On the group matrix and the morality of the nuclear deterrent: The worldview of Gregory van der Kleij

On the concept of the matrix

In the 1980s he wrote two articles on the group matrix which bear re-visiting, not only because they provide a clear resume of Foulkes’ thinking on the matter but also because they are peppered (or I should say salted) with Gregory’s uniquely forthright and pungent comments. In the first of these articles (van der Kleij, 1982), he examines the concept of the foundation matrix—the network which unites people by language and culture before they have even met for therapy—and that of the dynamic matrix—the network formed by the group members themselves within the newly formed therapy group. Then he goes on to record his somewhat idiosyncratic views on the personal matrix, which Foulkes saw as the complex of interacting processes which make up the mind of the individual.

Gregory’s starting point is Foulkes’ challenge to Freud—that interaction matters more than interpretation (Foulkes, 1975: 62)—a contention which group analysts now regard as axiomatic. However, while accepting that in the group all relations are therapeutically significant, he adds drily that no group he has ever belonged to has ever managed not to give priority to the interpretations of the therapist.

The foundation matrix

The foundation matrix is important, says Gregory, because it gives the group a common ground, which is nothing less than life itself which we all share, and history in which we all participate. Gregory frequently turns to the holocaust, a theme which hangs over his writing like a thundercloud. It cannot be true, he says, that after the holocaust our different neuroses are totally unrelated to that experience, and he goes on to present another picture, that of a child burning from Napalm, running down the road during the Vietnam war, as another example of an image which has taken its place within our collective life-histories. We may choose to shut these images out, he says, to deny them out of fear, but in so doing we create pockets of isolation which impede our ability to commune.

It is against this backdrop, he argues, that symptoms within the family matrix must be understood. It is not enough to simply analyse the Oedipal conflict in the pseudo-family matrix of the group and in so doing turn it into factual information derived from the transference relationship between therapist and group members. The foundation matrix is important because it enables us to understand family interactions against a background of life-in-history. It provides meaning for what we do and allows us to search for a synthesis which will give meaning to the whole of our existence. None of this can be experienced in isolation, which is why it cannot be done without language. This is where the group begins, he says: we share our language as a tool for therapy, and we have this matrix, this common ground which is nothing less than life itself, history in which all participate.

The dynamic matrix

Foulkes saw the dynamic matrix as the operational basis of all mental processes in the group in the same way that the individual’s mind is the operational basis of the individual. Gregory comments critically on this. ‘One sees what he means’, he says, ‘but what (Foulkes) wrote is not possible. The matrix is a concept which cannot be compared with the individual, who is a reality’.

Foulkes took his metaphor of the matrix from the neurophysiological work of Kurt Goldstein (1940), but Gregory points out that the jump from physiology to statements about the mind, which is an elusive, unmeasurable concept, is a step too far. ‘The ego is not a classifiable psychic entity about which you can establish the rules which govern its behaviour’, he states. Goldstein thinks more in terms of function than structure, observes Gregory. He views the nervous system as a global activity in the process of organizing itself and tries to hold it all together by speaking of an organism which functions in order to realize itself as much as possible in the given situation. ‘He is right’, says Gregory, ‘but he does not plumb the depth of my situation as a human being’…. ‘The subject (as in the relationship between subject and object) is not a centre of something, it is spread around, is more than one, and I have to learn how de-centred I am. There is a difference between what goes on in your soul and what you experience’.

The matrix, says Gregory, is a concept which draws its truth from the fact that the individual as an organism is continuously binding the immediate concrete experience to the abstract attitude without which the individual cannot relate to the environment. Impairment of this ability is an indication of isolation, or what Gregory, using one of his favourite words, calls ‘madness’. ‘We must all’, he says, ‘whether we like it or not, enter into a constant interaction with what is “other”’, and he takes issue with Foulkes when the latter says that ‘we can imagine mental processes as penetrating the individuals which compose the group—going through them, transgressing them and linking up with each other’ (Foulkes, 1975: 63).

‘This is a sentence which has bothered me greatly’, says Gregory. ‘. . . Instead of seeing the individual as fated with the need to assume responsibility for the world in order to become a person standing in freedom, the group experience now seems to reduce us to “. . . a nodal point in this network, as suspended in it” (Foulkes and Anthony, 1965: 259). But who wants to be a station for mental processes busy doing their own thing for their own purpose of shaping a “group mind”?’ And he goes on to say, ‘. . . to speak of a transpersonal network with the individual suspended in it as a nodal point, that invades my privacy . . . my mind is mine and nobody else’s’.

