“Imagination and Hope in Relational and Group Analytic Perspectives”

Taken from a panel presentation “Imagination and Hope in Relational and Group Analytic Perspectives” at the annual conference of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), “Imagining with Eyes Wide Open: Relational Journeys” in Tel Aviv, June 2019

I

I apologise for not being with you in Israel. Unfortunately, family obligations have made it difficult for me to travel just now.  I hope that our Zoom facilities will not fail us.

I am honoured to have been invited to respond to these excellent and stimulating papers by Smadar Ashuach and Ido Peleg.  I was pleased and surprised to find that the authors quoted my own millennial contributions to the study of hope, which in fact I have revised several times.  Perhaps I should rather say “cannibalised for the purpose of new presentations on the topic”, which depended on my mood, my current thinking, and my relationship to the audience who I have always tried to regard as partners in creativity. This might explain why, when reading these two new papers, I had the strange sense that I was in silent dialogue with parts of myself: psychoanalyst, group analyst, sociologist, Jew, American, immigrant, and so on.

I have organised my Response as follows:  a bit of background to my remarks; some general thoughts about Group Analysis and Relational Psychoanalysis (I continue to think about the latter in the context of my beloved “Middle School” of  British Psychoanalysis, which is now known as the Association of Independent Psychoanalysts); and some specific questions and comments about Smadar’s and Ido’s contributions.  My previous publications about hope began in 1992 in the collegial womb of the Washington School of Psychiatry. I was the invited Discussant of “Hope and Dread” by Stephen Mitchell for The Annual Frieda Fromm-Reichman Lecture. I am fairly sure that on the basis of our exchange, he developed his Lecture into a chapter for his next book. The chapter was entitled “The Dialectics of Hope”, and the book, published in 1993, was entitled Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis.

In fact, Mitchell and I had an intense debate about his Lecture, after which he thanked me for “engaging” or at least “trying to engage” with so many elements of his argument. We acknowledged that our audience was a bit taken aback by my intensity. However, Stephen and I had only recently escaped from the hegemony of the American medical profession. Although in inviting us to speak, the Washington School of Psychiatry had remained loyal to its radical origins, most of the audience were still medical. In any case, not everyone in the audience realised that in so many ways Stephen Mitchell and I were twins. Neither of us was medical, and neither of us “leaned in” as much to the Left. As a sociologist it had been necessary for me to “train” outside the United States, and I was steeped in the work of Erikson and the other American Revisionists and object-relations thinkers.  Stephen and I agreed that outside the field of theology the phenomenon of hope was a maturational achievement, which could be facilitated by work in the psychoanalytic dyad.  Nonetheless, we acknowledged that as a virtue, which is really how Erikson defined it, hope had to be considered in the context of faith and charity. (As my wife often reminds me, charity is not only the greatest of these virtues, but it also begins or should begin at home.  As you know, in the Christian tradition “charity” means love).

Stephen Mitchell and I disagreed, however, about the importance that should be given, and that he and other Relationalists should by then have given, to Group Analysis, with its emphasis on such matters as: the conductor as a particular kind of member of the group; horizontal transference and countertransference processes; the tripartite matrix of any dynamic open social system in terms of society, community and group, and persons; transgenerational traumatogenic processes; and perhaps most importantly to what I called the social unconscious. I insisted that it was necessary to appreciate the central importance of specific philosophical and religious axioms in the study of the sociogenesis of psychic life and of the interpretation of transference and countertransference processes as a hermeneutic activity. I also argued that some elements of the Kleinian orientation deserved to be rescued from its orthodox emphasis on envy and the death instinct.

We warmly and enthusiastically agreed to carry on our dialogue.  Then, as was his habit, he returned to his hotel. We never saw each other again.  However, all this was on my mind when in 1998 I wrote my Presidential Address for the International Association for Group Psychotherapy entitled “On the Nature of Hope”. This came to life once again when I started to prepare this Response.

