‘Every child that’s born alive . . .’ — Response to Regine Scholz and Earl Hopper

Introduction

I am very happy to respond to Regine Scholz’s (Scholz, 2019) and Earl Hopper’s (Hopper, 2019) wonderful commentaries on my 2019 Foulkes Lecture, and I am most thankful for their contributions. Earl started his participation by saying ‘I fear that tonight I’m not going to win any popularity contest’ (Hopper, 2019). I do not know whether he did or not, but I must confess I had pretty much the same feeling when I faced the audience. After all, you cannot tell a group of people that most of the certainties that have sustained their professional life have to be either discarded or thoroughly revised, and expect them to be happy about it, but during the past Foulkes Lecture and Study Day I had the most pleasant surprise of finding out that all the colleagues who were present received my invitation to question the assumptions that underlie our theory and practice with interest and respect. This speaks a lot in favour of the vitality of our group-analytic tradition and the customary English habit of good manners.

Of course, this also applies particularly to the two official respondents, who are not only my colleagues and friends, but also original thinkers and shrewd critics. They not only extensively studied and fully understood my text, but they challenged parts of my argument and contributed fruitful suggestions on how to develop it further.

Regine Scholz (2019) started by summarizing the main points of my presentation. I have not much to add about it, since her understanding of the text was precise and deep. There is only one point I would like to clarify, and this is my quite unusual concept of analysis as a ‘field philosophy’. She explains it as ‘Revisiting all these hidden philosophical assumptions that guide us in our work in one way or the other in our practice, is understood as a kind of field philosophy’ (Scholz, 2019: 436). I fully agree with her that this necessary revision is a philosophical endeavour—more specifically, an epistemological one—but the point I was trying to make was a bit different. I was referring to the clinical practice of analysis—both in psycho-analysis and group-analysis—as a kind of philosophical enquiry in itself, which is carried out through the analytic dialogue. Both our patients and ourselves are trying to solve the uneasiness generated by deep existential queries. These are the very same questions that occupy the philosophers, but we analysts, instead of trying to answer them by an armchair reflection or an academic search, explore them in the locus where vital things actually happen, which is the psychoanalytic or group-analytic relation and dialogue. Hence, I conceive our practice as a field philosophy, an expression in which ‘field’ means ‘Carried out or working in the natural environment, rather than in a laboratory or office’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

I have nothing else to say about her rendition of the content of my lecture, since it is quite accurate and deeply understanding. But then she goes on to put forward her own reflections and suggestions for a further development. These are most valuable, and I shall comment on them.

Regine affirms that Foulkes was very much aware of the heavy burden imposed on our thinking and practice by our dualistic ideological heritage, characteristic of western thought, and the momentous shadow of Descartes. This is sustained by a few selected quotations, such as the following:

. . . a configuration has arisen which created the idea of an individual person as if existing in isolation. He then is confronted with the community, the world, as if they were outside him. The philosophy of Descartes starts from this premise and its strict subject-object juxtaposition is still responsible for many pseudo problems of our time (Foulkes and Anthony, 1957 [1984]: 23)

I fully agree with her. There are many such expressions scattered throughout his work. This is what Dalal (1998) calls ‘Radical Foulkes’, coexisting with an ‘Orthodox Foulkes’ that upheld unquestioningly those aspects of Freudian theory that referred to individual dynamics, while he questioned his theories about groups. Such contradiction prevented him from fully developing the consequences of his most valuable insights. Nonetheless, he left us enough revolutionary ideas and observations to keep us occupied for a lifetime, if we are willing to develop them further, thus going ‘beyond’ group analysis as he bequeathed it to us. In this, I fully agree with her contention that ‘So much of what Juan wishes for, I see already included in Foulkesian theory, which sometimes might look sketchy, though offering a big potential for further elaboration’ (Scholz, 2019: 438). I would only add that this is also contained in Enrique Pichon-Rivière’s (1971, 1979) conception of his particular and independent approach to group analysis, which he called ‘operative groups’ and, later, ‘social psychology’ (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004; Losso, Setton and Scharff, 2017; Scharff, 2017; Tubert-Oklander, 2017).

