This item aims at exploring the history of exclusion-inclusion of the body in Group Analytic theory and practice.
Group Analysis is Psychoanalysis in flow, in movement, best described by J. Schlapobersky (2016) in the title of his recent book: From the Couch to the Circle
This title implies three important factors:
There is body movement from one place to another
This movement changes eye contact between patient and therapist quite radically.
While in the psychoanalytic situation two body-minds are present, in Group Analysis the movement from the couch to the circle locates these two units in a circle among other persons.
There is one common entity underlying these three factors: Body.
This item explores the reason for the negation of the body in most of the group analytic literature. This is exemplified in the title of the book: Group-Analytic Psychotherapy – A Meeting of minds (2005), and in the picture on the cover, a drawing of a group of people sitting in a circle, with body and facial expressions speaking a full physically-rooted body language.
The Group Analytic legacy is rooted deeply in the history of psychoanalysis.
In the conference “Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatics: Mind, Body and the Bridge Between” Andre Haynal (2006) gave the opening talk with the title: The History of the Body in Psychoanalysis: Freud, Ferenczi, and Groddeck.
His main points in this talk were: The body has a portentous history in psychoanalysis: Freud’s mortal illness, Ferenczi’s mysterious final disease, and their preoccupation with health in their correspondence, accompanied by pervasive silence about the body and its problems.
Haynal quotes Freud who wrote in 1923, the year of the discovery of his tumor, that the analytic treatment of gross organic diseases is not unpromising, since a mental factor not infrequently contributes to the origin and persistence of such illnesses.
At the very same time, Freud kept declining the treatment offered to him by Ferenczi and Groddeck, designed to ameliorate his cardiac and cancerous illnesses.
Haynal raises the question: How can a psychoanalyst feel at ease in his body? How does the analyst experience certain moments in his counter-transference – palpitations, extra systoles, cardiac arrhythmia? How does he experience his body, his skin: is he pale, does his face turn red of excitement, what is happening to his posture?
So striking are bodily symptoms among senior analysts that Haynal sees them as revealing “the analyst’s heart”. When Haynal mentions all these symptoms he thinks about an analyst who is not seen by his patient.
And what about a group analyst? He is seen and looked at by several pairs of eyes.
Was Foulkes different from Freud in his attitude to himself psychosomatically? Did he listen to Anthony’s recommendation (2010) to be checked physically? It seems that he did not and it is known that he died from heart attack in the middle of a session with his group. What can be more present bodily than the conductor of the group lying dead on the floor?
Have the participants in his group ever spoken about how he looked in his last moments?
This is a trauma in the foundation matrix of Group Analysis that has been split off from the theoretical development that has taken place since Foulkes’ death. This has left the body as a topic that is unspeakable.
It seems that in 2016 Foulkes’ death is still a crucial issue in writings of the most prominent writers in group analysis.
Hopper (2016) related to this split-off event in his account of the dynamics of the Large Group at the Foulkes Day in 2016: ” The Group could not risk the violence that might follow from the exploration of aggressive and competitive feelings in general. Not only are such feelings perceived to be a threat to our cohesion, but they are also experienced in terms of the death of Foulkes within a group of senior colleagues under circumstances which are both romanticized and mystified. This scenic configuration is used by colleagues who were not actually present in this “primal group” but who have nonetheless become witnesses to it, as a collective screen memory against other traumatic events, both within GASI and in Europe at large. The fear of the consequences of murderous rage is hard to manage when a death in the context of such rage has actually happened, especially when it is the Father himself who was “murdered”.”
In a one day conference about life and death in Group Analysis Nitsun (2016) talks about the negation of death in theory and practice of group analysis and relates it to the shadow of the traumatic death of Foulkes in Group analysis’ collective memory.
Haynal presumes that Freud’s attitude established a tradition in which bodily phenomena are neither talked about nor integrated into the analytic field.
If truth be told, Foulkes’ idea about body-mind integration is expressed clearly several times in his writings. A good example is his famous sentence (1957) :” Group Analytic method and theory do away with pseudo problems such as biological versus cultural, somatogenic versus psychogenic, individual versus group, reality versus phantasy. Instead we endeavor to use concepts which from the beginning do justice to an integrated view” (pp.27).
There are other examples as well:
In writing about the group as an instrument in the hands of the conductor Foulkes (1948) outlines four frames of reference that have relevance for the conductor’s interpretations. In the third one he writes: ” The individual’s attitude towards his own self, particularly in its unconscious aspect (instinctive impulses and reactions against them, defence mechanism) and towards his own body. The understanding of P. Schilder’s work on the “Image and Appearance of the Human Body” is of fundamental importance. A Group-Analyst without this as part of his equipment would be comparable to a Psycho-Analyst without knowledge of the interpretation of dreams. This latter point includes character-and psychosomatic-reactions which are continuously in operation in Group Analysis.” (pp. 135).