Foulkes talks about the communal experience of being de-centred, an experience which becomes possible in the group setting. Gregory captures this imaginatively when he says,

It is as if the members of the group are the words of a sentence, none of which can express their meaning—except as objects—unless belonging to each other. It is precisely because the events taking place in my soul or mind are not identical with what I experience, that I need to belong. For as long as I remain isolated I will be de-centred and only meet myself as a symptom, as it were, deprived of its meaning because isolated from the total synthesis without which I cannot live. (van der Kleij 1982: 224)

The personal matrix

Foulkes saw the mind of the individual as a complex of interacting processes, and he termed this the personal matrix. The individual brings this into the group and tries to re-establish the conditions of the primary network as experienced: ‘This is the group equivalent of the transference neurosis as observed most clearly in the psychoanalytical situation’ (Foulkes, 1975: 130). ‘We can see it pitched against the urge to communicate and the honest wish to be less miserable’, says Gregory.

However, he adds, the resistance to communicate (in other words, the wish to avoid change) lodges itself in a very safe place, the conductor, whose insights and interpretations result only in a false sense of resolution, with the rest of the group merely providing background noises and the patient cultivating the false belief that ‘now I have learned something new’. It is only by experiencing the foundation matrix, life itself, he maintains that we can be guided towards unity and synthesis. ‘By building a dynamic matrix within the group, we have to constantly re-negotiate with the world-at-large and begin to discover that our totality is more than the sum of its parts and prior to it’.

And finally, ‘Every word from the group members is part of a search from a past which left them isolated, into a future which restores the synthesis, allowing the parts to live in communion with each other’.

His second article on the matrix (van der Kleij, 1985) emphasizes the importance of the group boundary and strict adherence to the rules of therapy—beginning and ending on time, meeting regularly, following the rhythm of a calendar and so on—as a prerequisite for plunging into the ‘madness’ of the group. The members go ‘mad’ together, but they find they have a common language for it, a language which imposes patterns of thought and feeling and colours the ‘madness’ in a particular way. The personal matrix and the group matrix can therefore meet.

Gregory meets the challenge of the group’s collusive resistance to change by patiently waiting for a tiny misperception or misunderstanding on the part of a group member to declare itself in the here-and-now and then mildly playing with it until the group member is able to reflect on its origins in a remembered past, some bit of his or her personal story, often sad and moving, which is then resonated to by the other group members as a kind of Greek chorus.

Order emerges from the chaos, says Gregory, and that means people begin to accept and live with their differences. Groups are there to tell the story of life, he maintains. They represent all mythology. ‘The group writes its own bible, using any documentation it can find, from law to poetry, and whenever a group member begins to experience that his contribution fits in somewhere, then he is coming out of his isolation’.

The article ends on a wistful note:

True culture is the sum of things forgotten and as I sit in my groups I see the group members as poets of the first order who, in one or two words, can evoke whole worlds they never experienced in the first place. If only I could hear them—that is the problem! (van der Kleij, 1985: 110)

The arms race and the morality of the nuclear deterrent

How do the reflections of Gregory the group analyst mesh with those of Gregory the priest? To look for answers to this question, I want to turn to a monograph addressed not to a readership of psychotherapists but to his fellow Catholics. He titles it, ‘Of War and Peace’, and it is an attempt to expose the madness behind the arguments both for and against nuclear disarmament. Although it is undated, his references to events and prominent figures in the debate suggest that it was written in the mid-1980s, during the Cold War and not long after the Falklands War.

The arms race is evil and disarmament ought to come about, he writes, ‘but what is the point of laying down a moral principle if you are not prepared to name names and confront the evil you have identified?’ And he castigates the pope for having made a moving speech at Hiroshima without saying that the 200,000 who perished were victims of a crime. This was not said, he believes, for fear of creating an uproar. Popes and bishops alike have bent a knee to the politicians who for their part justify a build-up of armaments to a destructive level far exceeding that of the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The deterrent effect relies on bluff, he argues. It is fuelled by the fear of retaliation and by a lust for power, a lust which is ‘rather mad at the best of times’. But neither is he in favour of unilateral disarmament. ‘I once listened to a speaker from Pax Christi’, he recalls, ‘who argued that there is not much difference between what happens in Russia and the oppression experienced by our three million unemployed. I never heard such nonsense’. The solution, he says, does not lie in capitulating to most powerful bully boys on the planet.

But what, then, is the solution? ‘All of us must assume responsibility’, he declares:

If I reach a point where I have to kill one single innocent child to save the world, I will be guilty for not having done everything in my power to prevent that act. If we bomb Minsk, every single person in the West would have to assume responsibility. Why are we not campaigning to stop the mad process? (van der Kleij n.d.: 8)

For a Christian, he says, the national interest cannot have the last word. A firm protest is needed against the total madness of the arms race we are witnessing. And his rhetorical question rings out, ‘What if, today, suddenly, our seven hundred million Catholics stood up to be counted? And firmly asked for a change, saying the madness has to stop?’

