The Discipline of Listening: On dialogue, the matrix, and what collapses when listening disappears

We had gathered to think together about a question that feels increasingly urgent: what happens to a world when its capacity for dialogue begins to erode? Reflections on the annual Group Analytic Network London workshop which took place on the 6th March 2026 at the IGA.

As the mother of a young child, workshops like this offer a rare moment to meet colleagues outside the paradigm of doing, be that client work, training, activism, writing, or the tasks of ordinary life. Instead, time opens up as we sit together in reflective practice, leaning right into the depths of the human experience. Not as something ‘out there’, but as something within us. It is the kind of shadow work that defines this community of practice and gives me hope.

We may know it well, but it’s worth saying again: we are all involved in projective processes, because they are unconscious, and because it’s how we begin. Babies place their unmanageable emotions into their caregivers, in order that the mature adult can metabolise the overwhelming feelings that rush through the infant nervous system. It’s normal for parents to miss things and make (many) mistakes, but the tragedy unfolds when caregivers continually fail to manage these primary elements. Instead of turning the volume down, the emotion gets acted out upon the BodyMind of the developing child. Transgenerational trauma hides in these early gestures, accumulating until some form of collective monstrosity plays out once more.

The title of the GANL workshop was Why Are We Becoming Afraid of Dialogue? At its core is the ever-present threat within dialogue itself: the risk that communication will break down and split into a kind of war, powered by fight or flight responses. Fear, in other words, of what the other might do with what we say, or what we might have to feel and face, if we really listen. It’s the place where aggression and attack (both psychological and physical) easily follow. The place where victims and perpetrators are positioned. The place where violence takes hold.

So although we were in discussion about the practice of sitting in groups as a healing modality, what we were really touching were the most challenging large group dynamics of our age. Perhaps of being human in general, but particularly now, in a time of senseless killing, fascism, and racism, of societies riven with trauma and the devastating legacies of empire, of a planet that we are destroying. And when you’re willing to take a look at that, there are multiple unearned privileges, systemic inequalities, and unbearable losses that surface, for all of us.

That is what we were sitting close to.

The opening reflection was given by Sue Einhorn, whose work spans decades of clinical practice alongside years in community organising and youth work. Her words were quietly radical: a reminder that the capacity to disagree without destroying the other is not a given. It has to be practised, held, and sometimes fought for. As she noted, Group Analysis “emerged at a time in history when hatred of the other squashed reflection and dialogue. Our work was to rescue the phoenix of dialogue and help it rise to embrace the value of other people’s minds.”

Underlying that purpose, Foulkes’ core concept of the Matrix orients everything. It is the shared ground from which all dialogue arises. We tend to imagine that our thoughts and perceptions belong to us as individuals, but group analysis proposes interdependence: our minds develop within and co-exist through this shared field.

In the discussion that followed (there were about fifty of us in the room) I noticed a strong focus on the frustrations of the speaker in dialogue. The challenge of finding your voice, the feeling of being censored, the fear around what you cannot say. And the very real threat, for some more than others, of retaliation and violence.

When I had the chance to contribute, I spoke about the way the centre of gravity in the group seemed to rest upon the speaker who longs to be heard, bypassing the essential work of listening. Because surely dialogue cannot exist without the capacity to listen?

And if we stay with the position of the listening participant, another question appears. Are we really listening when we think we are listening? Or are we blindly filtering what is being said through what is already inside us? That filtering lens is the mental archive of all our prior knowledge and experience, in other words the past, clouding our ability to meet or even experience what is actually present.

Each of us carries this internal map of the world, shaped by memory, culture, personal history, and countless charged emotional experiences. Most of the time we are completely unaware that this map is organising our perception. In group analytic language we know this inherited field as the Foundation Matrix: the many cultural, familial, and historical forces that shape how we perceive the world before we even try to find the words.

