Ferenczi and group analysis

Sándor Ferenczi did not work with groups, yet his thinking and practice can be conceived, not only as a major influence on the origins and development of group analysis but also as a seminal source of ideas for its further development today. The initiators of group analysis—S.H. Foulkes in Britain and Enrique Pichon-Rivière in Argentina—did not explicitly quote Ferenczi, although they undoubtedly knew his work. But in this field, as in many others in psychoanalysis, Ferenczi’s influence has seeped unrecognized into so many new developments in our discipline.

Ferenczi did not write much about groups or society, although he was keenly interested, from the beginning of his career, even before meeting Freud, in the social and political consequences of what we call nowadays sexual diversity. Deeply committed with his liberal-socialist ideology, he fought, from 1902 onwards, for what we presently call ‘gay rights’, arguing that ‘homosexuality is not a disease, but a psychic disposition’. He actively participated in the International Humanitarian Committee for the Defence of Homosexuals, created by the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose main aim was to attain a reform of criminal law, which qualified homosexuality as a crime and imposed severe punishments on its practice. In this, his attitude contrasted with Freud’s, who sympathised with the committee, but refused to be associated with its call for legal reform (Stanton, 1990: 10–11).

He firmly believed that society and its values and prejudices played a major role in psychopathology, and that psychoanalysis should free patients from the dire consequences of a repressive education. This set him on a path that was to become inimical to the orthodox psychoanalytical rejection of all environmental influence.

Ever since his very first psychoanalytic article, ‘The effect on women of premature ejaculation in men’ (Ferenczi, [1908b] 1994), he showed a keen interest in mutual unconscious influence in relationships, thus paving the way for an interpersonal approach to psychoanalysis. In this text and his other 1908 article on ‘Psychoanalysis and education’ (Ferenczi, [1908a] 1994), he emphasiszed the educational origin of the restraints imposed by the human environment on the child’s developing personality. Of course, Freud (1908) had already discussed this in his ‘“Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness’, but only in terms of ‘the injurious effects of our “civilized” sexual morality’ (p. 204). Ferenczi, on the contrary, claimed that a misguided education induced a repression of the child’s perception of his own experiences and his capacity to think for himself. He compared this to a hypnotic injunction that ‘render[s] a hypnotized man, when awake, unable to perceive or recognize certain visual, auditory or tactile stimuli, so nowadays is mankind educated to introspective blindness’ (Ferenczi [1908a] 1994: 288). This leads to collective disturbances, such as ‘clinging to meaningless religious superstitions, to traditional cult of authorities, to obsolete social institutions, [which] are pathological phenomena of the folk-mind’ (p. 282, italics added).

Consequently, in his approach to psychoanalysis, social facts have a bearing on psychological facts and vice versa, and this implies a constant interchange and mutual influence between individual and collective processes, inner and outer, psychological and social. This is, of course, one of the basic tenets of group analysis, which requires that social facts be given as much attention as the psychological. In psychoanalysis, such a dialectical approach to the relationship between inner and outer processes, individual and group, was developed by Fairbairn (1952), who had met Ferenczi in the 1929 Oxford Psychoanalytic Congress and was clearly much impressed by his thought (Fairbairn, [1929] 1994)

But his major contributions to the emergence of group analysis—which are still not fully recognized—are his conceptual and technical revolutionary innovations, which paved the way for the quite similar approaches of the British Independent Tradition of Object Relations Theory, Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Field Theory and the Contemporary School of Relational Psychoanalysis, all of which are fully compatible with and complementary to group analysis.

These innovations, which he developed in a series of articles written between 1928 and 1932 (Ferenczi, [1955] 2011) as well as in his Clinical Diary (Ferenczi, [1985] 1988), centred on the essential unity and mutual interchange between the clinical phenomena we have learnt to describe as ‘transference’ and ‘countertransference’. However, this concept of the constant dialectic between the subject and the other had been implicit, as we have already seen, in his first articles, and was explicitly theorized in his articles on ‘Introjection and transference’ (Ferenczi, [1909] 1994) and ‘Stages in the development of the sense of reality’ (Ferenczi, [1913] 1994). ¹

Group analysis is quite different from the mere application of the theories and techniques derived from the practice of bi-personal psychoanalysis to the treatment of patients in groups. It rather implies approaching the study and conduction of groups, both therapeutic and non-therapeutic, with an analytic attitude, striving to understand and interpret whatever occurs in them and constructing new theories and techniques on the basis of the group-analytic experience, just as psychoanalysis has done on the basis of the bi-personal psychoanalytic experience. This idea that psychoanalytic theorizing must be based on the analytic experience was first formulated in Ferenczi and Rank’s ([1923] 1986) book, The Development of Psychoanalysis.

