The Social Unconscious and the Large Group Part I: The British and the Latin American Traditions

The Two Traditions of Group Analysis

Let us start at the beginning. For S.H. Foulkes (1948; 1964; 1990), the creator of group analysis, this was originally a form of psychotherapy: group analytic psychotherapy, understood as an intensive form of treatment in small groups, conducted along analytic lines. But it most certainly was not an application of psychoanalytic theory and technique to the treatment of individuals in groups. It is rather a method and technique based on the knowledge and use of the group’s own dynamics. In this, it can be seen as an extension of the analytic enquiry of human affairs that Freud initiated in a bi-personal setting, to a group and social context (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2004).

Freud believed that his method allowed him to investigate the structure and functioning of an individual psyche; hence, the name ‘psycho-analysis’. Nowadays, we tend to think that the smallest possible field of observation in a psychoanalytic treatment comprises two people, not one, thus emphasizing the bi-personal and relational nature of psychoanalysis (Tubert-Oklander, 2013), but yet the name stuck. So, when we started to analyse groups and social systems, it was only natural to speak of group analysis and socio-analysis.

Group analytic psychotherapy

is not an application of psychoanalysis to a group, but a method and technique based on the dynamics of the group. It is a therapy in the group, of the group and by the group, the group providing the context in which the individual person is treated. (Foulkes, E.T., 1984: 5)

This means that the therapist, now called conductor, is not conceived as the active part in therapy, as a doctor who cures his patients, but rather as something like a catalyst, that is, an element that makes a chemical reaction possible and speeds it up, but without really being a part of it. The conductor is, at one and the same time, in the group and out of it. The underlying metaphor is that of the conductor of an orchestra, who convenes the musicians, trains them, helps them become a functional group, and takes them to the concert, but once the music starts it is the members of the orchestra who carry out all the work. The only remaining functions for such a conductor, during the performance, is to somehow modulate what the group is doing, and behold and enjoy it. Of course, in the case of the group-analytic conductor, such modulation is carried out through his particular position of being both in the group and out of it.

Although group analysis in no way rejects or discards psychoanalytic discoveries and theories, it develops its own theories and techniques out of the group analytic experience, just as psychoanalysis had developed its theories and techniques out of the psychoanalytic experience. In both cases, the starting point and touchstone of their theorizing is the analytic experience, whether psycho analytic or group analytic. ¹ Theory is necessarily the most variable aspect of the analytic edifice, since it comes about as an effort to account for whatever happens when two or more people meet in an enclosed space in order to ‘do analysis’.

But the term ‘group analysis’ also includes the application of its principles to the conduction of non-therapeutic dynamic groups. Once again, this is not an application of the group analytic theories, as derived from the experience of group analytic psychotherapy, but of the group analytic principles that allow the group and its conductor to enquire, interpret, and understand together their shared experience. Hence, just as therapeutic group analysis is not a mechanical application of psychoanalysis to the treatment of patients in groups, non-therapeutic group analysis is not a mechanical application of group analytic psychotherapy to conducting other kinds of groups, but an integral part of the group analytic enquiry of human life and experience in groups.

All this is fairly well known by now. What is not so well known is that there was another school of group analysis that developed simultaneously with and independently from the British group analytic movement initiated by Foulkes. This was the Latin American school of psychoanalytic Social Psychology derived from the work of Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1971; 1979). He was a Swiss-born Argentinean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who came to a jungle area in north eastern Argentina at the age of three, was raised in a multi-cultural and multi-linguistic environment that included the influence of his French parents and the Guaraní Indians, and eventually became a physician and a psychiatrist who was a pioneer of psychoanalysis and group analysis in Argentina (Tubert-Oklander, 2002).