Beneath this inherited layer lies something older still: the Primordial Matrix, which is the earliest and largely unconscious field of bodily and emotional experience from which all life arises. Long before we have language, we are already immersed in rhythms of feeling, sensation, and oneness. This is also the realm of our deep inheritance, the ancestral traces carried in the body before individual stories begin. In the words of Toni Morrison, “Nothing ever dies.”

Dreams carry fragments of this invisible realm. In my practice I seem to be paying more and more attention to dreams (my own and those of my clients) because they offer the unconscious, the shadows of the collective, and our ancient lineage, a way to speak within the group field.

Foulkes suggested that what we call mind itself is never purely individual, “all that is mental is a matter of more than one individual person from the beginning.” What we experience as our “own” perception is already shaped by relationship. The mind is not simply a private space inside the head; it is continually formed through interaction with others.

So when someone speaks, we often imagine that we are hearing them, but in truth we are experiencing them through the ‘always already knowing’ of our past. Through what we already believe, what we already fear, what we have already decided is right or wrong. It’s the basic survival activity of the human mind. And when we remain unaware of that survival, something subtle but devastating happens: we’re no longer meeting the person in front of us, we’re meeting our idea of them as they appear to us.

Only when that blind spot becomes visible can another kind of seeing and hearing open. One that isn’t coming from what we already know, but from a space beyond the ‘knowing’ paradigm which we might call: nowhere. And only when we can come from this nowhere place, can we really discern what is needed in the here and now. In group analytic theory this live encounter is located in the Dynamic Matrix: the relational space that emerges through interaction itself.

Dialogue does not collapse because people disagree. It collapses when listening disappears. “Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.” (Ursula Le Guin)

When Bion spoke about the therapist learning to listen “without memory or desire” he was pointing towards a receptive, expansive openness. A state of being where we resist the urge to conclude or to know before whatever has arrived has fully arrived. Keats described this quality as Negative Capability: the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

This is not a technique, it’s a context. And that leads to another question. When we are listening without memory or desire, who is actually there? There is certainly no solid ‘me’ there. Instead, there is a space: “open, unobstructed, and allowing everything to appear within it.” (John Wellwood)

A psychotherapy client recently began his session with me by questioning the point of therapy. He knows something is happening, but quantifying it feels impossible.

I asked him: who do you come to sit with when you come to therapy? Do you come to sit with me? Or do you come to sit with yourself?

There was a pause. The question had landed. His enquiry seemed to connect directly to how he devalues his own needs, voice and experience, and that pointlessness became a mirror. Because what is uncomfortable about therapy has very little to do with me. What becomes uncomfortable is what you begin to encounter when you sit there.

If I am doing my job properly, I am not really there. The space that I am is there. And yes, within that space there are many pieces: my knowledge, identity, experience, intuition, empathy, and my many limitations — but these are not the central position. Where I am coming from is nowhere. And that is precisely what gives any of us the capacity to listen.

Which means that if I am truly listening, someone may have an authentic experience of themselves, without interference. There is a kind of aliveness in that encounter: life meeting itself, and realising that nothing is wrong. There may be heartbreak and desperation and terror and love and longing, but the deeper intelligence knows that none of that means anything about who you are. It is the weather of being human. And in that weather, which can sometimes be so incredibly painful, we need each other more than ever.

If dialogue depends upon listening, so does democracy. Democracy is not simply the freedom to speak, its very framework requires a willingness to relinquish personal certainty long enough for something new to appear between us. “The object of dialogue is not to analyse things, to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend opinions and look at them.” (David Bohm)

As Sue Einhorn reminded us, “By listening to ordinary people in our therapy groups, we value all thoughts and do not regard the conductor’s ideas as more important than those of group members.” Even the arrival of compassion where there was none before can begin in this way. When we sit together in dialogue we are not simply exchanging thoughts; we are participating in the ongoing creation of the world we inhabit together. Dialogue is the moment in which the matrix becomes visible.

