Abstract
This book is as exciting as it is instructive to read. It is a kind of interim balance of the author’s professional life as a group analyst. It contains—together with introductory remarks to the different chapters—the main contributions to the group analytic discourse the author has written until now. Obviously, it is about a ‘work in progress’.
Robi Friedman often refers to the mainstream of group analytic discourse but his book is also exciting to read because it deals with important steps that lead beyond the status quo of this discourse, and attempts to follow Foulkes’ original intentions in a fundamentally changed situation beyond Foulkes himself. In a certain sense it is also Foulkesian because practical innovation precedes theoretical foundation and elaboration and the latter is not quite able to keep up with the former. Thoroughly, in the spirit of Foulkes, the emphasis lies on the relative autonomy of the group analytic perspective and the tendency to understand this perspective as complementary to the psychoanalytic tradition.
The book is divided into three parts: The first part focuses on the dream and dream-telling as an intersubjective event; in the second part the focus is on the concept of ‘relation disorder’; the third part contains essays on the ‘soldier matrix’ and the ‘sandwich model’, which the author practises as a specific form of group analytic intervention in dealing with this matrix. The order of the parts corresponds to the chronological sequence in which the author developed his innovations. In the last chapter of the third part, which the author presented in 2018 as his Foulkes Lecture, he uses a vignette from one of his small groups to summarize the basic ideas of his group analytic approach and places it in the context of his personal biography.
Robi Friedman first profiled himself in the international group analytic community as a pioneer of a specifically group analytic approach to the dream and to dream telling. Perhaps too little attention has been paid to the fundamental importance of this pioneering work for group analysis and its relationship to psychoanalysis. He has thus opened up a terrain for group analysis that Foulkes only ventured into with ambivalence and caution. Even in current group psychotherapy, the approach still dominating does not understand the dream primarily in its relation to the here and now of the group, but rather as a message from the dreamer’s inner world. In the history of psychoanalysis, the dream has been regarded as the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, and Freud’s book Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), published in 1899, marks the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. In this field, which psychoanalysis saw as its core area, upgrading the external world of the dreamer’s relationships with his fellow human beings compared to his inner world, is undoubtedly an important challenge.
At first the author proceeds very carefully and ‘on quiet soles’. He introduces his approach as mere addition to the classical approach, focusing on dream telling as an interpersonal event, which has been rather neglected in this approach, although it is the only way through which dreams become accessible in psychotherapy. This focus on dream telling opens up the special potential of group work with dreams. In the dyad, the intersubjectivity of dream telling always remains limited. In accordance with the asymmetry of the analytic relationship, the analysand has—apart from exceptional situations—the monopoly on dream telling.
In the group, there is no such monopoly. Dream narratives are shared, they find resonance in dream narratives of other group members, and they can influence and penetrate each other. Robi Friedman’s approach to dreams is based on the idea that the dream of the individual—largely independent of its manifest content—becomes the ‘dream of the group’ and thus unfolds the transformative potential that is hidden within it. After many years of experience, he radicalizes his approach by also understanding the genesis of the dream as an intersubjective process: ‘Today I think dreams are usually conceived in relations and then shortly worked through alone, in a first “dreaming” step. Later, in a second step, and if possible, dreams are shared in relations for communicative and “digestive” reasons’ (p. XII). With this radicalization the author puts a fundamental change of conceptualizing the unconscious itself on the agenda.
Already in the founding years of group analysis—at the latest in 1948 in his Introduction to Group-Analytic Psychotherapy—Foulkes set the task of developing a psychopathology that understands mental disorder as a disorder in a network of relationships. Although this manifests itself in the individual, he always saw a plurality of individuals involved in it. Foulkes himself did concretize this basic idea in his later works only fragmentarily, but it was developed independently of him in the systemic schools of family therapy. It is my impression that after his death not much more happened in this direction in group analysis. With his concept of ‘relation disorders’, Robi Friedman goes one important step further here. He developed it in his own clinical practice because he was increasingly dissatisfied with the effectiveness of interventions that were oriented towards individual pathology.
The concept can be applied to family—and extra-family-relationships. Disturbed relationship patterns manifest themselves in many ways in the here and now of groups and are central to their dynamics. With the new concept, a one-sided relationship, in which the containment of one individual is at stake, is replaced by a relationship between multiple individuals and full reciprocity: ‘In the group, disorders heal each other’. Directly or indirectly, the question of belonging or exclusion is central to all relation disorders. And all relations disorders are also conceived as—pathogenic—patterns of group formation.
It is certainly possible to discuss the selectivity of Friedman’s categories and their relationships to each other. The question, whether his classification is exhaustive, surely remains open. In the vignettes of this part, the one-sidedness of the presentation is sometimes astonishing. It gives the impression that, again, only one individual group member is affected by the disturbance and its change and leaves the contributions of the other group members underexposed.
Also his experiences as a soldier and officer in the Israeli army and his career as a renowned volleyball player and coach have led the author to his concept of relation disorder. In these social contexts, the primacy of the group over the individual is clear, and the individual’s membership depends crucially on the ability to contribute to the achievement of the group’s goals. Apparently, these formative experiences made it easier for Friedman to free himself more and more from the remnants of a view which isolates the individual in the group and is still quite effective in group analytic thinking today.