Regine feels this to be in the concept of matrix, ‘in which [Foulkes] puts each individual in the middle of society, being in conflictual yet inseparable unity with their environment, carrying the legacy of all the groups they were ever a member of.’ (Scholz, 2019: 436). This is a subject of which she has written before, in a chapter called ‘The foundation matrix and the social unconscious’ (Scholz, 2011), in which she said that the concept of the foundation matrix ‘understands individual and group as one single and inseparable process in which biological, social, cultural, and economical factors meet, based on ongoing communication’ (Scholz, 2011: 265).

In this context, ‘mind becomes visible as a multi-personal co-creation and not as something locked into the brain of individuals’ (Scholz, 2019: 437). Indeed, the brains themselves and the body as a communicative agent transcend the limits of biological discourse and can be understood as being shaped by relations and their whole surroundings. This is what José Ortega y Gasset meant when he wrote ‘I am myself plus my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I cannot save myself’ (1914 [1961]: 45).

From this, she goes on to formulate her own reflections on two main open areas for further theoretical development. First, she points out that in Foulkes’ attempt to emphasize the social embeddedness of individuals ‘his shorthand description of persons as knots in the [communicational] network did not go far enough’ (Scholz, 2019: 438). In this I fully agree with her. This is only a metaphor, which he borrowed from his neurologist teacher, Kurt Goldstein, a major theoretician of biological philosophy, who had compared neurons with knots in the neural network, which always acted as a whole. But metaphors are only useful as far as they go.

A metaphor is an analogy, a comparison between two situations that highlights their similarities and obscures their differences, in order to show what they have in common. ‘The individual neurons are to the neural system as a whole as the knots are to the net’ is a way to convey the idea that the nervous system always acts as a whole and that it just will not do to try to explain it in terms of the individual neurons (or the individual nuclei) in themselves. The very same thing may be said of Foulkes’ metaphor of the individual as a knot in the communicational network.

But these metaphors have their limits. Neither neurons nor persons are mere knots: they are living beings, with an inner organization and processes, and they influence the network as much as it influences them. The relation between the individual and the group is mutual and dialectic, and this has been stressed by both Foulkes (1948, 1964) and Pichon-Rivière (1971, 1979). I have often said that a theory that takes the individual as its starting point finds it very difficult to explain the fact that persons relate to each other and participate in collective entities, such as groups, institutions, communities, and society-as-a-whole, but conversely, those theories whose point of departure is the social are at odds in accounting for that strange phenomenon of individual existence. This was stressed by Foulkes and Pichon-Rivière, in almost the same terms:

Each individual—itself an artificial, though plausible, abstraction—is basically and centrally determined, inevitably, by the world in which he lives, by the community, the group, of which he forms a part. (Foulkes, 1948: 10)

One cannot think in terms of a distinction between the individual and society. It is an abstraction, a reductionism that we cannot accept, because we carry society within us (Pichon-Rivière, 1979: 57, my translation).

Hence, I can only agree with Regine’s comment that,

Juan’s reference to the self-actualization tendency of organisms (originally from Goldstein), that contribute to the energy of the processes, can perhaps come into fruition here if combined with ideas of a dialogical (or better polyphonic) self. What I want to say is: We need a group analytic theory of subjectivity–thinking the individual anew from a distinct group/group analytic perspective. (Scholz, 2019: 438)

We most certainly need a group-analytic theory of subjectivity, one that accounts both for individual and collective (shared) subjectivity. As Regine points out, we sorely need a theory of the ‘We’ and of the unavoidable relation and mutual determination between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’. This should include what she calls the ‘often overlooked . . . void, left between the small group and its members and society’ (Scholz, 2019: 439), in which we find all the larger groups and institutions. This implies a further development of the matrix concept beyond what Foulkes left us. And such development should proceed upwards, towards the institutional and inter-institutional space, but also downwards, towards the individual, in order to formulate a ‘matricial’ (i.e., field) and processual theory of the person as an open system, subordinated to other open matrices (group, communitarian, institutional, social, national, and international).

This is all I have to say about Regine’s commentary, for the moment. It only remains for me to add, once more, my most sincere gratitude for the attention she bestowed on my text and her most stimulating suggestions.

Now, going to Earl Hopper’s commentary, his is a most challenging contribution, and I shall try to respond to the more significant points of his complex argument. Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to study his written text, so I shall base it on the video-recorded version (Hopper, 2019).