Group analysis also relies heavily on the social sciences—sociology, anthropology and political science. This creates the major problem of articulating and building bridges between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’. In this, Ferenczi’s emphasis on the fundamental importance of actual relations with other significant persons, such as the primary caregivers, the family, the analyst, and society, and his description of the dynamic interplay of transference and countertransference anticipated the theoretical developments of group analysis. He introduced the holistic concept of the unity of transference and countertransference, and of the family and the child (Ferenczi, [1928] 1994). This implied an underlying but yet unformulated field theory, which is basic for group analysis.

Field theories differ from ordinary causal theories in that they pose an atemporal organization of data, which explains all occurrences in a certain event space, which is called a ‘field’, as the result of the mutual influence of all significant factors that are simultaneously present in that space. Hence, events in a field are determined by its overall organization, instead of the linear sequence of events postulated by causal theories (Katz et al., 2017; Tubert-Oklander, 2017a). This allows us to study the interdependence of multiple factors which would be ordinarily considered heterogeneous and incommensurable (‘comparing apples and oranges’). A psychological field may, according to Kurt Lewin (1951), include personal experiences, such as feelings, thoughts or desires, and interactions, as well as social, political, biological, geographical, and even climatological factors. It is obvious that this approach is fully consistent with Ferenczi’s ([1985] 1988) emphasis on the fusion of the analyst’s and the analysand’s mental processes, the integration of social and psychological facts, and the mutual articulation of psychology and natural science (Ferenczi, [1924] 2005). This is the essence of Enrique Pichon-Rivière’s concept of vínculo, which has been translated ad ‘link’ or ‘bond’. The link is a complex dynamic structure, which includes the subject, the object, their mutual relationship and the whole physical, social, cultural, political and ecological context (Losso et al., 2017; Pichon-Rivière, 1971a, 1971b, 1979; Tubert-Oklander, 2017b; Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2014).

But this essential unity and mutual interchange of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ also needs to be accounted for in psychological terms, if we are to integrate these novel concepts with our previous knowledge, and this is where Ferenczi comes to our aid. His most important theoretical contribution postulated an originary undifferentiated state of mind, which he called ‘Thalassal’, from which all other mental states, experiences, perceptions and thoughts evolve, and which remains present but unseen, underlying the more differentiated states. Thalassa is the Greek name for the sea. Ferenczi ([1924] 2005) chose it because his book, called Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, was a bold bioanalytical speculation about the phylogenetic trauma suffered by all those living beings that were forced to adapt to a new life on earth, when the ocean waters receded. All organisms living in the water do not need a physical contact between the sexes in order for their gametes to meet and fuse; they can be set free in the watery environment and their conjunction is left to chance. But when life migrated to an earth and air environment, mating became an urgent need. So sexual behaviour, and particularly coition, is a consequence of the biological trauma of having lost the aqueous environment and an expression of an urge to return to it.

But what is true at the phylogenetic level is also true in ontogeny. Viviparous animals, such as human beings, which develop a prenatal existence in a liquid environment within their mother’s body, which resembles the originary form of life in our planet, also have an urge to return to the womb, and this is acted out in coitus. Psychologically, the human drive for joining bodies and fluids with a mate symbolizes both the individual’s urge to return to the mother’s womb and that of the species to go back to the ocean.

Now, this line of thinking sounds quite strange because it oscillates between biology, psychology—particularly, psychoanalysis—and a most daring speculation about the origins of life on Earth. Sigmund Freud (1933) said of Ferenczi’s book that ‘it was perhaps the boldest application of psycho-analysis that was ever attempted’ (p. 228). But what allowed the author to make such wild flights of imagination was his most original approach to epistemology, which conceived that natural science and psychology should interpret one another, and that ‘all physical and physiological phenomena require a meta-physical (i.e., psychological) explanation and all psychological phenomena a meta-psychological (i.e., physical) one’ (Ferenczi, [1924] 2005: 4).

