Mountain or river? — A response to Emma Reicher’s article ‘Approaching the mountain: A journey into the wilderness of large group thinking’

1. Introduction

I truly enjoyed reading this text. It is sensitive, reflective, and fresh, and it fills a major gap in our present literature on the large group. The author starts by recounting her surprise at finding out that this practice, which was to be a regular feature during her group-analytic training and conferences, was not to be studied in her institute. As she participated in the monthly training large group, she spontaneously started writing process notes about the sessions. Then she felt that she had to do something more about it and decided to attend as many large groups in conferences as she could and write down these experiences. In this narrative task and witnessing, she continued the path set by her original university study of history and her early professional work as a filmmaker. She also started to review the literature on the subject.

Thus she found out that not only there is a rather surprising paucity in it but also that most papers on the subject are theoretical, with only some vignettes of selected episodes and very few reports of what actually happened during a large group. This is even more so in the case of accounts of the experience from the point of view of a participant, of which there are practically none. Hence, there is a void in our knowledge of this practice, which this article intends to fill.

I will not try to respond to the many interesting questions posed by the author, but only to reflect on and respond to a few themes that resonated with my own concerns.

1. Who does the large group experience belong to?

This is a most important question posed in the text, since it determines who, if anyone, has the right to talk or write about what happened in the group. Usually those who write or publicly discuss the experience of a large group are the conductors-coordinators-convenors (all these terms being presently in use). In this field, as in those of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the voice of the allegedly passive party (patients, analysands, group members, or participants) is usually absent. So, this should be the answer to her question, ‘Who am I to speak for what happens in large groups?’, and a comment on her answer, ‘It is conventionally the conductor who tells the story, but perhaps it is time for other voices to enter the discourse’ (Reicher, 2021: 4).

This unwritten tradition that only the therapist or conductor has the right to recount an analytic experience is, of course, an expression of power. I have always maintained that patients should participate in psychoanalytic congresses, since an analyst can say whatever he wants in a clinical paper and the only person who could refute his account of what happened is the patient, who was actually there. But the case is radically different when we are talking about a large group, in which there are always a great number of other witnesses. That is why we need to have testimonies from participants.

There is also the question of confidentiality to be considered. But this is a controversial matter. Many large group conductors and participants object to any publication or public discussion of these experiences, deemed to be a breach in confidentiality (Weinberg and Schneider, 2007). But it is quite obvious that large groups that take place in conferences are not therapy groups, so that the conventional ethics of clinical practice cannot apply to them. Such large groups are public events, whose aim is both offering a learning experience and an opportunity for social research. Trying to impose a gag order on information about these experiences is tantamount to stifling the development of our knowledge and understanding of this practice.

But not only that. There are also considerations that are intrinsic to the very aim of the large group. Teresa von Sommaruga Howard (2012) tells us that, some days after having conducted a large group in 2007 at the annual conference of the Aotearoa New Zealand Psychotherapy Association, she received an email criticizing her for not setting up a confidentiality agreement at the beginning and suggesting that she should not write about it. (von Sommaruga Howard, 2012: 224). This she did not accept, but she had her reasons:

Large groups, as places where social assumptions and differences are revealed and negotiated, do not preclude participants from meeting afterwards and talking. In fact participants need to do a lot of talking to make sense of the experience. Inappropriately applied, such agreements for confidentiality can lead to a false sense of safety so that mutual respect is not adequately worked out. (von Sommaruga Howard, 2012: 225)

This working-through of the experience is done for a rather extended period after the event, which for her took over four years. And she still returned her understanding to the community by means of her writings (von Sommaruga Howard, 2012).

But, even if the large group is not a therapeutic group and one would not expect participants to share private or intimate information in it, the fact that there is significant regression in the group, particularly at the beginning, might lead the members to reveal information or express feelings that they would not ordinarily voice in a public meeting. Hence, their privacy should be protected. But confidentiality is not synonymous with secrecy. Weinberg and Schneider (2007) suggest that ‘that what is said can be reported, but who says it should be protected, with the identity of the speaker unidentified or disguised’ (Weinberg and Schneider, 2007: 224).