Pichon-Rivière called his own approach to group analysis Operative Groups (Pichon-Rivière et al., 1960). He did not call it ‘group analysis’, but that was what he did. He, like Foulkes, emphasized the primary social nature of man, the importance of group work, and the social, cultural, historical, and political determination of individuals, relationships, groups, and institutions. He was also convinced that psychoanalytical theory and technique were an insufficient basis for working with groups, and that they had to be complemented by the knowledge derived from the social sciences and the humanities, as well as by a whole set of new concepts that emerged from the group experience itself. He also conceived the therapeutic and learning processes that took place in the group to be something derived from the group members’ active efforts, while the analyst, whom he called the ‘co-ordinator’, was something like a coach who would help them to make the best of their hitherto unknown resources.

There were differences, of course. Pichon-Rivière defined an operative group as ‘a group of people with a common goal, which they try to approach by acting as a team’ (Bleger, 1961: 57, our translation). This he called the group task (Pichon-Rivère and Bauleo, 1964). A large part of the group work is intended to help the members develop the skills and knowledge that are needed for them to be able to operate as a team. The group therefore has a double task: trying to attain its goal (external task) and learning to operate as a team (internal task).

Now, Foulkes always emphasized that a group analytic group does not have a task. In this he was surely trying to dispense with the kind of purposeful organization and efforts that define most ordinary work groups in society, so that they would not interfere with the emergence of the unconscious group dynamics by means of a free-floating discussion. But he also always conceived the group process in terms of an ego training in action (Foulkes, 1964), and that action would have necessarily implied intentionality, even if it were not in terms of the kind of concrete goals that are usually formulated in ordinary groups. So, this difference is probably to be found more in the terms and concepts used by either author to think-through their group experiences, than in the group experience itself.

Perhaps this divergence stems from the kind of group each of them took as the paradigm of their approach: Foulkes clearly started by exploring therapeutic groups, and only later turned his attention to non-therapeutic ones, while Pichon-Rivière originally concentrated on learning, institutional, and communitarian groups, which he called ‘operative groups’, from which he developed his concepts and techniques that were also to be applied to therapeutic groups. For him, a therapeutic group was conceived as ‘an operative group that assumes the explicit task of attaining the healing of its members (Pichon-Rivière, 1965a: 127, our translation)’.

A perhaps more substantial difference is to be found in their respective attitude towards interpretation. Foulkes did not consider interpretation to be a major contribution of the conductor, but rather that, once the group analytic setting had been established and the group process set in motion, the conductor’s main contribution would be to nurse this process, on the basis of her or his ability to take into account the whole situation, represented by the group and its boundaries. This he clearly stated in a letter to Juan Campos Avillar, when commenting on the work of Grinberg, Langer and Rodrigué (1957), another group of Argentine psychoanalysts, highly influenced by the Tavistock’s Kleinian approach, who developed an exclusively interpretative technique, centred on the concept of a single group unconscious phantasy, which allowed them to take the group-as-a-whole as if it were an individual analytic patient. According to Foulkes they:

. . . had not understood my point of view . . . Their main misunderstanding is that they believe that I only provide interpretations to the group-as-a-whole, and that we emphasize solely verbal communication, while what I have always said is that what we do is to treat the individual in the context of the global situation, which is represented by the group and its boundaries. (quoted by Campos Avillar, 1981: 18, our translation)

Pichon-Rivière, on the other hand, conceived interpretation as a stimulus for thinking and reflection among the group members, so that it became for him the main contribution of the co-ordinator. Interpretation was intended to help the group overcome the primitive anxieties that hindered the members in their task, imprisoning them in stereotyped roles and sterilizing the group’s productivity. This he summarizes as follows:

The aims and purpose of operative groups may be summarized by saying that their activity is centred on mobilizing structures that are stereotyped, as a result of the anxiety levels generated by every change (depressive anxiety for the loss of the previous bond and paranoid anxiety generated by the new one and the resultant insecurity). In the operative group, clarification, communication, learning, and the resolution of the task coincide with healing, thus creating a new referential schema [for the group and its members]. (Pichon-Rivière et al., 1960: 120, our translation)

His interpretations were not, of course, traditional psychoanalytic interpretations of intrapsychic wishes, conflicts, and mechanisms, but rather reflections about the groups’ and the members’ situation, assumptions, relations, and efforts, as well as on the way in which they tackled their task and related to it and to the co-ordinator. Such interventions did not usually look like interpretations, since they were frequently formulated by means of analogies; so he could recount an event in a football match, a film, the words of a tango, or quote the popular long poem Martín Fierro, that everyone had read in elementary school. But, of course, it is true that he spoke much more in his groups than Foulkes used to in his.