Foulkes proposed: the mind is not a thing inside the head, but a series of events unfolding between people. Many contemplative traditions remind us that reality is not ‘out there’, it is being generated moment by moment through us. When individuals come together in dialogue something else appears, and a group becomes something beyond the mere sum of its component parts. This is where collective action draws its unique power, and perhaps the only way that any meaningful shift arrives. “We have to give up the idea of private salvation and the idea of private healing. That’s all fantasy. We either heal communally or we don’t” (Francis Weller).

For a few years now I have been conducting an unusual online group called ‘Earth Matrix’. The name came to me in a dream as I grappled with how to integrate my deep psychotherapy roots with the wisdom of non-dual practice and the somatic intelligence of Chi Kung. People often assume that what happens there is therapy, or ontological enquiry, or movement practice. And those things are all present. But at its heart the process is simpler than that. Learning to sit in the presence of others. Learning to speak. Learning to listen. And learning to listen in older, forgotten ways.

In my practice this includes listening to the intelligence of nature as articulated by the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Five Elements, and listening reverently to dreams, drawing on the Tavistock tradition of Social Dreaming. In this setting dreams carry messages from parts of the matrix that have not yet found words. As Charlotte Beradt wrote in her study of dreams under the Third Reich, “dreams are the diary of a society.” When they are spoken in a group, something of that collective field is given a voice. It is another vital form of shadow work.

My facilitation in Earth Matrix is to hold a space of awareness, where people can develop embodied listening together, without rushing to control or resolve what arises. Something begins to shift and reorganise on its own. It is the Group Analyst within me that trusts the process: which is less about what someone says, and more about what becomes possible when someone is heard.

It’s essential that dialogue is not only a practice within therapy rooms and groups devoted to reflection. It is something we must develop the capacity to bring into the societies we share together.

In the very last minutes of the large group at the end of the workshop, something happened that surfaced this directly. We had been circling ideas all afternoon: what can or cannot be said, the ways speaking can quickly degrade into concrete, binary, and aggressive states where people wound each other.

Once again, the privilege of speaking revealed itself as an assumption. There are times when your mere existence generates attack. A woman spoke. She shared that she had been in an active internal dialogue throughout the afternoon, listening closely, but had not felt the need to say anything until that moment. She had been turning over in her mind her recent experience of being hit in a public space without warning, because of her race.

She spoke about it with grace, though it was clearly painful. She said she had not been able to enter into dialogue after it unfolded. There could be no dialogue with her attacker. But she was interested in speaking about it here, perhaps as a way of expanding her process of repair.

And then there was silence. A long silence. A kind of wordlessness about how to be with such an experience.

She had not been unsafe because the dialogue failed. The dialogue had failed because she had already been made unsafe, before she could speak, and before she set out on her day. That is what listening cannot reach, when the conditions for being heard have already been destroyed.

One of my colleagues finally offered a response, associating to the protest placards declaring opposition to genocide and support for Palestine Action. Those home-made cardboard signs mean a great deal. For those without a voice, for those who remain unheard, and for those who are disappeared, they are everything.

They signal that someone, somewhere, is willing to make a stand. And that someone is listening.

Sometimes dialogue begins with the courage to say the words that others are no longer safe to speak.

References:

Foulkes, S. H. (1973). Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Method and Principles. London: Gordon & Breach.

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Foulkes, S. H. (2003 edition). Introduction to Group-Analytic Psychotherapy. London: Karnac.

Le Guin, U. K. (1969). The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books.

Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock.

Keats, J. (1817). Letter to George and Tom Keats, December 21.

Wellwood, J. (2000). Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation. Boston: Shambhala.

Bohm, D. (1996). On Dialogue. London: Routledge.

Beradt, C. (1966). The Third Reich of Dreams. Weller, F. (2020) . Deschooling Dialogues. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/deschooling-dialogues-on-initiation-trauma-a nd-ritual-with-francis-weller/