This is a viable solution, since in a large group the subject matter is not the individual members’ personal histories, relations, and circumstances, as in therapy groups, but the events and processes in the wider social context. Hence, what is important to report is what is being said or enacted, as an expression of the whole group and its circumstances, and not who said or did it.

There is, however, a caveat. The secret that imposing a confidentiality rule intends to preserve may not be of an individual nature, but a collective one that has emerged during the sessions. For instance, in the case of von Sommaruga’s (2012) large group in New Zealand, the request was aimed at preserving the shroud of secrecy and denial that concealed the whole nation’s painful feelings of guilt and shame vis-à-vis its painful and shameful history of colonialism, racism, and discrimination. This is understandable enough, but the explicit aim of that particular large group and, indeed, of the whole conference, was ‘to provide an opportunity to “weave our living stories together” as a way of encountering the bicultural history of Aotearoa New Zealand’ (von Sommaruga Howard, 2012: 219). So that any attempt to spare the feelings of the participants and the community would turn out to be self-defeating. The phantoms of old wounds and catastrophes must be exorcised, but all those involved, including the exorcist, must pay the price.

The effort to protect the privacy of the participants in a large group requires not mentioning their names and omitting any detail that might identify them. Nonetheless, this does not apply to the conductor or conductors, who, even if their names are not included in their quoted interventions, are easily identifiable. But this is as it should be. Acting as the conductor of a large group is a public office, and this means that one’s actions as such are necessarily open to evaluation, scrutiny, and discussion. The same considerations have a bearing on the case of the authorities of the institution in which the group takes place, since their participations in the discussion are never a merely private matter, but an expression of their place in the power structure of the organization.

Sadly, it seems that the restrictions placed on the publication of clinical or group experiences have been applied, more often than not, in order to protect analysts and the authorities from any criticism, rather than the patients’ or the group members’ privacy. But it is high time for this to change.

2. The influence of psychoanalysis on the large group practice and theory

Group analysis was clearly derived from psychoanalysis. However, it is neither psychoanalysis, nor an application of psychoanalytic theory and technique, but rather an analytic enquiry in itself. This was explicitly stated by Foulkes, when he wrote that ‘group analysis is a totally different approach to psychology and to psychotherapy than is psychoanalysis’ (Foulkes, 1952: 93) and ‘it is better to steer clear of concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis—however useful and meaningful they may sound’ (Foulkes, 1959: 121).

He clearly thought that, in spite of the fact that group analysis originated from psychoanalysis, it should be strictly kept as a separate discipline, and not be subordinated to psychoanalytical theory and technique, but rather develop its own concepts and procedures.

For Foulkes, there are two possible forms of relation between group analysis and psychoanalysis. Either they stay separate, each discipline developing its own concepts and procedures, or they conflate, but, in that case, psychoanalysis should be radically transformed (Foulkes and Anthony, 1965: 17). Malcolm Pines turned this into the idea that group analysis is really a further development of psychoanalysis, when he said,

I always said that psychoanalysis is slowly moving to where it should be, which is group analysis, and, through relational psychology and self-psychology, it’s moving in that direction. (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2011: 10)

But, just as we may say that group analysis is what psychoanalysis is bound to become when it finally dares to step on the sacred turf of collective living, ‘where angels fear to tread’, we may equally say that traditional psychoanalysis is nothing but group analysis carried out in a bi-personal setting! In any case, there is no doubt that psychoanalysis and group analysis have developed their theories in order to account for their respective experiences—psychoanalytic and group-analytic. But what sort of theory might emerge from the group-analytic large group experience?

Of course, we do need some theory of individual mentation to account for the evolution of the participants, particularly in therapeutic groups, just as we need a theory of collective minding to explain group and social processes, which are undoubtedly mental in nature, albeit subjectless by definition. Foulkes relied on orthodox Freudian theory, whenever trying to understand the dynamics of individuals, but he also introduced a social theory of Mind, in which the person’s internal processes are determined by and can be viewed as a particular case of social processes. In this, collective minding was conceived as a hypercomplex network of communications, in which individuals are just the nodal points where numerous threads coalesce. This he clearly states in the following quotation:

It looks as if we must reverse our traditional assumption, shared also by psychoanalysis, that the individual is the ultimate unity, and that we have to explain the group from inside the individual. The opposite is the case. The group, the community, is the ultimate primary unit of consideration, and the so-called inner processes in the individual are internalizations of the forces operating in the group to which he belongs. (Foulkes, 1971: 212)

Does this mean that the individual does not exist, or that he is merely ‘an abstraction’, as he liked to say? Not at all. The theory of group analysis has to include all intra-personal, inter-personal, and trans-personal processes, in a dialectic interchange, since they are just different aspects of a single hypercomplex and multidimensional process, as he was convinced that ‘it is mental processes, not persons, that interact’ (Foulkes, 1973: 228). And the inner processes of persons are also necessarily part of the whole, even if we challenge the alleged ontological primacy assigned to them by orthodox psychoanalysis.

The traditional opposition between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, ‘individual’ and ‘collective’, created a dilemmatic cul-de-sac that led to endless controversies that had to be transcended by a negation of the previous terms and the emergence of a new conceptual level, as in Hegel’s dialectics.

Such a synthesis requires a new conceptual framework that radically differs from the underlying assumptions of psychoanalysis. This he did by introducing his concept of the matrix. This is a multifarious network of communication, relation, and meaning that surrounds, contains, pervades, and determines individuals and their mutual relationships. But individuals are not merely puppets of this supra-personal process since they also have a matricial organization and are able to negotiate this determination by the higher-order system in their own way. They also have a perception of and relation with this invisible entity, and their actions have some bearing on it. Hence, the relationship between the individual and the group is mutual, just as between groups and the higher social systems. All these levels are in resonance and mutual determination.

This is the way in which Foulkes solved the seemingly unsolvable problem of the opposition between individual, group, and society since, for him, all these levels are matrices, which are continuous with each other, being only aspects of a single hypercomplex organization and process, extracted by means of abstraction by our thinking processes.

Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1979), who developed an independent school of group analysis in South America since 1936, tackled this problem in a similar vein, when he wrote, ‘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).

His approach was dialectical: the outer becomes inner and the inner becomes outer, in a perpetual flow. This he summarized in his concept of vínculo, alternatively translated as ‘bond’ or ‘link’. The bond is a complex relational dynamic structure that comprises: i) a subject; ii) an object or objects (which are really other subjects); iii) their mutual relation, shared subjectivity, communication, and interaction; and iv) their whole social, cultural, historical, political, and ecological context (Pichon-Rivière, 1971, 1979; Tubert-Oklander, 2011; Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2004).

Pichon-Rivière’s Theory of the Bond does not only describe its structural properties, but also its dynamic evolution in the group, which follows an ever-expanding spiral course that leads to a deeper understanding and capacity for thinking. This is clearly a holistic concept, in terms of field and process, which is fully compatible with Foulkes’s conception of the matrix, in which the context appears as an impersonal foundation matrix, which is common to all group members and contains, determines, and relates with their personal matrices and the dynamic matrix that emerges when they meet in a group.

But how does this group-analytic theory of Mind relate to the individual’s personal experience of being a single locus of perception, feeling, thought, decision, and action? José Bleger (1967), a disciple of Pichon-Rivière, tackled this problem by postulating, identifying, and describing a deep indiscriminate level of existence, characterized by syncretism and ambiguity, which coexists with the imaginary level of unconscious fantasy and the symbolic level of secondary process mentation. This conception, which is compatible with Sándor Ferenczi’s (1924), Hans Loewald’s (1951), and Margaret Mahler’s (1968) descriptions of primeval fusion, does not conceive it as a primitive organization to be superseded by more elaborate later organizations, but as a permanent component of the mind, a level of being, which is in a dialectic interchange with the iconic thinking of fantasy and the symbolic, rational, and verbal thinking of conscious mentation.

This foundation of indiscriminate experience implies that, apart from our everyday perception of ourselves as separate from other human beings and the non-human environment, there is an essential continuity with them. Bleger (1971) described this as a syncytial organization. A syncytium is defined as ‘A single cell or cytoplasmic mass containing several nuclei, formed by fusion of cells or by division of nuclei’. In other words, it is a single protoplasmic mass that contains several or many nuclei. The metaphor suggests that a collective entity is continuous and homogeneous and contains the individual subjects, immersed in it, thus allowing a free flow among them, at the deepest level, while their differentiated part has to communicate with other nuclei by indirect means.

