Abstract
Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise that power. (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972: 9)
If one is going to take on the task of challenging or critiquing one of the founders of group analysis or, I guess, of any other field, it pays to have done one’s homework thoroughly. In the case of someone whose thought draws on so many diverse sources this is something of a challenge. From the start, Dr Luiker’s piece (Luiker, 2021) leaves serious doubts as to how well he has risen to that challenge.
The second requirement, after homework, if the critique is to be taken at all seriously, is the need to address the overall thrust of the person’s thinking and work. Simply trolling through her/his writings to alight on selective examples that can be abstracted from the main body of thought in order to prove some particular point is rather cheap and easy, and sadly, very limited.
The third requirement, particularly if one is going to criticize another’s lack of clarity, is to take some trouble to explain what one means by the terminology one uses oneself rather than assuming it to be self-evident. ‘Religion’ for one example. ‘Science’ for another.
The fourth requirement, or at least caution, might be that a conceptual framework rather more elaborate than the ‘dialectic’ of the pleasure principle/reality principle, particularly if it is rendered in a positivistic rather than dialectical language, with Bion’s basic assumption theory bolted on to it, might be needed to develop a serious critique.
Dr Luiker’s thesis seems to be that there is some sort of oppositional relationship between something he calls ‘science’ and something he calls ‘anti-science’ which is to be found in the discourse of what he regards as ‘group analysis’, and further that Pat de Maré and his work fall squarely into the camp of the ‘anti-scientists’. One might characterize it, as I read him, as sort of ‘post-enlightenment’ position that valorises rationality, scientific reasoning, logic etc., against the more ‘primitive’ thinking of the pre-enlightenment. Where romanticism might lie in this framework is somewhat unclear. But I have the suspicion it might be classified as ‘anti-science’. Anti-scientists, it seems, are routinely guilty of ‘magical thinking’. Might they also be guilty of placing undue reliance on intuition, imagination and fantasy? Or indeed, on art and poetry?
Dr Luiker begins his attack with a quote from Pat’s 1972 book, Perspectives in Group Psychotherapy (1972). The passage quoted addresses the limitations of a deterministic, linear and strictly logical causal approach. An example of this might be the way a formal meeting, with a chairperson and an agenda, might be inhibiting of what Foulkes called, ‘group association’. This is read by Dr Luiker as a rejection of the scientific approach! He goes on to quote, from a paper some 30 years later with Roberto Schollberger, a description of a duality among the ancient Greeks: a duality that is not hard to discover in the most casual reading of the pre-Socratic philosophers. (See Shibles, 1971). According to Dr Luiker, Pat de Maré’s identification with the one side of the duality is ‘unmistakeable’. He then leaps triumphantly on to a statement about a part of the mind that is ‘God oriented, generally known as the soul’ and says, ‘look see, he believes in a “supernatural entity” (God) and in a “mind” that includes a supernatural component, the soul’. This for Dr Luiker is conclusive evidence of a belief in ‘magic and religion’.
For me, this calls to mind, Terry Eagleton’s (2006) beautiful and hilarious review of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, in the London Review of Books. A review entitled, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching.
I wish I could quote the whole review but a few extracts must suffice: Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince . . . Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. (Eagleton, 2006)
In 1963 the then Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, wrote a book called, Honest to God (1963). Drawing on German theologian Dietriech Bonhoeffer and American, Paul Tillich, he that clarified that the God believed in by modern theologians was not an old man in the sky or any other kind of supernatural being. Bonhoeffer, a forerunner of Liberation Theology, had introduced the idea of ‘secular or religionless Christianity’ and Tillich had written of the God who was the ‘ground of our being’. Barth and Bultmann had weighed in with similar arguments that might be labelled as ‘demythologizing’.
In 1972 I met radical Jesuit priest, Fr Dan Berrigan, who had campaigned so impressively against the US invasion of Vietnam and had spent some time in prison for his troubles. In the course of a discussion group, I asked him if he had a concept of ‘God’. He thought about it for a few moments, then shook his head, ‘No, I don’t think I do’. Then, after another pause, ‘And if I did, I’d pretty soon get rid of it!’ A further pause, ‘I think it’s what we used to call “sin”’. Fr Berrigan had taken a stand against political violence and slaughter inspired and sustained by his Christian faith: a faith that did not involve a concept let alone the existence of a supernatural being, and he was not going to have it put into a conceptual or rationalist box. I guess Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu might answer in similar ways. Mr Luiker’s equation of Pat de Maré’s reference to ‘God’ and ‘soul’ with a belief in supernatural beings and ‘magic’ are indicative of little more than theological illiteracy.