Besides, Pichon-Rivière, like Foulkes, did not conceive the group co-ordinator (conductor) as someone alien to the group, but as an analyst who should always include himself as part of the very same phenomenon he was striving to understand. Foulkes (1948) described, in his first book, ‘the characteristic position of the conductor: partly inside and partly outside the group’ (1948: 143). Pichon-Rivière, on his part, wrote that ‘The co-ordinator included himself in the psychotherapeutic process, thus attaining a change in the distorted image he had of the patients, as well as the distorted image they had of him (1965a: 131, our translation)’.

In any case, there is still a difference in the approaches of the two schools of group analytic theory and practice they initiated, albeit one that may well be cleared away by dialogue and mutual understanding. We shall further deal with this when discussing large group techniques.

There is certainly no question of priority here, since neither of them seems to have had any influence on the other. Foulkes started his first therapeutic group in Exeter in 1940, developed his approach to group analytic therapy in the Northfield Military Hospital from 1943 to 1945, published his first book An Introduction to Group-Analytic Psychotherapy in 1948, and founded the Group Analytic Society in 1952. Pichon-Rivière started his clinical explorations in the Hospicio de las Mercedes, the Buenos Aires psychiatric hospital, in 1936 (Zito Lema, 1975; 1976), and developed it in his work with non-therapeutic and therapeutic groups (Pichon-Rivière, 1951), until he managed to implement, together with a group of disciples and co-workers, in 1958, a social laboratory called the Rosario Experience, in which they tried to analyse a whole city (Pichon-Rivière et al., 1960). ² These two traditions developed independently and with few contacts between them, since Latin American group therapists still have little knowledge of the Foulkesian tradition, and there have been no English translations of Pichon-Rivière’s writings, a limitation the two present writers tried to overcome when publishing our book Operative Groups: The Latin-American Approach to Group Analysis (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004). We believe it is high time for these two group analytic traditions to engage in a productive dialogue, such as the one that took place in Belgrade.

There is still the question of the name. It could be argued that the name group analysis should be used only to refer to the particular approach to analytic groups introduced by S.H. Foulkes and to the school and institution he founded. This would be to treat the term as a proper name and, of course, every person and group is entitled to choose their own.

Besides, Pichon-Rivière never talked of ‘group analysis’, but of ‘operative groups’. Then, why not leave things as they are and avoid any confusion, by keeping their chosen names? Personally, we have tended, over our decades of writing, teaching, and practising, to restrict the use of the term ‘operative groups’ in favour of ‘group analysis’. Why? Because we have found that speaking of operative groups always generates the misperception that we are talking about a particular kind of groups, to be distinguished from therapeutic groups, learning groups, focus groups, and the like, while Pichon-Rivière always used the term to refer to a whole conception of what groups are, how they function, and how they should be handled, quite apart from their manifest goals. The term ‘group analysis’ connotes a process, the underlying values, and its evolution, so we believe that it should be used to denote any kind of group theory, technique, and practice that shares its basic tenets (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004; Tubert-Oklander, 2014).

Besides, there is room to argue that ‘group analysis’ is not a proper name, but a common name. The term was introduced in 1927 by Trigant Burrow and later used by Karl Mannheim, before it was taken over by Foulkes in 1943 (Foulkes and Lewis, 1944). This being so, it seems only natural that we extend the use of the term in order to include other similar traditions and practices. This is, of course, a moot question, and we fully understand why someone raised in the Foulkesian tradition might object to the idea of qualifying the operative group approach as ‘group analysis’. Nonetheless, our position, which is open to discussion, is that terms like ‘psychoanalysis’ and group analysis are more fruitful when they refer to a specific field and a method of enquiry, that when they are limited to theories, techniques, or traditions.