It seems that Ferenczi’s bioanalytical essay—just as other bold attempts to integrate the physical and the psychical, as Freud’s ([1895] 1950) Project—may be read in two quite distinct ways (Beuchot, 1985). There is a literal reading, which takes it as a depiction of actual physical events, and a metaphorical one, which conceives it as an analogy that attempts to clarify much more obscure and hyper-complex mental processes, a veritable origin myth of the emergence of Mind. Of course, Ferenczi would have argued that there is no need to choose between the two.

So, no matter what one might think about the author’s bioanalytical efforts, of Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics—which was wholeheartedly accepted by Freud and Ferenczi, and generally rejected by present-day biologists—and of Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law (‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’), there remains the idea that Mind starts from an undifferentiated original state, that such a state somehow persists in the more mature states of being, and that there is a yearning, perhaps a drive, to return to it. In this, Ferenczi’s approach differed from Freud’s (1930), who conceived what he called the ‘oceanic feeling’ as a primitive state of mind, characteristic of infancy, which should be left behind with growth and development and that only persisted in adulthood in pathological conditions.

In the human being, this is what makes possible the appearance of ‘Thalassal regressions’, which are the basis of sexuality, creativity, art, religion, and social life. This is yet a much-needed concept for the full development of group-analytic theory, which is still to be incorporated into it. For the major question for such theory is how does the articulation of individual and collective mental processes occur. This finds a possible answer in the idea that there is a basic undifferentiated phase of mentation, which is not only a primaeval state, but also a constant and pervading presence, underlying and constituting the base for the more differentiated mental processes, in which there is no such thing as discrimination between self, others and the whole environment. ² The consequences of such a hypothesis are still to be explored, and they may offer the key to a much deeper understanding of the individual-collective dialectic.

This is clearly related to the Aristotelean conception of Man as primarily social being, a social animal—the Zoon Politikón, which underlies both group analysis and the various relational approaches to psychoanalysis. In Ferenczi’s conception of the psychoanalytic situation, this primary undifferentiation silently underlies the more apparent analytic dialogue, which requires a differentiated definition of self and other. Thus, he writes in his Clinical Diary (Ferenczi, [1985] 1988),

It is as though two halves had combined to form a whole soul. The emotions of the analyst combine with the ideas of the analysand, and the ideas of the analyst (representational images), with the emotions of the analysand; in this way the otherwise lifeless images become events, and the empty emotional tumult acquires an intellectual content. (p. 14)

In the very same way, several apparently differentiated individuals are submerged into a holistic group process, which can be studied and interpreted in itself. And this is possible because they were not just individuals to begin with, but part of a common whole that includes, not only them but also their whole context—social, political, historical, legal, geographical, architectonic, climatic and ecological. ³ The group field—both in group analysis and in traditional psychoanalysis, which can be thought as a two-person group—is not generated by the meeting of the parties: it was already there before they ever met. And all this is fully consistent with Ferenczi’s approach to the interpretation of human affairs and the implications of his Thalassal theory.

Group analysis was born almost simultaneously in two quite distant places: in Britain, through the work and thought of S.H. Foulkes ([1948] 1984, [1964] 1984, 1990) and in Argentina, with those of Enrique Pichon-Rivière (Losso et al., 2017; Pichon-Rivière, 1971a; Scharff, 2017; Tybert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004). The term ‘group analysis’ was coined by Foulkes and is still identified with the Group-Analytic Society he founded, while Pichon-Rivière referred to his own theory and technique as ‘Operative Groups’. Nonetheless, their approaches are strikingly similar, in spite of some formal and theoretical differences that may be derived from their respective psychoanalytical traditions and sociological influences so that they may well be conceived as two forms of one and the same endeavour (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2017).

Both authors had to deal with a same theoretical problem, that of transcending the spurious opposition of individual and collective psychology. Pichon-Rivière (1971a, 1979) resorted to the interplay of introjections and projections posed by Kleinian theory, the concept of an ‘internal group’, derived from Fairbairn’s study of internal objects, Kurt Lewin’s field theory, George Herbert Mead’s social psychology and Marxist sociology, as well as introducing the numerous new concepts he created in order to account for the group experience. Foulkes, on the contrary, was a red-blooded Freudian, but in his work on groups, he relied on Kurt Goldstein’s holistic theory of the organism and the nervous system, the sociological theories of the Frankfurt School and his friend and colleague Norbert Elias, and also on a series of concepts derived from the group-analytic experience. His main theoretical contribution was his concept of a group and social Matrix, which contains, suffuses and determines the life, thoughts, feelings and relations of individuals embedded in it. The group is for him a gossamer network of relations and meanings, and individuals are just the nodal points in such a network. (Foulkes, [1964] 1984, 1990; Hopper and Weinberg, 2016, 2017).