The realm of the body in the group process is central to what Foulkes (1964) called the third level of communication, or The Projective Level – The Level of Bodily and Mental Images. “Not only may individuals embody a part of the self, but the group as a whole may do so. The group often represents the mother image. The body image is reflected and represented in the group and its members.” (pp.115)
There are other references in the history of Group Analysis to the group as a mother ( Foguel, 1994). Elliot (1994) built on this idea and suggested that the potential to regress to very primitive and early states of mind results from memory traces of being in the womb. This experience can be evoked in a group situation.
In 2016 Hopper (2016) writes in a similar vein: “I would suggest that groups connote unconsciously the mind and body of the Mother. The perfection of the maternal mind and body depends on its optimal leakage and leakiness, one element of which is tears and crying. Thus, it can be argued that all groups are cracked or leaky containers.
The participants in them will always need holding and containing in order to manage their grief, which tends to be reawakened in connection with personal and collective regression”.
The conductor needs to hold the reality of his own and of his patients’ body (as part of their person) in his mind all the time, in order to encompass the infantile baby selves that can emerge in the group. Some of the dropouts from the group might be a result of a failure to hold and to handle appropriately the primitive fragile states of mind that can exist in the group.
The denial of the body is expressed in the title of the Gas Winter Workshop in Budapest, in 2005:”Body and /or Mind – Who are sitting in the circle”? It seems that in 2005, group analysts were still not certain about what is a person, a body or a mind, or maybe, the two of them together.
In 2006 there was an important breakthrough that altered this split in group analysis.
Morris Nitsun (2006) focused on two issues which had been marginalized in our field: sexuality and the body. “There is a clear need in group psychotherapy to give greater credence to non-verbal communication and greater attention to the body. This includes the facilitation of patients talking about bodily experience as an integral part of sexuality. The body needs to be brought onto center stage. This is another area in which the therapist can lead by example, encouraging a bodily discourse as part of the sexual discourse. It is important not to loose sight of the social inscriptions that contribute to the experience of the body… the body is the sight of culturally mediated judgements concerning shame and disgust, as well as excitement and pleasure. In the group there is a rich opportunity to consider the confluence of the bodily and the social in the interest of a deeper understanding of sexuality – including an understanding of why it is so difficult for people to talk openly about the sexed body.” (pp. 261-2)
There are several issues that arise from the preceding quotation:
- How to deal with the body in the group situation?
- The ability of the therapist to be sensitive to body language and non-verbal communication (which, in my understanding, means that the therapist is not split-off from his own body)
- Sexuality and its relation to the body.
- Shame has an important place in the therapeutic work with sexuality in the group. Shame stems from the inevitable gap between the private and the public self.
Bracha Hadar who is both a group analyst and a bioenergetic analyst felt the need to promote this issue and published the paper The Body of Shame in the Circle of the Group (2008). Her main point is that shame, an affect so relevant in groups, is experienced in the body and needs to be addressed also on the body level.
She Quotes Conger (2001), a Bioenergetic analyst:
“It seems remarkable that for all the literature published on shame, an affect that expresses itself psychologically and physiologically, an affect notable for physical manifestations such as blushing, sweating, increasing heart rate and downcast eyes; that very little has been written on “the body of shame”. Shame strikes at the foundations of the embodied self`: our grounding, our sense of boundary, our uninhibited breath, our access to a range of emotions and our intention to be present.” (Conger,2001 pp. 71).
It seems that the intention to be present is not so self-evident.
Nitsun writes about the contradiction “that the therapy group has such a strong physical presence, that the body is so much in evidence and sexuality so likely to be present in some form – yet this is spoken about with such caution and reserve.” (pp.261)
Pines (1984) reminds us that Freud himself admitted to his dislike of being constantly looked at by his patients and this, amongst other considerations, led him to construct the situation of the patient on the couch with the analyst sitting behind him.
The very fact that this technique was so deeply accepted in psychoanalysis might indicate that the refusal to be looked at was not only Freud’s problem. Foulkes’ daring shift from psychoanalyst to group analyst who sits in a circle with his patients is a crucial transition, not sufficiently appreciated in Group Analysis. Was it only a coincidence that Foulkes made this move for the first time in 1940, one year after Freud died?
Anthony (1957) refers on one occasion to the difficulty that both patients and therapist experience when exposed to other eyes: “It is customary to leave the central space of the circle furnished only with a small table. This leaves nothing to hide behind, so that the members of the circle are exposing those expressive and revealing parts- the face, the hands, and the feet- which ‘talk’ their ‘body language’ even during silent periods of the session. The therapist is one of the circle and equally ‘vulnerable’ to the eye.” (pp. 63).
