Abstract
I
At the time I was the chair of the Scientific Committee of the Society, it fell to me to thank people for their contributions to scientific events. In search of appropriate words to express this in proper English, I copied the letters drafted by my predecessor, Earl Hopper who always thanked people for‚ making themselves ‘available’ for the event. This phrase must have got stuck in my mind and resurfaced when I was struggling to provide an obituary for Malcom Pines. Wondering how to characterize Malcolm as a person and his work, I felt it fitting to say that throughout his life he made himself ‘fully available’ to the group analytic work of Foulkes, to group analysis as a discipline in its own right, and to the group analytic community like no one else had done except Foulkes himself. Due this commitment, Malcolm represented Foulkes’ often quoted claim that the group analyst is ‘the first servant of group’ (Foulkes, 1948 [1983]: 139); a principle he embodied ‘to the bone’—personally, as a clinician and as an intellectual.
II
Without Malcolm’s editorial efforts, we would neither have access to Foulkes’ written work(s) nor would we have a group analytic journal of an international reputation and standing. This alone is a formidable achievement for one person to accomplish. However, as Harold Behr rightfully pointed out for both projects, Malcolm as a talent scout was able to enlist ‘a multitude of different collaborators’ (Behr, 2022) helping him ‘to develop Foulkes’ ideas in a multitude of different directions’ (ibid.). However, I do not agree with Harold when he says that Malcolm Pines ‘translated Foulkes’ convoluted language into lucid prose’ (Behr, 2022).
This only applies to Foulkes’ early papers written in German (Foulkes, 1930, 1936) and not to his subsequent publications in English since his membership paper for the BPAS: On introjection which was published in German and in English (Foulkes, 1937). Moreover, the paper Harold’s view most clearly applies to is Foulkes’ lengthy review of Goldstein’s book on The Organism (Goldstein, 1934). Titled in English as Biology und Kurt Goldstein (Fuchs, 1936), this was the last paper Siegmund Heinrich Fuchs should ever write in German. Read in the original, it appears much less ‘twisted’ than Behr assumes. However, although Malcolm’s translation of it surely deserves to be praised as ‘lucid prose’, its textual revision (provided by Malcolm and Elizabeth Foulkes) cannot be equally praised as it distorts the text in important details, and thus reveals the strengths and weaknesses of Malcolm as an editor of Foulkes.
Two points stand out to illustrate this. In his review of Goldsteinian neurobiology, Fuchs in both versions likewise asserted Goldstein’s view that ‘patients suffering from amnesic aphasia have lost the representative function of speech’ (Fuchs, 1936: 219; Foulkes, 1990: 46; italics mine), which Malcolm faithfully translated into ‘lucid prose’, English (Foulkes, 1990: 46); Pines here omitted Foulkes’ explicit reference to the work Karl Bühler, a psychologist and language researcher at the University in Vienna as relevant for this view (cf. Fuchs, 1936: 219). By obliterating Bühler’s name and work, Pines unwittingly obfuscated the scientific legacy Fuchs alluded to in this reference; namely the informal cooperation and cross fertilization between Kurt Goldstein, Adhémar Gelb, Karl Bühler and Ernst Cassirer. As a consequence of this omission, English speaking readers are prevented from recognizing the foundations of group analytic theory. Moreover, and even more puzzling is that Pines in his foreword to the Selected Papers of S.H. Foulkes (Pines, 1990: xiii–xvi also passed over the considerable differences between the first and the subsequent editions of the book Foulkes had written with James Anthony (cf. Foulkes and Anthony, 1957; Foulkes and Anthony 1965, 1967, 1968, revised 1973, 1984) and thereby again obfuscated Foulkes’ decisive ‘turn’ from Freudian orthodoxy to cultural inheritance and transmission (cf. Foulkes, 1963; cf. Nitzgen and Hopper, 2017), a development which seems to have been ignored in the group analytic community in London (It is not mentioned, for instance, in the important book of Brown and Zinkin, 1994). However, as can be gathered from the foreword he wrote to a book of Wilfred Abse, Foulkes was not entirely ignorant of this (Foulkes in Abse, 1974: xiv).