As already pointed out above, neither of them quoted Ferenczi, although they must have been cognisant of his work, which was a required reading in all courses of technique at the time. Yet, it was Ferenczi who might have provided a much-needed element for their theorizing, with his Thalassal theory. This book, however, is perhaps the least known and understood of his writings, on account of its great complexity and the fact that it is quite inimical to our present-day scientistic Zeitgeist. Ferenczi’s silent contribution to the very bases of group analysis has since gone largely unnoticed, just as it was for many years in the case of the numerous developments in psychoanalysis that passed for new, albeit they were truly a revival of the revolutionary ideas and technical experiments of this forgotten master, whose memory had been radically repressed on account of Freud’s utter rejection of his last contributions and their incompatibility with the orthodox point of view. ⁴ It is quite possible that Foulkes and Pichon-Rivière might have been unconsciously influenced, like so many generations of analysts and authors who failed to quote Ferenczi as a precursor of what they felt to be their new ideas of their own, by what Ferenczi would have called a collective ‘introspective blindness’ of the very fact that he had existed, worked, thought and wrote about and taught psychoanalysis. This was, of course, a symptom of a repressed conflict within our professional community, a ‘pathological phenomenon of the folk-mind’, which took several generations to be acknowledged and worked-through by part of its members.

This is most certainly an interpretative hypothesis, but this is what analysis—both psychoanalysis and group analysis—is all about. One of the peer reviewers of this article posed a most important question, in the following terms: ‘It could have being helpful to know better on which basis it is supposed that Ferenczi’s thoughts gave origin and development to group analysis’. This is perfectly valid when theories are studied in academic terms, but I am making no such claim. The common-sense conception of thinking that prevails in the scientific and academic discourses views ideas as a production of individual brain processes and assumes that the influence of some person’s thoughts on another’s can only come about through some kind of visible communication, by means of speech, writing or actions. But the analytic trend initiated by Freud (1912), when he posed the existence of unconscious communication between analyst and analysis and of collective mental processes that underlie the hyper-complex phenomenon of cultural evolution (Freud, 1912–13, 1939), calls into question such assumptions. In analysis, we assume the existence of trans-personal mental processes that precede, surround, pervade and determine individual thought. This can be found, for example, in Bion (1970) concept ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’, and in Ogden’s (1994) ‘analytic third’ as well as in Foulkes’ ‘matrix’. New ideas are not personal creations, but the crystallization, through the work of an individual or a group, of unformulated collective thoughts that are incubating in the social unconscious of a community and shape its Zeitgeist.

Hence, I do not claim that Ferenczi’s ideas gave origin and development to group analysis. What I actually think is that a new conception of human existence was brewing unnoticed and found an expression in parts of Freud’s enquiry, as well as in Ferenczi, Goldstein, the Gestalt theorists, Marx, the Frankfurt school, Sullivan, Foulkes, Pichon-Rivière and many others. This common theme was a holistic view that rejected the ordinary dilemmatic oppositions of inner-outer, subject-object, individual group. Foulkes and Pichon-Rivière, who initiated the two great schools of group analysis, were both psychoanalysts, and it is a fair assumption that they must have received some influence from his thought, either directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. In any case, they were certainly attempting to tackle the very same problems that occupied him, and the traditions that stemmed from their partially overlapping work can only profit from the belated incorporation of his ideas, practice and experiences.

Now that we have recovered him from the no-man’s land of banishment and imposed inexistence, it is high time for us to dig into the unexploited veins of these abandoned workings (Ragen and Aron, 1993). I strongly believe that the riches that are still to be found there will provide many of the missing pieces of the work in progress that is the group-analytic theory and practice and build the much-needed bridges between psychoanalysis and group analysis. As the other peer reviewer aptly put it, ‘Hopefully “introspective blindness” will give room to “creative awareness”’.