There are several writings in the psychoanalytic literature about the connection between deep shame and the eye of the mother who did not mirror her baby (Wurmser, 1981; Bropucek, 1982; Ayers, 2003).
Hadar’s main intention was to bring the body of shame to the forefront of group analysis. In order to be aware of the body of shame we, group analysts, need to be aware of our bodies. Being also a bioenergetic analyst Hadar agrees that the conductor of the group needs to hold the reality of his and his patients’ body (as part of their person) in his mind all the time
In his commentary to Hadar’s paper Malcolm Pines (2008) welcomed the “bringing together that which should not have been rent asunder: mind/body: body/mind”(pp.180). The title he gave to the commentary was: Minding the Gap.
In his third book Nitsun(2015) continues to call our attention to the body. This time he does it by bringing together group analysis and performance art, a result of his interest in the link between art and psychotherapy. …”Yet, in some of these group illustrations, it is clear that communication is expressed dramatically via the body and actions, either in reality or in intention…. We know this intuitively, of course, but to what extent can we respond to the challenge of performance art, which often embraces the body in movement, and make this a greater focus in our work – or at least include it more fully in our theorizing?” (pp.208)
Weinberg and Raufman (2016), in their writing about the Social Unconscious, also contribute to bringing the body to the Group Analytic arena: In the introduction to their last book, (2016) they write: “The discussion of the foundation matrix many times neglects the importance of the human body as carrying meanings. Elias (2000) termed the concept “habitus” which is closely related to the foundation matrix and Bourdieu (2000) developed this concept further. Habitus refers to the lifestyle, values, dispositions and expectations of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. In other words, the habitus could be understood as a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste. The particular contents of the habitus are a complex result of embodying social structures – such as the gender, race, and class discrimination embedded in welfare reforms – that are then reproduced through tastes, preferences, and actions for future embodiment. Habitus is one’s physical and psychological demeanour, a result of habits developed over a period of time. Habitus means embodied social values.” (In press.)
In another paper (2016) Weinberg and Raufman discuss Anzieu’s concept of the group skin-ego. They restate their previous idea that the foundation matrix includes two different levels: the symbolic social unconscious and the somatic social unconscious. “Fairy tales, with their phenomenon of the realization of somatic idioms, may reveal something about the border between both levels of the social unconscious and the ways in which they are connected. In a way, this middle ground serves as an analogy, similar to that of Anzieu’s (1999) group skin-ego, depicting the way people belonging to the same society unconsciously share the same skin which, although symbolic in nature, may evoke very concrete experiences. The human body is more universal than other conscious and cultural elements. Thus, expressions related to body organs and physical actions reflect more universal issues. It is possible that people belonging to the same foundation matrix experience similar unconscious somatic and sensory aspects—and that certain idioms evoke these experiences in them. Whereas societies differ from one another in many social, cultural and linguistic aspects, the primary/somatic level of experience is a more common field.” (pp. 18)
These ideas may generate, in the future, further understanding of Foulkes’ concept of the trans-personal network (1957).
In writing about this concept Foulkes (1957) gives a clear idea of how he sees the members of the group as human beings possessed of both body and mind: “Particularly through their nervous systems and brains the organisms of the group members are in a state of interaction, in a common field, in interpenetration and communication. They speak now through one mouth, now through another. Active currents within the group may be expressed or come to a head in one particular person, between particular persons, or may, in a sense, be “personified’ in individuals. But whatever is going on in the group is always regarded by us as a process developing in the total group”(pp.259).
Dalal (1998) mentions the relevance of skin colour to belonging: “Clearly, ‘colour of skin’ is a marker of difference, and what it differentiates is something about belongingness….. I think that what it is thought to ‘communicate’ is that the person is one of us, or is not one of us.” (pp.69).
The paper about skin connects Weinberg and Raufman with an older text in the group analytic foundation matrix: “The Psychosoma and the Group”. In this paper Dennis Brown (1985) describes the power of the group to deal with somatic disorders: “Analytic groups provide a prime opportunity to study the communicational and relational significance of psychosomatic disorders and processes. This might seem a paradoxical statement given the fact that such disorders and processes often signal a denial or avoidance of direct and full emotional relatedness. In a sense it is: the point of the bodily symptom of dysfunction might be that which it serves to block or conceal. But the combination of support, regression, learning by example, identification, projection and introjection, provocation and response, translation and interpretation that characterizes a well-functioning analytic group does enable individuals to grow into awareness of the unity of bodily and psychological processes and bring more of themselves into relationships with others. This is true for those whose mental life is cut off from its somatic roots (for example, the excessively intellectual or inhibited) and for those for whom neurotic conflicts are dissociated and expressed through conversion mechanisms (for example, hysterical personalities) as well as for those who seem to have failed to develop a mind that adequately reflects bodily and emotional drives and the associated feelings and fantasies.” (pp. 93)
Although Foulkes holds the body in his mind and his writings, his crucial and important concept of Matrix (1964) relates to the matrix in terms of a group mind. In this respect the concept lacks the dimension of the body.
