, so that to think and to experience is also to participate in a transactional situation. Psychoanalytic developmental psychology has progressed from the ‘closed system’ libido theory to ‘open system’ concepts which relate the interactive and the intrapsychic. Such ‘interactive constructs’ (Schermer, 1980b) include projective identification (Melanie Klein, 1975), the transitional space (Winnicott, 1955), the merged selfobject (Kohut, 1971) and symbiosis. These terms refer to the interface between the mental and the interpersonal in which intrapsychic and group structure, process, and content emerge from an ‘undifferentiated matrix’ (Hartmann, 1958), the bio-social equipment of the infant-person in the context of his beginning social interaction.

A brief review of the thread in group science which leads up to the present discussion, and emphasizing the contributions of Freud and Bion, will orient the reader to the origins of such a paradigm for group relations.

Origins of the paradigm

Psychoanalysis has, from its inception, been concerned with the family and group situations. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) Freud hypothesized a ‘natural continuity’ between the dynamics of the individual and those of groups and advanced a theory to explain ‘the psychology of groups on the basis of changes in the psychology of the individual mind’ (p. x). Freud’s intrapsychic model of group phenomena focused primarily on processes of identification and libidinal attachments, and also on the then newly introduced concept of tripartite structure, id, ego, and superego (including the ego ideal). Freud viewed identification with the leader as the motive force of group life and saw two mechanisms operating: (1) identification of the members’ ego with an object, and (2) replacement of the ego ideal by an object. In the former, ambivalence towards the leader results in an identification with him, his values, behavior, etc. In the latter, a more primitive narcissistic relationship is formed in which aspects of the ego ideal are projected onto the leader, attributed to him, and reintrojected.

Here may be seen two bases of group behavior, one as a recapitulation of the Oedipal situation, seen in the group context as the totemic overthrow of the leader and the incorporation of his ideals; another, expressing narcissistic and other pre-Oedipal concerns in which the group as a maternal environment is cathected as part of the self and yet at the same time facilitates that dawning awareness of a world beyond the self which is necessary for social ties to exist.

Freud commented on the preservation of narcissistic cathexes with respect to the problem of how each member could maintain a feeling of special importance in the eyes of the leader under conditions where it is contradicted by the reality of the presence of other group members. He exemplified these dynamics in two social institutions: the Army and the Church.

In ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1913) Freud, however, had earlier asserted the centrality of the Oedipal conflict in group development, comparing the group to the struggle between the father and the primal horde, and emphasizing incestuous and rivalrous impulses among the members as displacements from the unconscious murder-guilt theme in the group’s attitude towards the leader. Bennis and Shepard (1956) as well as Slater (1966) have utilized this model to account for the characteristic development of training groups from a leader-centered to an inter-member orientation. Slater, however, pointed out the limits of the model, especially its lack of attention to the role played by female members, and Bennis (1961) suggested that ‘depressive anxieties’ appeared in groups and facilitated role differentiation.

Bion (1959) extended Freud’s lines of investigation of the group but, emphasizing the work of Melanie Klein on object relations, utilized formulations of primitive dynamics, the paranoid-schizoid position, and psychotic anxieties to portray the foundation of group culture: the basic assumption states of dependency, fight/flight, and pairing. He indicated (pp. 188–9) that

it is not simply a matter of the incompleteness of the illumination provided by Freud’s discovery of the family group as the prototype of all groups, but the fact that this incompleteness leaves out the source of the main emotional drives in a group [emphasis added]…. In fact, I consider… primitive anxieties of part-object relationships…to contain the ultimate sources of all group behavior.

Bion facilitated the transition from Freud’s individualistic orientation to an examination of unconscious group process per se. He added valuable considerations on group-level interpretations, group regression, anxiety and defense, and phantasy and role formation to the repertoire of the group psychologist. In contrast to Freud’s Oedipal-familial model, Bion saw the prototype of group existence in the relationship of the infant to the mother’s breast. Entry into a group, in his view, recreates the helplessness, the tendency toward fragmentation, the overwhelming impulses, and the condition of need experienced in the first months of life.

A precipitate of Bion’s work has been to regard the group as an evolving ‘maternal entity,’ a container for projective identifications which evolves higher forms of organization corresponding to the process of separation-individuation and the establishment of individual and group identity. Following upon the work of Bion, a fresh approach to groups evolved whose premises may be summarized in the following points:

1. The group takes on the qualities of the maternal object (‘in locus maternis’, Slavson, 1956) evolving from part-object relations to object constancy and the ‘work group’ (Ashbach and Schermer, 1978).
2. The group regresses to various levels of development as a function of its task, the leader’s position and interventions, and the balance of social forces affecting differentiation and structuralization.
3. Anxieties and defenses characteristic of the earliest years of life are commonly evoked in groups, and are to be regarded as a property of groups rather than just a manifestation of individual characterology (Bennis, 1961; F.Fornari, 1966; Gibbard, Hartman, and Mann, 1974).
4. Changes in group structure reflect changes in affects, ego boundaries and the predominant mode of object relations of the members.
5. Group fantasy, myth, and ritual are simultaneously ways in which the membership defends itself against primitive anxieties and adaptive vehicles for the evolving group culture (Hartman and Gibbard, 1974).
6. The group leader or therapist is subjected to particular countertransferential pressures centered around group issues as well as individual transferences. In particular, massive projective identifications into the leader and the struggle for separation from him present special problems which test the limits of his neutrality, empathy and forbearance.