III
For Foulkes, the review of Goldstein’s book was much more than a scientific account. For me, personally, he remarked‚ ‘each line of Goldstein recalls the well-known voice of the greatly respected teacher under whose guidance I was privileged to work for over two years’ (Foulkes, 1990: 40). Regarding this statement of Foulkes, what Pines did not translate is another important detail of the German original text, namely that for Fuchs the fading sound of his teacher’s voice went beyond Goldstein as a person. It also represented ‘the faded sounds of a world which had literally disappeared’ (Fuchs, 1936: 212; italics mine). To leave this out was a forceful editorial intervention as it touches the emotional core of the original text, namely its intention to communicate utter desperation, the moment when the pain bites in and becomes unbearable.
In her obituary, Sue Einhorn puts a finger on this when she points out some biographical similarities between Pines and Foulkes. Regarding Malcolm, she speaks of him as ‘the unexpected youngest of three, born to parents who had emigrated from Russia in 1921’ (Einhorn, 2022) and to his ‘personal trauma of his own mother’s unavailability due to depression’ (Einhorn, 2022). Taking this into consideration, can we afford to ignore that Foulkes too, according to his second wife‚ was an unwanted, late child, who when naughty was told by mother that she had a ‘difficult confinement with him’ and also ‘was unable to breastfeed him and employed a wet nurse’ (Brown, 1998 (2006): 173).
So far, we do not have a group analytic elaboration of André Green’s psychoanalytic concept of the syndrome of the ‘dead mother’ (Green, 1993), a mother who is physically alive but mentally unavailable and thus ‘dead’, mostly due to chronic depression. A group analytic ‘equivalent’ of Greene’s concept might help us to understand better why and how for Foulkes and his analysand the dice were loaded from the stars long before they met in the consulting room.
IV
Unfortunately, no obituary on Malcolm Pines can avoid to address what he himself referred to as ‘his episode’ or spell of ‘madness’ (Einhorn, 2022). Interestingly, although all obituaries addressed it, none referred to the GASI Autumn workshop ‘When therapists fail their patients’ from 2012. In my view, it would be pity not to mention it as it was at least a memorable event in the life of the Group Analytic Society (GAS) and the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA). It also marked a decisive moment of the painful process of working through of the therapeutic failure by one of their most inspiring and distinguished members of both organizations, leaving them traumatized as it was so vividly brought to attention in David Vincent’s passionate key note.
It was at this workshop when Malcom Pines, at the age 86, made himself perhaps most fully available to group analytic public. Leaning on a stick, he entered the meeting formally dressed, wearing a pin-striped suit. His complexion was pale. Following a short exchange with Earl Hopper, sharp and bitter, he then started to argue what eventually emerged as his case of personal and professional failure (but not only his). Exposing himself to the many fingers of blame pointed at him, he took the full brunt of righteousness, pain and helpless rage without flinching. He acknowledged the damage caused to the reputation of group analysis by his misdemeanour and he apologized for it. Sitting in the circle, among the participants, he subjected himself to the authority of the group ‘as a powerful forum’ which Foulkes had evoked so many years before; a forum that allows the individual to ‘see itself in a new light by consent and disapproval’ (Foulkes, 1948 [1983]: 168). In my view he did this not just for his personal benefit but also for all of us. This is why, for all its emotional strain, this workshop was deeply significant and meaningful for the group analytic community, to be aware and wary of hypocrisy. For some Sufi orders the highest spiritual achievement is to challenge one’s own hypocrisy by pursuing ‘the way of blame’ (malamatiyya), i.e. by deliberately attracting blame (malam) to oneself (cf. Toussoulis, 2010: 74, 79, 83).
As one participant put it so well when she wrote in Contexts (2013): ‘I thought of my own radical shift, from not wanting to attend to feeling privileged to be a member of GAS’. Although the Autumn 2012 was not the last time Malcolm’s ‘failure’ was reconsidered. However, these later efforts were just what was felt, thought, experienced and expressed by those who made themselves personally available to it. With his death it is history now and therefore there no reason to be morally aroused any longer. However, I am sure Malcolm would be the first to embrace Sue Einhorn’s characterization of him as ‘a man of his times’ (Einhorn, 2022). Regarding the span of his life, they extended for almost a century.