Earl starts his comment by saying that responding to me is like ‘talking to [him]self in an echo chamber, to a brother, or even to a double’, and acknowledging our mutual influence through a long-standing dialogue. I fully agree with this. Earl and I have so many coincidences in our thought and practice, that our few differences stand out in a sharp and precise contrast. These are more in the nature of questions of emphasis or personal style, than of substantial disagreement.

This respondent takes exception particularly at two words that arouse in him feelings of intense ambivalence: relational and beyond. Even though he acknowledges the positive contribution of the relational approach to psychoanalysis, he considers that ‘relational has become an excuse for sloppy clinical work’, and sees in the relational school a prime example of the undesirable tendency to ‘turning what should be a footnote into a gigantic school of thought’.

This is related to his objections to the word ‘beyond’. In spite of its positive connotations, in stressing the importance of process, the infinite, and the dialectic, he resents the implication that the new and the radical is necessarily better and deeper than the old and the conservative, which is ‘more a political statement than an academic and a clinical one’.

Earl believes that such positions ‘are connected with the visceral hatred of psychoanalysis and with the rejection of the Law of the Father (and the Law of the Mother)’. This is, perhaps, our greatest disagreement, among so many points of agreement: he is more of a conservative and identifies himself with our tradition, while I am more of a radical and interested in finding new ways of looking at old things.

The relational view of psychoanalysis does not in any way imply that ‘the new and the radical is necessarily better and deeper than the old and the conservative’, because it is not new. Psychoanalysis has always been relational, and this was present in Freud’s clinical work and writing from the very beginning. The problem is that those revolutionary discoveries were subordinated to the straightjacket of a causal-deterministic theory—namely, metapsychology—that was utterly alien to their very nature, which was necessarily relational and hermeneutic, not naturalistic (Tubert-Oklander, 2008). While these core values of Freud’s discovery and endeavour kept emerging in disjointed clinical observations and reflections, scattered among his writings and letters, it was Sándor Ferenczi (1933), his prime disciple, who made explicit, theorized, and openly explored what had been implicit in his master’s writings. This brought about his virtual excommunication from Freud’s circle, and an anathema placed on his memory and his main theoretical and clinical interests: countertransference, the analysis of psychotic patients, the traumatic conception of neurosis, and—Heaven forbid!—mutuality (Balint, 1967). But his ideas and clinical approach were salvaged by the authors of the British Independent tradition, albeit most of them (with the exception of Balint and Margaret Little) failed to quote him as their predecessor.

When the movement of relational psychoanalysis emerged in the US in the early 1980s, they thought they were saying something new, although they acknowledged Sullivan, the Independents, and Kohut as their point of departure, but not Ferenczi. It was only in 1988, with the publication of the English translation of Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary (1932 [1985]) that they discovered this valued ancestor (Aron, 1996). What they did not, and have not even now, acknowledge is that Foulkes (1948) and Pichon-Rivière (1971) had been saying the very same things for the past 40 years. Not being group analysts and hence being unfamiliar with the group-analytic literature and tradition, they were not aware of the fact that group analysis is, and has always been, a strictly relational approach to analysis and therapy. I therefore strongly feel that those psychoanalysts who identify themselves as ‘relational analysts’ can only benefit from the study of the group-analytic tradition and problematics.

Now, I cannot subscribe to the idea that the relational view of analysis is ‘an excuse for sloppy clinical work’. This is a prejudiced interpretation. There is no theory or practice that cannot be misunderstood and distorted by sloppy thinkers and practitioners. Indeed, I have known many instances in which a strict adherence to orthodox psychoanalytical theories and techniques has become ‘an excuse for sloppy clinical work’. ‘Sloppy’ means ‘careless and clumsy’, and no ideas, procedures, or values are beyond the power of careless, clumsy, and stupid people to distort them. Whenever we strive to criticize a line of thought or practice, we should tackle its best examples, not its worst.

So, relational analysis is not a school or a theory, but a problematic and a perspective, and this is what the concept of a paradigm is all about: the often unformulated assumptions that underlie our thought and behaviour. I would invite Earl to read again the text of my lecture, in order to identify what I actually said. He might find out that I did not in any way propose an alternative theory, but only suggested a possible way of identifying and revising the previous assumptions that have distorted psychoanalytic and group-analytic thinking and practice for too long.