These premises form the basis for an analysis of groups which derives from the landmark work of Freud and Bion but proceeds beyond them. It is clear that what has evolved since their work is a field and systems framework for investigating unconscious and primitive group dynamics. Certainly, contained within this framework are important and seminal clinical and educational insights and quite promising theoretical ‘leads’ and perspectives. The position of the present work is that, in addition, a new scientific paradigm has emerged, a special set of theoretical assumptions, and, still more deeply, an epistemology or theory of knowledge concerning the relationship between the person and the social context. Where in the past there had been two more or less separate domains of individual depth psychology, on the one hand, and dynamic group psychology on the other, it appears increasingly that psychodynamics and group dynamics are interlocking systems which possess an underlying unity. Such a unified perspective implies literally new ways of observing groups and theorizing about them. This monograph attempts to take the step of articulating some of the fundamental assumptions of a paradigm which would represent the unity of the psychonanalytic investigations of the unconscious with the field theoretical, contextual, and sociocultural study of the group matrix.

Chapter 2
Towards a paradigm and epistemology
for psychoanalytic group psychology

What follows is a paradigm for linking object relations and self psychology with group psychology in a systems interactive view of individual and group process. Here, some epistemological and conceptual premises are stated as a basis for further principles and practice.

Kuhn (1970, p. 175), reviewing his groundbreaking work on the philosophy and history of science, notes that,

the term paradigm is used in two different senses. On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community. On the other, it denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.

‘Normal science’ is for Kuhn the accepted theory and practice in a particular field at a particular time. For example, the notion of discrete particles possessing momentum is part of the normal science of Newtonian mechanics, while in quantum mechanics, particles are replaced by ‘quanta’ of vague dimension and location, having properties of both matter and energy, particles and waves. It took a ‘crisis’ in physics which precipitated a ‘scientific revolution’ (Kuhn’s terms) to achieve acceptance of the new point of view. Similarly, psychoanalysis created a change in psychology and psychiatry by postulating unconscious motivation for behaviors and symptoms previously considered random or consciously intended. In group psychology, the concept of a dynamic field and matrix established the study of collective behavior and mentation as group-wide patterns rather than an aggregate of social ‘units’. Today, group dynamics is ‘normal science’. It has its own terminology, theoretical formulations, and research efforts which differ from the study of individual dynamics.

For Kuhn, scientific truth is based not on data alone, but on a frame of reference, part of which cannot be stated explicitly but which contextually informs the perceptions and activities of scientists. Polanyi calls the implicit factor ‘tacit knowing’ (Gelwick, 1977, pp. 57–82) and maintains that, although it can never be fully articulated, it is as crucial to scientific investigation as the facts and laws themselves. He says, ‘We know more than we can tell.’ Theories depict only the surface of what one has experienced and observed. In psychoanalysis, ‘tacit knowing’ is present in the productive elements of the analyst’s countertransference and his skill in making interpretations. In group work, the consultant’s intuitive awareness of a group event, phase, or culture often likewise precedes its conceptual definition.

Problematically, the very same frame of reference which allows knowledge to be accumulated can act as a resistance to change. Kuhn (pp. 62–5) points out that, while a ‘normal’ paradigm is necessary and useful in working out problems and investigations which derive from its explicit and implicit premises, it can obscure and edit out the anomalies, that is, the dissonant information that emerges. That is what has happened in the relationship between psychoanalysis and group psychology.

Historically, psychoanalysis was conceived as the study of the inner life of the individual. Data which suggested that the deep unconscious is inseparable from human interaction was often excluded from its purview on the assumption that the mental life is determined within the ‘somatic core’. Group life was considered secondary to and derivative of impulse discharge and tension reduction. The impact of the analyst on the patient’s transference and the richness of the newborn’s interaction with the social environment are but two of the empirical findings which, until recently, have been systematically excluded and considered secondary to the inner core of the personality. The mental life was altogether interiorized, creating an impression of a closed ‘intra-dermal’ system (de Mare, 1972, p. 101).

In this respect, Amacher (1965) has suggested in an historical assessment that Freud’s metapsychological assumptions derived from the anti-vitalist, reductionist ‘pledge’ of the physiologists Brucke and du Bois-Reymond (p. 10). Brucke was Freud’s mentor in medical research and advocated an explanation of all neurological events in terms of physical and chemical laws, which for Freud became the drives or instincts. Freud, who admired Brucke, maintained this stance throughout his theorizing. The neurological theory of the time consisted in a type of reflexology which implied a stimulus-response psychology. One wonders what Freud’s psychological theory might have looked like had he been exposed to the much later neurological gestalt field theory of Merleau-Ponty (1964) or the more complex holographic theory of Pribram (1969). These latter viewpoints imply that the nervous system (hence the mental life) functions as an integrated whole and is one with the environment.

Finally, Amacher documented how Freud borrowed from Meynert, who advocated that every action of the nervous system had a specific energy, allowing Freud to explain dreams and perceptions in terms of inner and outer stimulation (p. 24). In retrospect one can see that Meynert confused energy (or quantities of excitation) with information processing. Freud’s theory was thrown out of synchrony with the nervous system by this assumption. The point of reviewing these historical findings is to suggest that Freud adopted a ‘closed system’ neurology and psychology which systematically reduced and excluded the primary organizing impact of the social environment on the mental life and vice-versa (even though he always recognized it clinically!).

Group dynamicists have on the whole unfortunately agreed with psychoanalysts’ perceptions of themselves as investigating the singleton, or perhaps the dyad, but certainly not the life of the group. Thus, the group psychologist, regarding psychoanalytic data as individualistic, was not to be concerned with the idiosyncracies and interiors of personalities, but rather with the social life as either behavior or phenomenological field. As a consequence, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgements
• A Note to the Reader
• Part 1: Elements of a Paradigm
• Part 2: Object Relations and the Self: From Intrapsychic to Interactive Constructs
• Part 3: Systems Theory, Developmental Psychology, and the Group
• Part 4: Special Topics
• Appendix
• Bibliography