Powell’s concept (1991) of the ’embodied’ matrix is relevant here, he quotes Fiumara (1991), who says that the human psyche retains for- ever a kind of nostalgia for that first imprint of somatopsychic undifferentiation.
When we think about the matrix as the group mind, it is worth remembering how Winnicott (1949) relates to the mind as part of the psycho soma. The mind does not exist as an entity in the individual’s scheme of things, provided the individual psyche-soma or body scheme has satisfactorily negotiated the very early developmental stages; mind is then no more than a special case of the functioning of the psyche-soma.
Looking backwards to the history of Foulkes and Anthony
In his paper about his relations with Foulkes James Anthony (2010) mentions some important aspects of Foulkes’ early history:” I remained somewhat puzzled at his apparent avoidance of my childhood history until, very recently, I learned that he was the fifth and last child, an unexpected child that his mother refused to nurse, handing him over to a wet-nurse for feeding. He grew up feeling that he did not belong in any integral way with the family…”(pp.84).
If Foulkes experienced an early trauma in his bonding with his mother’s body, how could it not interfere with his psycho-somatic integration? (Winnicott, 1949). In that same paper Anthony gives a glimpse on Foulkes’ ambivalence about treating his body in his older years. “At this time, on one of my visits back to England, he asked me to examine him for pains in his chest which I did, feeling that it was a queer reversal of the doctor-patient relationship. However, I said two things: That he needed a full medical check-up and that he should take a rest from his professional work.” (pp.83-4).We know that he did not follow Anthony’s recommendation, but there is a question, also in Anthony’s mind, about his choice not to see his GP (did he have any?) and to consult his former patient/student. On Anthony’s last visit to London they met in Golders Green tube station and Foulkes took him to see the Golders Green Crematorium where his wife Kimberly was buried. “He said to me with more emotion that I had ever seen him manifest before:’ I want to be buried with her’.”(pp.84).
They went on walking into the casket room where there was a magnificent chalice containing the ashes of the great psychoanalysts (including Sigmund and Anna Freud). Anthony asked him whether he ever thought of arranging something similar for the analytic group and he answered, smiling: “No, I think we have better ways of dealing with our ambivalences” (pp.84).
Did they really have better ways?
It seems that no paradigm of theory and practice can escape the influence of its originator’s biography on its theory and practice.
Haynal’s (2006) words about psychoanalysis are also relevant for group analysis: “As always in psychoanalysis, an understanding of the problem is helped by an investigation of the personal experiences of the protagonists. Hence in psychoanalysis, historiography is not just a whimsical undertaking, but it is crucial in order to grasp important elements in the history of ideas”.
Optimistic look towards the future
Over the last decades, psychoanalysis has begun to shake off the tradition of negating the body. More and more papers, books and conferences on the issue of the body have become part of the therapeutic environment.
A current example is a conference held in U.K. in 2016 with the title “Embodied Approaches to Psychotherapy”. The brochure included the following lines: “this conference includes videos and papers by psychoanalysts and body psychotherapists who see the body as central to the therapeutic process and illustrate a theoretical shift within psychotherapy that regards the body or the mind-body, bodymind or embodied mind as an integrated entity that cannot be subdivided into psyche and soma.”
This change in psychoanalytic orientation to the body does not skip the group analytic field.
GroupBody’s concept has waited several decades to be depicted and then appears in a dissertation by Maoz (2014) with the title: GroupBody – The Non-Verbal Dimension of the Group-as-a-Whole:
“The goal of this research was to explore and conceptualize the non-verbal dimension of the Group-as-a-Whole (GAW) in the context of the simultaneous interrelationship existing between the verbal and non-verbal dimensions of the group space. This was done through an expansion of the Dyadic System Model of Interaction (Beebe et al., 2003) to the group and by defining the “GroupBody” as a metaphor for the physical expressions of the Group-as-a-whole.”
In an invitation for a workshop suggested by the group-analytic network in London (2016) they write: “Our recent workshops on Loneliness and the Internet, Gender and The Symbolic Role of the Father we have become increasingly aware of the impact our bodies make on each other. Connecting via the internet, the instability of current gender roles and the desires and projections on to the single sex groups that we have been working with, have all led us to think about what we see and experience when sitting together in a room. How does a small group develop its own culture and also become embodied.”
Bibliography
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