Robi Friedman is a protagonist of that international development which in theory has led to an increasing preoccupation with the problematic Foulkes’ concept of a ‘social unconscious’ and in practice to a stronger appreciation of the large group setting. In particular, he became involved in this setting in the context of the numerous violent international and inter-ethnic conflicts of the recent past and present. The third part of the book presents the so-called sandwich model—a combination of large and small groups—which he has tested and developed for this purpose in a cooperative effort. Theoretically, the author attempts to grasp the conflict areas in which he applies this model with the concept of the ‘soldier’s matrix’, the third important conceptual innovation that he has contributed to group analytical discourse.
The concept of the ‘soldier’s matrix’ has a number of advantages over many other psychodynamically oriented approaches to the question of war and the military. With this concept the author makes use of group analytic insights gained in small groups for a better theoretical understanding of large group processes. The concept opens the view for the often underestimated key role of the military in society, also in peacetime and not only in the special situation in which the State of Israel finds itself. Soldiers stand—in reality and/or in collective fantasy—with their own lives for answers to basic questions about the existence of a society or a state, up to the question of its survival or destruction. Since they personify their own community in the fight against the enemy, the demarcation between military and civilian population in war is very fluid, especially under the conditions of modern high-tech warfare. More or less all citizens of a state are affected by war or the possible danger of war starting with the question of how much reduction of their own standard of living a population is willing to accept in order to finance military and war preparation.
With his concept, Friedman pleads for an alternative to psychological reductionism, which refers war and the military primarily to the destructive aggressivity of the individuals. Instead, he emphasizes their function of creating group cohesion and collective identity. Without reflecting this social function, destructiveness and above all its mass appeal cannot be understood and effectively limited. Feeling and thinking in the soldier’s matrix are dominated by fear of social exclusion and collective narcissism.
As important as these advantages are, there are some shortcomings and gaps in the elaboration of the idea of the soldier’s matrix. Above all, the author seems to underestimate the conceptual difficulties involved in transferring the matrix concept to entire societies or states. Since Foulkes, group analysts have become acquainted to think of the matrix concept in the singular and are not considering the overlapping and mutual influence of multiple matrices. In my opinion, the reconstruction of Foulkes’ original tripartite matrix model (Nitzgen and Hopper, 2017) has not changed much of this practice. This practice is already problematic in group work with complex organizations such as hospitals, public authorities or companies, but even more so when it comes to whole societies and states.
The concept is intended to grasp those large groups and their mass psychology, in which fighting an external enemy more or less completely dominates the personal and collective relations inside the group. The soldier’s matrix includes therefore more or less all members of the respective large group. But if all members of the group are integrated in the matrix, why does the author insist that it is a matrix of soldiers? Of course, the author knows that historically and in the present there are very different variants of militarized societies. But by speaking of a soldier’s matrix in which everyone is included more or less without further differentiation, he conceptually blurs these differences, which can also be highly relevant in practice. This ambiguity in the question, who are the subjects of the soldier’s matrix?, is closely connected to an underestimation of the fact that the relations between military and civilian population in a state of war are very different from those in peace time.
These differences have to do with how the military matrix—itself a conglomerate with a multitude of group matrices—some hierarchically arranged, some nested within each other—is connected with other matrices in a state or large group: with the matrix of politics, the matrix of civil society, the matrix of economics, etc. It makes a big difference whether there is universal conscription or a professional army; whether the military operates in a democracy or under an authoritarian or totalitarian regime; whether there is a basic social consensus or the state’s monopoly on violence is called into question and the danger of civil war threatens, etc.
These differences are especially significant in regard to German history in the 20th-century, to which the author refers as an exemplary case in his presentation of the concept. I think that understanding the Nazi regime only as the most extreme form of the soldier’s matrix in modern history bears the danger of downplaying it—which surely is completely against the author’s intentions. For all the consensus on war aims and war planning between the Nazi leadership and the military elites: Germany in the First World War was de facto a military dictatorship; Germany in the Second World War was something much more terrible. The ‘SS’ was not the ‘Wehrmacht’. It had its own army, the ‘Waffen SS’. Its huge terror apparatus was completely outside military control. In the First World War, the German Emperor Wilhelm II left the field entirely in the hands of the military when the war began; Hitler, on the other hand, fanatically insisted until the end that he had the last word in all important military decisions.
After Foulkes, the matrix concept has never progressed beyond the status of a basic metaphor (Behr and Hearst, 2005). In particular, its subject-theoretical implications have not really been elaborated. The famous nodal point in the network of group-relations is not a subject-theory. René Kaes (Kaes, 2013), among others, has pointed this out very sharply. The author’s remarkable sway in the question of the relationship between matrix and individual is probably due to the fact that he underestimates this difficulty. And this sway is not only evident in the third part, but runs through the whole book. At times it seems as if it were not the individuals in the matrix who feel, think and act, but the matrix, a subject in its own right, imposing feelings, thoughts and actions on them. On the other hand, the individuals are granted leeway for distancing themselves from the influence of their own matrix, which theoretically remains completely mysterious if the matrix—as Foulkes himself says—‘ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events’ in the group (Foulkes, 1964: 292). It was probably part of the compromise Foulkes made with his psychoanalytic environment in establishing his group analytic approach that he did not venture any further into the field of subject theory. But this compromise is now historically outdated, given the intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis, and Foulkes himself foresaw the possibility of such a turn. There are not only good reasons, but also new possibilities to combine further work with the innovative concept of the soldier’s matrix with a basic theoretical reflection of the matrix concept itself.