We can moreover turn to Freud’s response to Ludwig Binswanger in 1926 raising the idea of ‘spirit’. ‘Man has always known he possessed spirit, I had to show him there is such a thing as instinct’. Binswanger himself wrote ‘We have tried to demonstrate how one must speak also of the religious, moral and aesthetic life in those spheres of human existence which till now have seemed dominated exclusively by the vital or instinctual life’ (Binswanger, 1963: 1). I wonder if this statement along with Freud’s reference to ‘spirit’ makes them both believers in magic. We can also look at other contributors to the development of group analysis. Gregory Van de Kleig (1993) and Andrew Powel (1994) who have also sought to introduce the spiritual and the transcendent that take us beyond what normally passes as scientific reason.
Dr Luiker goes on to discuss what he claims as Pat de Maré’s notion of causality claiming that the distinction between a man kicking a stone and a man kicking a dog taken from Watzlawick et al. is somehow fallacious. Interestingly he does not trace the source of the distinction to the work of Gregory Bateson, from whom I believe Watzlawick took it. Bateson was concerned to distinguish energy from information. Kicking the stone involves a transfer of energy according to the equation, E = mv2 whether or not the pebble is dislodged or the foot damaged. While kicking the dog might also involve a transfer of energy, the dog’s response was to the information that it had been attacked. Another of Bateson’s examples was the activity that is triggered by a failure to send in a tax return. There is no energy involved but the information of a missing tax return produces an action. And while the equation, E=mv2 applies to billiard balls, it does not apply to the tax return that has not been sent. This is the argument of a thinker on whose theories most of the family therapy movement has been based, who was widely regarded, as was his father, as a most rigorous scientist, whose work is somehow being depicted by Mr Luiker as ‘anti-science’.
What Pat actually says in his discussion of Wittgenstein’s ‘tractatus’ is the main point of Tractatus . . . namely, the concept that a proposition is a picture that cannot describe itself in words, cannot be said, and can only be shown. Attempts to show what is valuable as distinct from what is logical are metaphorical—i.e. symbols, ethics, aesthetics, religion, the cultural dimension. Wittgenstein himself called this . . . the unwritten but more important half of the Tractatus, and it shows how far Wittgenstein was from logical positivism. (de Maré, 1991: 153)
Another of the founding fathers of group analysis, James Home, in 1966, published his important paper, the Concept of Mind, in which he argued that while natural science deals with causes, psychoanalysis deals with reasons. So, to explain the reasons for an event or a human action is not the same as explaining causes.
Another pioneer and former SH Foulkes lecturer, Murray Cox, was renowned for finding a Shakespeare quote for every occasion. I wonder if the progress made by members of his psychotherapy groups at Broadmoor Psychiatric Prison suffered from a lack of scientific understanding of the causation of their behaviour or whether they appreciated that, as Murray used to quote from Bachelard, the poetic idea touches the depths without disturbing the surface.
During the 1970s many family therapists were reading Fritzof Capra’s Tao of Physics (1975) in which the problems of modern physics where the nature of the experiment was central and determining of the outcome was outlined at some length. One experiment showed ‘light’ to be ‘particles’ while another showed it to be ‘waves’. Intuition and imagination, were, according to Capra, central to real scientific discovery, as was a sort of mysticism.
Adorno and Horkheimer, in, Dialectics of Enlightenment, describe how the banishment of superstition and magic from respectable thought, and its replacement by ‘scientific’ reason, had left us in world obsessed with the conquest of nature by reason. Humans had become imprisoned by the very ‘reason’ through which they sought liberation. It was in art and music that we might yet re-humanise and liberate ourselves from the tyranny of reason. Echoes here of Pat de Maré’s statement that while the small group socialises the individual, the large group humanises society.
Jane Campbell in her SH Foulkes lecture, (Campbell, 2010) provided a fictional literary account of a group analytic group, that transcended the limitations of logical explanation, but succeeded in conveying the way in which even a small group might humanise society. It was a vision and an insight rather than a rational theory. Unsurprisingly, she was attacked by the ‘positivists’. (See Blackwell, 2011).
Dr Luiker’s social pluralism appears valuable in its questioning of atomism and monism. But seems to have little to say about the positionality or ideology of the observer/author. It seems if he remains stuck in the pre-postmodernist position of the neutral scientific observer.