II

It is not generally recognised that Group Analysis shares many assumptions about human “nature” with the work of members of the Association of Independent Psychoanalysts of the British Psychoanalytical Society, especially in their appreciation of hope within the context of communication processes. I have become more and more aware of these connections through my study of terrorism and terrorists.  For example, as noted by Kleinot (2017), Foulkes (Foulkes & Anthony, 1957) suggested that an antisocial act can be a way of trying to convey a crucial message:  if this message is unheard, it becomes an autistic symptom; if this message is heard and acknowledged, it becomes a communication! An autistic symptom is, however, likely to be enacted.

In his studies of traumatogenic processes, Balint (1969) argued that the consequences of a traumatic event are mitigated by the responses of other people to the person whose dependency needs have been failed. Trauma breeds violence breeds trauma only when traumatised people are unable to narrate their experiences to other people who can convey that they “got” their messages.  Not only is the autistic symptom a function of failed dependency as the essence of traumatic experience, but the continuing consequences of it are also a function of the responses of other people to this predicament.

In his discussion of delinquency with respect to the rights and wellbeing of the “neighbour”, Winnicott (1967) argued that the antisocial tendency is often found in children who had a good enough start but for whom “things” did not go very well thereafter.  Although they have the tantalising sense that things could be better, they do not know exactly what could be better or how to achieve this.  However, they instinctively “wish” that things could be as once they were, or at least as they imagine that they were.  Many antisocial acts should be treated as the equivalent of the young child’s need to try out his “power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle and to appropriate…” (Winnicott, 1984, p. 115), or in other words as the need to test boundaries and to build personal identity.  Some antisocial acts can even be understood as dramatic steps towards creativity (Winnicott, 1984).

Building on these ideas, Bollas (1987) argued somewhat romantically and over dramatically, that some kinds of violence can be seen as attempts at self-transformation and self-repair.

Referring to the work of Winnicott and Bollas, several colleagues, such as Welldon (1997) and Motz (2010), have explored violence towards others as a kind of hopeful search for good objects who will hear and understand.  They have also considered this process with respect to violence towards one’s own body and mind.

Following the definition in English of hope as “desirous expectation”, another Independent psychoanalyst, Charles Rycroft (1979), argued that where there is life there is hope, and where there is hope there is life. As the poet said, “Hope springs eternal from the human breast”.  Whereas in the beginning of life hope is directed towards the breast and its contents, subsequently, hope is directed towards, and perhaps sublimated into, other objects that have been valued as goals. However, Rycroft found it difficult to appreciate “other objects” in a non-reductive way.

In my opinion, the phenomenon of hope can and should be considered in terms of the relational perspective, which is based on both project and introject, which are usually in the service of communication processes, especially of the sub-symbolic.  I (Hopper, 1981, 2003a, 2014) have argued that from conception onwards, desirous expectation with respect to objects that have been valued as “goals” is rooted in relationships in the context of economic, political and religious institutions. Although the pleasures and pains of desire, both fulfilled and frustrated, are felt within the body as sensations, all desire is goal directed and object-related. Moreover, there are many kinds and levels of desirous expectation, for example, normative expectation, aspirational expectation, anticipatory expectation, and so on.  There are also levels of achievement!

Feelings of relative deprivation and other kinds of anxieties are a function of a negative discrepancy between levels of normative expectation and levels of achievement with respect to objects that have been valued as goals.  People must manage their feelings of relative deprivation and various anxieties related to them.  This is a hallmark of maturity. We must engage in a variety of what Anna Freud called “coping strategies” and what I have called “forms of instrumental adjustment” both to these painful feelings and to the situations which have given rise to them. Although such manoeuvres vary in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency, they involve social-psychological mechanisms of defence/protection, including alienation, resignation, mature acceptance, political action, etc.  They also include the ability and willingness to exercise the transcendent imagination in order to change the situation which has given rise to the anxieties in question.  This is the basis of hope, at least in terms of how I define it. This goes way beyond what is sometimes called “re-framing”.