Bleger’s ideas were further developed by Blanca Montevechio (1999, 2002) and myself (Tubert-Oklander, 2014, 2017). The basic idea of these works is that accepting the continuous existence of an indiscriminate syncretic level of experience and a syncytial organization gives us the grounds for understanding and accounting for the primacy of relationship, communication, and social living, as well as human phenomena such as empathy, solidarity, charity, cooperation, and commitment.

So here we are dealing with an incipient group-analytic theory of Mind, derived from the group-analytic experience, which differs from that of Freudian metapsychology (Tubert-Oklander, 2019b). This is not intended to replace psychoanalytic theory, derived from the bi-personal experience, but needs to enter into a fruitful dialogue with it, on an equal standing.

What just will not do is to attempt to subordinate group analysis to psychoanalysis, since group analysis must develop its own path and create theories to account for its own particular experience. Nonetheless, there has been a tendency in group-analytic literature to rely, in our understanding of group processes, on orthodox psychoanalytic theories, based on assumptions that are incompatible with those of group analysis. Perhaps we are impressed by its prestige and experience a kind of inferiority complex and need for recognition, such as Freud felt towards natural science.

For instance, trying to explain the group processes in terms of Klein’s and Bion’s concept of projective identification implies an unconditional acceptance of the primary existence of isolated individuals, which is at odds with the group-analytic affirmation of the essential social nature of the human being. In Kleinian lore, projective identification is viewed as a defensive and aggressive transgression and denial of the objective separation between individuals, which constitutes reality, fuelled by primary envy, as a direct manifestation of the Death Drive.

Obviously, such view is incompatible with the group-analytic conception. If the primary state of existence is one of communion with other human beings, participation in collective entities, and primeval fusion with everything that is (Ferenczi, 1924; Tubert-Oklander, 2019a), one would expect mental contents to flow freely, at the unconscious level, between the various individuals and groups that meet in any given social space, without necessarily doing any violence to the differences between them. This does not mean that there is no such thing as projective identification, since it is quite clear in certain pathological structures, states, and relations, particularly in those derived from trauma, but only that this is not an adequate theoretical basis to understand healthy relations and social life.

In any case, it is quite clear that unmodified psychoanalytic concepts and techniques should not be applied to groups and society, and particularly to the large group. Every analytic practice should be enquired and thought-through in terms of its own context. Pat de Maré (1985) once wrote that ‘to apply a psychoanalytic or small-group model hook, line and sinker to the large group is like trying to play Ludo on a chessboard’ (de Maré, 1985: 81).

3. Essentialism and contextualism

Sigmund Freud always emphasized the universal validity of his discoveries and concepts, which he deemed to be the essence of human nature. He believed that they should be true for every human being, and consequently rejected any attempt to qualify or restrict them in terms of the various human groups, societies, or cultures. Such firm stance was based on his belief that psychoanalysis should become a natural science, which, by definition, is independent from social, cultural, and political factors. But there was also a deeper determination. Freud had suffered from antisemitism, but he had also been raised in the belief and expectation that he could and should attain high positions, just as any gentile, as he tells us in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a: 192–193). He therefore yearned to be seen by the community, not as a Jew, but as a generic human being. Consequently, he feared that his psychoanalytical findings might be dismissed as ‘something that happens only to Jews’ and had to emphasize their universality. Ever since, most schisms in the psychoanalytic movement have had to do with the question of the influence of the social context.

Group analysis, on the contrary, has emphasized cultural, social, and political factors from the very beginning. The social determination of our psychic life, far from being ‘merely external and conscious’, is deeply embedded and repressed in our unconscious and becomes the source of intense resistances. These are caused by the narcissistic offence of finding out that not only ‘the ego is not the master in its own house’, as Freud (1917a: 143) wrote, but also that the house was not ours to begin with. Patients in a group are quite willing to accept interpretations posed in terms of their infancy and repressed instinctual motivations but are adamant in their rejection of any suggestion that their allegedly free choices, thoughts, and opinions are really an expression of social stereotypes, values, and ideology. And this also applies to therapists and analysts.