While I think he is right to see competing and conflicting interests within group analysis and the group analytic discourse, he seems to have a limited view of what they are, and the division between ‘science’ and ‘anti science’ is rather crude and simplistic. There are for example, tensions and conflicts around whether group analysis and analytic psychotherapy are branches of medicine. Is it diagnosis, treatment and cure? What is mental health? Is adjustment to a sick society any sort of meaningful achievement? Is group analysis a form of politics? Is it liberatory praxis or a technology of social control? Then there are predictable differences between left and right, between communists and capitalists. Not to mention the ‘decolonizers’ versus the defenders of the mainstream status quo.
There are certainly, what might be described as religious type dynamics and affiliations, and one might detect a sort of priesthood of elder and established ‘authorities’. Doubtless too, there is much uncritical acceptance of theories and ideas. Notably, for example, Bion’s ‘basic assumption theory’ with which the author was far less enamoured than the acolytes. Bion himself, reportedly fled to the US and Latin America to escape the adulation, and some of his most astute observations concern this idealization, both of himself and of psychoanalysis.
What is somewhat inconsistent with the reality, is for Pat de Maré to be set up as a religious leader. In fact, the central thrust of his work was the lateralization of hierarchical systems of thought and status. Moreover, when one of the very few group analysts and indeed psychotherapists of any persuasion, to have read Chomsky, Levi Strauss, Sartre, Plato, Lacan, Marx and Lenin, along with numerous others, to be accused of believing literally in magic and superstition is somewhat bizarre.
Nor has his thought been widely taken on board. While Dr Luiker notes the distortion and pacification of the revolutionary preacher, Jesus of Nazareth, it seems to have escaped his attention that such is the fate of many other revolutionary thinkers of lesser fame. While he cites my ‘Epilogue’ to the collection of Pat’s work, as an example of the special status allegedly conferred on it, he does not appear to have actually read what I wrote: that he was a prophet without honour in his own country; that one of his central ideas was dismissed as ‘psychotic’ by Foulkes; that large groups generate a multiplicity of perspectives, none of which has any special claim to be the ‘right’ one (a rejection of monism Dr Luiker?); that the radical and subversive nature of his thought and of his whole project threatened received wisdom and established ways of thinking and working. All overlooked by Dr Luiker in his effort to caricature Pat as just another priest, or even a high priest, of irrationality and anti-science.
There may well have been, more recently, some efforts to quote and incorporate him and his work into some sort of group analytic canon that he would have been at pains to dissociate himself from. Some group analysts seem to think that his approach is consistent with group relations type models based on the individual’s psychotic anxieties and defences against them, as Bion seems to have suggested. But just as many people who talk readily about ‘basic assumptions’ appear not to have read Experiences in Groups (1961) very thoroughly, so some of those who bandy about terms like ‘koinonia’ and ‘dialogue’ have little more than academic fantasies about the practical phenomena. It’s a bit like people discussing the theory of football without ever having played the game.
Had Dr Luiker done a little more homework and read some of my other elaborations of and responses to Pat’s work, (Blackwell, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2009) he might have grasped a little more of its inherently dialectical nature and its incompatibility with the sort of uncritical religious adherence he alleges. For example, in And everyone shall have a voice: the political vision of Pat de Maré (2000) I emphasized the difference and divergence of his approach to from the traditional psychoanalytic approaches based on individual psychodynamics, regression, transference etc. I also emphasized and elaborated the political nature of the whole project which goes far beyond any supposedly rational, scientific or predictive theory about an abstraction called the ‘large group’.
It thus appears that Dr Luiker is actually locked into a relatively positivist ‘professional’ discourse, or meta discourse with its usual pretensions to some sort of ‘objectivity’, scientific neutrality’ and most importantly, a claim to be ‘apolitical’. Which actually means politically conservative and not too far out of step with the mainstream liberal consensus I have previously referred to, following Tariq Ali, as ‘extreme centrism’ (Blackwell, 2020). A rather long way from the politics of Pat de Maré.
If one wanted to take a more critical position on Pat’s work, one could point to his neglect of the Frankfurt School, his limited engagement with feminism and patriarchy despite his article on (Phallus and Kunta), his overlooking of colonialism, racism and the emergent discourses of post-colonial and subaltern studies, and his lack of attention to the emergence of class-conflict in the large and median group. All of which he might have given more attention to. Nevertheless, his work remains as a basic template for group analytic engagement with such discourses through a fundamentally democratic conversation.
I began with two lines from Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectics of Enlightenment, and I end with the rest of the quote.
Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them. In this way their potentiality is turned to his own ends. (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972: 9)