A problematic (from the French, problematique) ‘is not simply a set of questions; it is rather the matrix or the angle from which it will become possible and even necessary to formulate a certain number of precise problems’ (Maniglier, 2012). It is a way of looking at things, both new and old, and giving them a new meaning, in terms of a new set of questions. Hence, it is not sectorial, but global. The relational perspective covers the whole of psychoanalysis and group analysis, beheld in a new light. It is not a set of new answers to old questions, but a set of new questions that open the path for further enquiry. Hence it recoups what was truly valuable in our tradition, albeit it had been obscured by a less than valuable perspective and theory. It is not ‘better and deeper’ than the old view, but it is certainly different and more adequate to respond to our present concerns. This may well be an answer to Earl’s plea for ‘more appreciation of the core elements of what you would call “the old paradigm”.’

One minor point is his comment that he ‘would have appreciated more scholarship of local sources’. I understand his feeling, but my lecture was not an academic article, but a personal statement and an invitation for my audience and readers to question their own unexamined assumptions and beliefs in order to take a fresh look at our profession and at the human condition. I therefore conducted it in terms of a conversation with those friends, teachers, and authors that have a place among the denizens of my inner group. These include Freud, Ferenczi, Winnicott, Aristotle, Bateson, Shakespeare, Foulkes, Pines, Pichon-Rivière, and Antonio Machado, among many others, but I have made no effort to review the main contemporary authors in the field. I hope that those who have been omitted do not take offence at this choice of mine.

Academic prowess is a good thing in itself, but all too often (although not always) it becomes an excuse for sloppy writing, when non-creative thinkers use it to conceal the absence of their own voice, by enshrouding it with a patchwork made of fragments of the discourse of other voices. Fortunately, some major writers manage to combine serious academic enquiry with their own original thought, Freud being a major example of this. But such efforts require a most carful perusal and study, which makes them hardly suited for stimulating an open conversation, such as that one would expect to foster in Foulkes Lecture and Study Day. Consequently, this is not what I set out to do.

Earl closes his commentary by stating, ‘I would say that, in the course of preparing my response to your lecture, I have become much more of a psychoanalyst and classical group analyst that I have ever been, and this has made me feel more confident in my professional and clinical identities’. This is a feeling I respect, but I also have to say that, when listening to his response, I felt more happy and confident in not being a classical analyst, but a contemporary thinker and practitioner who does not jettison the living core of the tradition in which he has been reared (throw away the dirty bath water, but keep the baby safe and sound), but is able and willing to go beyond his inheritance.

I have said before that these differences are a question of emphasis and personal style, but now I feel that they are more than this. Showing a penchant for tradition or innovation is more of an almost carnal trait, a veritable way of living. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, we find the Sentry’s Song of Private Willis, who has been posted in front of the Houses of Parliament ‘all night long’ and shares with us the following reflection:

I often think it’s comical—Fal, lal, la!

How Nature always does contrive—Fal, lal, la!

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

Fal, lal, la!

So, neither Earl nor I can be something different from what we are, but we can still engage in a fruitful and mutually respecting conversation, one that does not erase our differences and is not always tranquil but is invariably worth our while.

There is still one final reflection, before we draw the curtain. Regine began her commentary with a highly personal note, by recounting a dream she had while preparing her response,

The only image I remember was the picture of two exactly similar looking, big, beautiful, light blue cars (Cadillacs?), standing (or slowly driving) very close to each other—and I had to find my way by passing between them. I had the feeling I managed somehow. Well, I leave the interpretation to you. (Scholz, 2019: 434)

This was clearly an illustration of her feeling, which she had just told, of being ‘excited and also a bit scared how to find my place between these two celebrities of group analysis’. But indeed, she managed most gallantly. What I did not quite like, as I later told her, was to be depicted as a Cadillac: it is too flashy for my taste.

I remember thinking, at the time, that she was being unfair to herself, since her stature as a group analyst and writer was well up to the task. But now, after finishing writing my response to them both, I wonder if she was not right about it. It is not a good idea for a sensitive, intelligent, and creative woman to be placed in midst of a clash between two massive male egos, but she certainly rose above the situation and provided a much-needed balance. Hence, I feel that we three did pretty well together.

Consequently, I like to think of us as the Weird Sisters, the three androgynous and all-knowing witches of Macbeth:

When shall we three meet again / in thunder, lightning or in rain?

Well, in Barcelona, of course!