Abstract
‘You’re not finished yet . . .’
Lady Jane did not accept that her failure with Mathinna disproved her theories—rather it demonstrated powerfully their rightness: clearly too much had transpired by the age of seven, and what must happen was the breaking of all bonds from birth. (Flanagan, 2008)
The fictional Lady Jane feels unable to alter her approach to the education of an orphaned indigenes girl, taking matters back to birth and enforcing her ‘theories’ more severely than before; she becomes trapped in a tunnel vision of theory rather than allow theory to lead towards new light. Weegmann’s sub-title for his new volume emphasizes the provisional nature of the evolution of theory, emphasizing its developmental qualities and not the certainties that we often desire from theory.
This book looks through archways into new territory that has large relevance for group-analysis as a human science. Weegmann examines the work of three philosophers, Nietzsche, Gadamer and Dewey and how they illuminate the activity of group-analysis; there are examinations of historic eras such as the Protestant Reformation and witchcraft; investigations into abject and degenerate groups of the 19th-century via Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) exploring what group-analytic theory might expose in human history.
Gadamer is a find for group-analysts. He explores the concept of horizons, their continuous movement away from us as we move towards them, thus revealing other things, other worlds, if we allow this to happen, and not sit back and act as analytic flat-Earthers. Weegmann links this to Foulkes’ emphasis on group-analysis being a ‘horizontal’ analysis and not primarily a vertical one: this is well elucidated. We travel on the land and sea’s surfaces while the world simmers and hunkers beneath. ‘Horizon’ is a concept in which not only patients are confined and wanting to move away from but, implicitly, that their therapists too become ‘horizoned’ by their theories, unable to find out what is over the next horizon-line. It took a long time for Freud’s drive theory to be substantially questioned, and a long time for group-analysis to admit to its radically different view of the world in contrast to that of psychoanalysis (Dalal, 1998).
The statement of one patient to another, in Weegmann’s illustrative group, that ‘You’re not finished yet . . .’ is at the heart of what group-analysis is about for both participants and practitioners; extending the boundaries of human expression and interaction and the bounds of theory; no one is ever finished while they draw breath as there is no ‘closure’.
Theory as a ‘process’ of proposing and developing ideas may not be welcome because people regularly seek definitive answers to (often) poorly posed questions thereby hoping to eliminate doubt and ignorance while living and working in a human interactive world. One of the qualities necessary for a group-analyst is ‘an ability to stay with the uncertainty inherent in all living’. In psychoanalysis Freud’s authority for many came as a relief from having to challenge him; that he was the first so he must be correct, was the underlying stance of disciples. Those who worked in part revising his theory, such as Klein, Winnicott and Lacan, felt obliged to publicly accept almost all that he had stated and then apologize for going further in whatever direction they chose. Winnicott’s theories on mother–baby interactions (his articles fizz with his thinking) prefigured what group-analysis openly allows, free and open interplay among group members that is as candid as each group can allow.
When theory is a ‘slow-open’ process, orthodoxy must shift accordingly, adapting to new truths as they unfold. Currently, societal culture highly prizes rote learning, predictability, concision, algorithmic formulae and so forth, because these are expected to yield correct costing and firmly implementable budgets, as well as corrected, well-serviced humanoids. In such a stifling climate, teaching becomes a fearsome thing that students may become annoyed about: ‘but where are the certainties?’ they may ask. In contrast Weegman’s attitude and examples demonstrate this as limited, seeking to replace it with a working-through approach. It is quite possible to live so; we all do so at some levels unless we have wholly given up. It is part of the deeper structure of democracy and of living. Weegmann displays his own approach to theory as an uncovering of new horizons, and one of its purposes is clearly to invigorate other group-analysts to take up this attitude in their own work and practice; no group-analyst can sit back on theoretical haunches.
He explains and contrasts Nietzsche’s stance towards conventional philosophy with group-analysis’ approach to the world. Group-analysis has a dilemma here, in that what it has revealed more than any other ‘philosophy’ is the constant change inherent in large and small human groups and their inter-relating, their need for ‘coherence’ as well as ‘cohesion’ (Pines, 1998). Philosophers such as Nietzsche had already explained this (Marx’s ‘History and philosophy have explained the world; the point is to change it’, asserts this as an applied process). Group-analysis has provided a working situation where this is apparent and explorable. The world of Capital has no truck with this, because it insists that things must be sold, not communications and interactions exchanged, and the world be organized around the production of goods and not an unfolding of experience. The dialectic of thesis–antithesis–synthesis between production and experience continues; CBT is the therapy of choice for the current stage of capitalism because its main target is the return of ‘casualties’ to the ‘front-line’ of production and labour. Once back there the treatment is withdrawn so that another worker can be ‘treated’ so as to return to where his injury was done. Northfield Hospital existed essentially in order to return soldiers to fight, to return them to the ultimate front-line, or else to support those who were fighting, in a war that was the apotheosis of Capital. Foulkes was criticized by his colleagues there for being rather apart (Harrison, 2000). Perhaps this is due to his disinterest in war as such, and his greater interest in what he had uncovered about his group approach. Already I feel he was looking to the post-war situation and a wider application of group-analysis.
Weegmann’s volume expands the idea of what constitutes theory for group-analysis, making a distinction between names and processes. This includes understanding the social unconscious as a process and not as a location, calling it ‘social unconsciousness’ i.e. what is happening now against a background of history that is continually moving and re-understanding events and facts and their meanings.
He uses a chapter to re-examine Stevenson’s novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), placing it in the historical era when Charcot was treating female hysterics in Paris (with Freud as a witness; apparently some at least of the grosser hysterical demonstrations were set up by Charcot’s [male] assistants without Charcot’s knowledge); in the novella it is men who are portrayed as hysterical. He argues that it illustrates a ‘19th-century exclusionary matrix’ and this is widely explored. Perhaps what is underplayed are the huge forces of the Industrial Revolution that by 1886 was into its fifth human generation. Railways dominated transit, steam energy drove most industrial production. UK’s third Reform Act of suffrage had taken place two years before, which gave the vote to many of the labouring industrial and agricultural (male) working class. Hyde may have been Jekyll’s monstrous shadow side: was Hyde also representative of what the professional middle classes saw as the feared intrusion into public affairs of the ‘monstrous’ labouring classes? Six years after this novella’s publication the UK’s first working class MP was elected; he was Keir Hardie, working full-time from age seven and down a coal mine from 10 years old. Like Stevenson he was a Scot, but from Glasgow, not Edinburgh. Not all that is processed through social unconsciousness is mythic but also arises from the political world.
There is an error on the first page, Foulkes misquoted as writing ‘no closure’; what he actually wrote is, ‘ . . . (no ‘closure’)’, at the end of a sentence near the end of his 1964 volume (p.287). Foulkes is indicating that group-analysts are not here to provide conventional ‘closure’ but rather to open up horizons for patients; it is the concept of ‘closure’ as a sought outcome of psychotherapy that he queries, and not ‘no closure’ it is a whisper not a declaration.
The volume is packed with erudite knowledge and ideas, taking group-analysis towards philosophic and intellectual new territory, towards that ever-retreating horizon: Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades Forever and forever as I move. (Tennyson, cited in Day, 1991)
If Tennyson wrote this in the mid-19th-century whatever has been happening since?