The Operative Group Approach

We shall now present an essential aspect of the way in which Pichon-Rivière and the tradition he initiated approached groups. Since he considered that a group is defined by the common task shared by all its members, their work together could be seen as a problem-solving activity, and the co-ordinator’s function would be to help them attain the highest possible level of effectiveness in their operation, defined as ‘operativeness’; hence, the name ‘operative groups’.

Now, all of us approach new problems with a previous set of assumptions about the nature of problems in general and the way of understanding and tackling them. These we might qualify as ‘prejudices’, meaning ‘judgements made before having the relevant information’, but this is inevitable: there is no way of approaching new things, if not in terms of old knowledge and habits. The only way to avoid them turning into an obstacle for perceiving, conceiving, thinking, and dealing with novel situations is to become conscious of these assumptions, and this requires reflection and, in the case of groups, dialogue.

Pichon-Rivière (1951) conceived this set of assumptions as a reference scheme for thinking, and called it the Conceptual Referential Operative Schema, abbreviated as ‘CROS’ (‘ECRO’ in Spanish, the acronym for ‘Esquema Conceptual Referencial Operativo’). ³ This he defined as ‘the whole of knowledge and attitudes that each of us has in his mind, and which he uses in working in his relation to the world and to himself’ (1951: 80, our translation).

So, each of the members of the group, as well as the co-ordinator, comes provided with a personal CROS, which is the crystallization of his or her life experience, and the internalization of the collective schema shared by the groups, institutions, and society she or he belongs to. These disparate schemas, which are largely unconscious, are activated whenever a number of people get together in order to do something. At the beginning, this breeds misunderstanding and requires a special effort in order to turn it into understanding.

In this, the group co-ordinator’s contribution is essential: his or her task should be to induce and help the group members to enquire into their various frameworks for thought, and to construct a common shared conceptual framework for their use in working as a team; in other words, constructing a group CROS. ⁴ This, for the author, can only be attained by means of interpretation. In the last interview he gave, just before his death at the age of 70, Pichon-Rivière answered to the question of which are the operative tools of a social psychologist (the term he used to refer to what the present authors would call a group analyst) as follows: ‘They are the same [as in psychoanalysis]; basically, interpretation given to groups . . . [I]t is a discovery: what is implicit should become explicit’ (1977: 1, our translation).

This is a consequence of the fact that a large part of the group members’ CROS is unconscious for them. Hence, the co-ordinator’s task is to interpret this—that is, to utter an explicit formulation of what, from her point of view, has previously been a set of implicit assumptions. This is not an easy task, since each one of them feels that his personal assumptions about reality are necessarily true, that they are nothing but ‘the way things are’, and this breeds dogmatism. The mere discovery that other people perceive, think, and work from contrasting assumptions opens the way for the development of critical thought. So, one of the main tasks that a group has to face in order that its members be able to work together is to build a common group CROS (Pichon-Rivière, 1970; Tubert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004: 47–52; 2004: 74–82).

Of course, the CROS is not merely an individual matter. We have already noted that it is largely the result of the internalization of the collective schema shared by the groups, institutions, and society. As such, it is obviously determined by history, language, culture, ecology, economics, and politics. This is clearly related to Foulkes’s concept of the foundation matrix (1964), Elias’s (1939) and Bourdieu’s (1972) habitus, and our present understanding of the social unconscious (Hopper, 2003; Hopper and Weinberg, 2011). In previous writings (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004; Hernández de Tubert, 2004; Hernández Hernández, 2010), we have analysed this in terms of the concept of the Weltanschauung, as a mainly unconscious psychological and social structure, to be enquired by means of analysis. Nonetheless, an in-depth study of these conceptual relations would require a separate article.

One major difficulty in analysing this collective aspect of the CROS is that it is not only unconscious, but also shared by the conductor and the members, inasmuch as they belong to a same social context. This makes it invisible, in principle, but it suddenly emerges when there is a crack in communication, as, for example, in a heterogeneous group in which there are people from diverse national, social or ethnic origins.