It must be acknowledged that political and social changes are often extremely difficult – if not actually impossible – to achieve.  When people are blocked from full access to political institutions, and/or when such institutions are systemically biased against them, even terrorism can be considered as a form of “legitimate” political action. In other words, terrorism can be understood as a communication about the unconscious dynamics of the internal world of the terrorist, and the unconscious dynamics of his groupings. Terrorism proclaims that the flame of desirous expectation will soon be extinguished.  From this point of view, terrorism is a final effort to keep hope alive. Ultimately, actual death, actual murder and actual suicide do not harbour any fears that are greater than those associated with psychic death. This is consistent with what we have learned about the behaviour of Muselmann in Nazi concentration camps whose deaths could be predicted by their loss of hope.

III

With regard to “Enactments of sibling relationships in a group” by Smadar Ashuach, I would make the following comments:

• Although we ourselves are interested in siblings in psychoanalysis and Group Analysis, I am not sure that this is widely shared. In fact, a perusal of the literature in psychoanalysis suggests that almost every article and book still begin with a statement to the effect that very little interest has been shown in the place of siblings, despite their obvious importance in psycho-sexual development. To some extent, this is also true in Group Analysis, although there is a well-known collection of articles on sibling relations in 1998 in a Special Issue of Group Analysis with contributions from Biran, Brown, Brunori, Maratos and Wilke. In my (Hopper, 1981) much earlier study of social mobility, I considered the importance of comparing oneself to one’s siblings. Juliet Mitchell (2003), one of the few psychoanalysts who has availed herself of a Foundation Course in Group Analysis, has also written about siblings.
• It is possible that the place of siblings has a particular resonance in Relational Psychoanalysis and “Relational Group Analysis”, although the latter is a kind of pleonasm, because by definition there is an emphasis in Group Analysis on mutuality and the analysis of horizontal transference and countertransference processes.
• In fact, child-parent relations are often enacted in vertical (T)ransference and (C)ountertransference relationships in Group Analysis, and, therefore, subject to analysis with the focus on the conductor of the group. Moreover, the repetition of sibling relations in horizontal (t)ransference and (c)ountertransference relationships must always be understood within the context of parent-child relations. These two sets of processes are completely interdependent.
• “Slow-open groups” are particularly relevant for the analysis of sibling relations in that new members of the group are likely to evoke a variety of thoughts and feelings about the group and its conductor as being “pregnant”. Eventually there is the experience of a new member in the group. New members even exist within the minds of the participants, and are sometimes projected into the mind of the group conductor. This can be understood in terms of a new baby and new sibling. I (Hopper, 2019) have discussed this elsewhere in connection with immigration. In my experience this is a signature trope of slow-open groups in Israel, if not life in Israel more generally.
• There is often a preoccupation in a group with the imagined and actual relations that the conductor has with people outside the group. It is often thought that these are sexual relations, if not husband/wife relations.
• It seems to me that Aviv reported that he had done and tended still to do towards others that which was done and still done to him. In the unconscious mind, little animals, which are most likely the kind that he harmed, are often displacements from younger siblings.
• Aviv began “to imagine change and hope that he could make peace with the demon inside him”, but I am not altogether clear why this transformation occurred. Some kind of therapeutic alliance seems to have evolved, and I would like to know more about these dynamics.
• Smadar writes that “Sarah and Aviv considered themselves victims of sadistic acts during childhood and within the group. Aviv talked about feeling trapped both as a child and with me, because I did not let him escape from what he felt. The trapped feeling lead to the sensation of explosion inside him – the demon that he was afraid to feel”.  This is a vitally important paragraph in the clinical vignette of the group, and I would appreciate its unpacking.  It seems to me to be somewhat unusual for two members of an ordinary clinical group to say that they considered themselves to be victims of sadistic acts during childhood and even within the group. Sadism as an erotic form of hatred is not generally understood by patients, that is, as a phenomenon which is different from aggression and hatred.  Patients are usually deeply ashamed of sadomasochism, which is not to suggest that they do not experience it. There are implications of what people might imagine the sensations and feelings of an unborn fetus might be, and there is some confusion between the fetus and feces.  There is some sense that the group and its conductor, and in particular Aviv for Sarah and Sarah for Aviv, were all able to withstand and survive explosive feelings confused with an explosive birth of a new sibling.  However, I am left wondering whether there has been some history of birth trauma and possibly a damaged sibling.