Eventually, we hear the voice of the group analyst: beyond protest, says Gregory, we must study how mad the whole situation is. The prophet steps down from the pulpit and comes up with a rational answer: first, we must rise up as one and call a halt to the madness. This begins with stopping the making of even more bombs. After that, it is up to the military strategists and it is for the politicians who need our votes to give them the push. What we must not insist on is that the other side must call a halt first. That would get us nowhere and it would make us complicit in mass murder. In short, it would be ‘a rotten compromise’.

He offers ‘the lesson from history’; the Allies in the Second World War were egged on by the fear that Hitler might get the atom bomb first; then Truman used the bomb against the Japanese, who could not retaliate, for fear of incurring further massive losses at the hands of an intransigent enemy. Truman said that it was morally right and this led to the Russians building their bomb and the start of the arms race; Secretary of State Dulles developed the strategy of massive retaliation: the belief was that if both sides had so many bombs that they would wipe each other out, nobody would want war. But, says Gregory, that entails a terrible risk—a desperate madman just has to press a button . . .

The whole thing has turned into power politics, says Gregory, and a game of political blackmail. The game is that you can have so many weapons available that you can scare your opponent at all times, not in the sense of stopping him from attacking you but in the sense of scaring him into doing what you want him to do, ‘or else . . .’

There are two moral issues here, says Gregory: the morality of using atomic weapons and the morality of possessing them in order to stop the potential enemy from using them.

There are people, especially those who have not experienced the reality of war, who want to abolish the very possibility of nuclear war. But there are others, who see nuclear weapons as an unavoidable means of maintaining a balance of power through a balance of terror.

Gregory confronts those senior clerics who, while saying that it is wrong to attack civilian populations and also wrong to threaten to do so, then declare that Catholics can tolerate the possession of nuclear arms. That, he declares, is a credibility gap. The dividing line between soldiers and civilians has virtually disappeared, both in public opinion and in social consciousness. We do not live in a world where we separate out acts from their context. If I bomb a railway line to stop troops getting to the front and I kill 10,000 civilians in doing so, that would be out of proportion. We live in a world where there are no absolutes. The Vatican does not condemn the deterrent as immoral, he maintains. ‘They say that the sole purpose of possessing nuclear arms is not to win the war but to prevent it. It is a mad subject and we end up discussing the morality of a mad issue’. Gregory continues to struggle with these contradictions without ever emerging from the moral maze.

Sharing with his readers how his thinking originated, Gregory returns to the Holocaust:

Only the other day did I realise I have committed many sins by going swimming during the Second World War. I was in Holland, under the Nazis. And like they had started the persecution of the Jews in Germany with forbidding them to go to the swimming baths, so they started in Holland. We Arians should not be contaminated, in the water, by Jewish bodies. Now if I believe that all God’s children are brothers and sisters, I should not side with the Nazis in this. I ought to side with the Jews and never go swimming again. Silly example? The point is, rather, that if all Germans had spontaneously—because for Christians this ought to be self-evident, instinctive—stopped swimming in 1934, things might have turned out differently. Auschwitz came much later, after a long process of going step by step, day by day, a little law here, a little regulation there . . .. Nobody even thought about it, neither in Germany in 1934 nor in Holland in 1940. We have conditioned ourselves to work with two value systems—one for our own private life (I would not have dreamt of despising the Jews), one for our ‘obedience’ to whichever government happens to be in power. So we felt it was a pity for the Jews but nothing serious, as yet . . .. It was a rotten compromise. The kind of compromise which creates the possibility of Auschwitz. And tomorrow the bombing of Minsk. (van der Kleij n.d.: 33)

The churches are on the wrong track, he concludes. They try very hard to be reasonable. They moralize—while leaving Jesus out of it—but there is little point in moralizing with something totally mad. Hitler’s decision to kill the Jews was not only diabolically evil, it was mad. ‘I have seen [the Jews] being loaded onto cattle trains on the railway station of Assen. Madness in action. So what did I do? I literally switched off—I did not WANT to know’, and he goes on to say, ‘And all of us are doing it today, especially when Presidents and Prime Ministers assure us they are doing it for our protection’ (van der Kleij, n.d.).

Postscript

I wonder what Gregory would have thought of the madness in today’s world, where what we are seeing is the nuclear deterrent ominously ensconced within the global matrix of the 21st-century, influencing all other matrices and continuing to stimulate fears of destruction and annihilation. His solution—for the people to rise up in popular protest and bring the game-playing to a halt, and then for the politicians and military strategists to work out how best to co-operate and accommodate to each other’s differences—sounds strangely innocent in a world ruled by frightened, power-hungry leaders who are incapable of admitting that they are either frightened or power-hungry and who isolate themselves in their fortresses surrounded by their clones. But perhaps Gregory’s wisdom lay in his ability to see how small interactions could set in motion a liberating process within that foundation matrix which he called life itself.