This might seem to be an extremely intellectualistic approach to the group, but this is not the case, since for Pichon-Rivière there was no split between cognitive, affective, and conative functions—that is, between thinking, feeling, and acting. The assumptions we are talking about are not only those of the head, but also those of the heart and the body. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1670 [2003]) once wrote that ‘The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing’ (1670 [2003]: 127). This implies that there is certain logic of emotions, which can be studied and talked about, just as there is an emotional basis of all our thinking processes, which has to be experienced in order that it may be known. So, in the operative group tradition there is no essential difference between therapeutic and non-therapeutic groups, since in both of them there is need for interpretation, emotional experience, and action, even though the subjects they are dealing with may be widely different.

This means that the group conductor in this kind of group is more than a convenor and a facilitator of the group process, but rather an active part of the dialogue that ensues. ⁵ This is why Pichon-Rivière used the term ‘co-ordinator’ or ‘co-thinker’, since she is thinking together with the group and participating in the development of group thought, which follows a spiral course, called the ‘dialectic spiral’ (Pichon-Rivière et al., 1960; Baranger, 1979).

A three-dimensional spiral is an apt metaphor for this kind of evolution, since has a triple movement: 1) a circular movement that goes over and over again back to the same themes; 2) an amplifying movement, which determines that each new circle does not go back exactly to the same point, but is wider and more encompassing than the previous one; and 3) a forward motion that makes it advance as it goes round and expands. The result is something like a cone, resembling a tornado, which revolves, expands, and advances as it evolves (Tubert-Oklander, 2013; 2014).

A particular kind of operative group, created by Alejo Dellarossa (1979), an Argentine psychoanalyst and group analyst, who was a disciple of Pichon-Rivière and also teacher of one of us (Tubert-Oklander), is what he called reflection groups. These he introduced as a teaching practice at the Institute of Group Techniques of the Argentine Group Psychology and Psychotherapy Association. The training course for group therapists was intended for those professionals working in public mental health institutions. All of them had had previous studies and experience in individual psychotherapy and were already in some personal treatment, so it was not feasible to require them to enter a therapy group in order to acquire a personal group experience. Hence, it was decided that they should be provided with the experience of participating in a dynamic group, which nowadays we would conceive as a form of non-therapeutic group analysis. These were the reflection groups.

What is a Reflection Group? It is an operative group formed by members of an institution, who meet in order to think together about their experience of belonging and working or studying in that organization. In this case, they were groups of students of the Institute who were to discuss their experience of being, studying, and learning in it.

Tubert-Oklander was a member of one of those first reflection groups, which was co-ordinated by Dellarossa (there were two others, which met simultaneously and had other conductors). Unlike what happens in therapy groups, the emphasis was on thinking, not on feeling, although it was not a rigid, logical thinking, but a free-flowing discussion, which was every now and then punctuated by the conductor’s interpretations that referred it to what was happening in the institution and the group, in theoretical terms such as those the students were learning in their seminars. Dellarossa believed that in therapy groups the process should move from intellectualization to deep feeling, but that in a reflection group the direction is reversed, from an initial immersion in an intense group regression, towards an ever-growing detachment and conceptualization, in which the members recover what had been momentarily forgotten (repressed)—that is, the concepts they had been studying in their readings and classes.

Years later, when Dellarossa presented his talk on ‘reflection groups’, he defined such a group as ‘a context which becomes text’. ⁶ In other words, the organizational structure, dynamics, values, and assumptions that underlay everything that happens in that institution cease to be part of the perceptual ground (context) and become a figure (text), when they are taken as the subject of the group’s discussion. And this effort is introduced and fostered by the conductor’s interpretations, which remind the group members that they have forgotten the agreed-upon task, in their fascination with the intense emotional experiences that emerge in the group.

All this obviously has a bearing on our enquiry of the social unconscious and the conduction of large groups, as we shall see in the following two articles.