Consequently, there is always the temptation in large groups, in which the social, cultural, institutional, and political dimension is foremost, to explain away its manifestations, by reducing them to the intra-personal terms of psychoanalytic theory. This is compounded by the fact that the same repressed social situations that act on the group members have a bearing on the conductors, thus making them invisible, unless the heterogeneity of the group propels them from the ground into the figure.

The usual theoretical approach to large groups emphasizes the primacy of hate as the main motivational force in such groups, but this may well be an artefact induced by the context in which the initial large group experiences took place. Reicher quotes Segalla (2015), who contends that many of the initial formulations on the large group ‘came from physicians and others who were working with . . . traumatized people on a daily basis’ (Segalla, 2015: 246), on account of their Second World War experiences, and adds that these ‘physicians and others’ were also traumatized people. In other words, when all the participants in a large group share a background of traumatic experiences, relations in the group are bound to be intensely conflictive. For instance, von Sommaruga Howard’s (2012) account and analysis of the large group she conducted in New Zealand in 2007 clearly showed how the violence that emerged in the group disclosed the shared repressed and denied traumatic national history of more than one and a half century of colonialism, discrimination, and racism.

But are all large groups made of traumatized people? It could well be argued that social life is always traumatic and that a large group would necessarily act as a catalyst and condenser for the underlying traumatisms of that particular society. This would be in line with Freud’s and Klein’s pessimistic view of human nature and existence, but this is surely a moot question. All societies have an inheritance of traumatic experiences, but they are not equally conflictive, and some may have more resources for working-through their conflicts and thinking-through their history.

Besides, we should also consider the effect of the conductors’ theoretical and technical conception on what actually happens in the large group. I believe that, if the members of the conductive team have the conviction that the large group is necessarily moved by hate, and act accordingly, they will reap what they sow. If the convenors start the group without a minimum clarity about its aims and procedures, and are extremely passive in their conduction, the chaos that ensues is precisely what one would expect to happen. This was pointed out by Foulkes when he wrote,

Some advocate that the group be given a minimum of guidance straight from the beginning. This produces certain phenomena which are then ascribed to the group as inherent in it. These reactions, in particular those of panic, fear and bewilderment, are in my view merely the consequence of the situation into which the group is put. (Foulkes, 1975: 43)

Finally, there are also the expectations of the group members. Most of the participants in our large groups are mental health professionals and group analysts who have a previous idea of what is expected from them and tend to act accordingly. It takes a conscious effort on part of the conductors to help them stop behaving as group analysts—i.e., in a ‘psychologically correct’ way—and become just people who meet, share, experience, and think together. Large groups are, then, shaped by a large group culture, transmitted by those participants who have already been in such groups.

All these factors make up the enormous complexity of the large group situation and process, and I believe they should be duly interpreted, in order to help the group and its members think-through the experience in their dialogue.

5. In conclusion: mountain or river?

Reicher’s approach to the large group is quite at odds with the scientistic demand for non-participation and detachment. ‘Objectivity’ means trying to describe things as if one were not there to perceive, describe, and interact with them—trying to know the world as if one were not a part of it. This may work when dealing with the inanimate world, but it is a no-win endeavour when we are faced with living beings and even more so with people and groups (Bateson, 1972). By contrast, her way of knowing the large group was to immerse herself in it. This is not being a ‘participant observer’, but a participant who lives the experience and tries to reflect on it.

Pat de Maré (de Maré, 1985: 79) once compared studying the large group to ‘approaching a mountain’, but Reicher would rather see it as a big river, ‘a rich seam where the community of practice collides, develops, regresses, remembers, forgets, ages, mourns, renews and moves through time together’ (Reicher, 2021: 15).

This is indeed a poignant metaphor. A mountain is a thing, an inanimate object, always identical to itself, which can be approached, perceived, and thought about, but never related with. A river is an ever-changing process, constantly renewed; the banks shape the stream and are shaped by it, at one and the same time. Heraclitus once said, ‘You can never bathe twice in the same river’; this is so because the river will not be the same, and neither will you. And we may well add, ‘And the only way of knowing the river is to bathe in it.’