With regard to “Co-constructing hope in group analytic psychotherapy: relational and group analytic perspectives” by Ido Peleg, I would make the following comments:

• I appreciate the implication that in the therapeutic process there can be an emergence of both impasse and despair, as well as the emergence of hope as a point of change. Many patients bring into the therapeutic process a kind of battle in which the analyst is challenged to bring about a change for the good, while the patient is determined to hold on to various aspects of despair and to blame and to punish the analyst for early traumatic experience. The experience of hope is often associated with letting go of such a battle.
• The social anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown, in actual or implicit debates with the cultural anthropologist Malinowsky, stressed the importance of ritual and rhythm as a basic source of safety in persons and their groupings. This could be compared to attacks on safety associated with uncontrolled sensations and emotions associated with sexuality and aggression. Similarly, for Radcliffe-Brown, a dance was more a matter of ritual and rhythm, whereas for Malinowsky, it was more a matter of enhancing sexual feeling and fantasy, and even imitating sexual activity. Sitting in a circle around the fire could be a matter of ritualizing the fire as a source of warmth, or it could be a matter of maintaining the circle and keeping the flickering flames under control.
• I am particularly intrigued by the thought that there is a possible connection between feeling that one can be of help to a parental figure of the analyst or to the group or particular members of it, and the emergence of a sense of hope. It is so important to have acknowledged and validated that one has been helpful to a parent or older sibling.
• Although the burden of the paper is that a patient may in one way or another have a new experience of a new object, and in particular in the context of relationships within which a spontaneous communication of “fitted-ness” can occur, I am struck by a couple of aspects of the clinical vignette: 1) the amount of physical containment that is offered within the psychiatric ward and within the hospital as-a-whole by the fence; 2) acting out the representations of the fence in the performance reported in the group. I am not sure if this was an authentic “moment of meeting” or an acting out of what was felt to be unacceptable within the group, in that something from the “inside” was taken to the “outside”, from the core to the periphery of experience, and shown to imaginary observers. I have a sense that the group must be helped to examine the meaning of the “fence”, as an object in its own right, not only between self and other, inside and outside, but perhaps also in terms of socially unconscious resonances which most probably involve barbed wire and all the various connotations of it. We need to protect patients from the enactment of despair and the enactment of manic hope, at least through interpretation and mature management. It is necessary to keep in mind the possibilities of communication, of trying to understand what the patient is attempting to communicate which cannot necessarily be put into words. Perhaps, the whole psychoanalytical and group analytic project was being mocked or, as the English say, “sent up”. Yet the group and its conductor were not destroyed by this. Although this has an element of Pirandello’s (1921) “Six Characters in Search of an Author”, it also has an element of the Marquis de Sade’s (1795/1971) “Philosophy in the Bedroom”.
• There are many possible lines of discussion of this material, but I am struck by the way in which Dalit and Samira as well as Saul were contained by the group who functioned as the non-familial circle around the flickering fire of sex and aggression and derivatives of it. The group is providing a sense of warmth for itself.

IV

In summary, the ability and willingness to exercise the transcendent imagination does not mean living in a state of denial and disavowal concerning our most difficult impulses, and our deepest despair.  Hope always involves the desire to narrate what have been truly terrible life experiences. It seems obvious to me that the velvet lined boundaries of analytical relationships offer possibilities for the development and maintenance of mature hope in the context of authentic communication between two or more people.

References

Balint, (1969). ‘Trauma and object relationship’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50, 429-436.

Bollas, C.  (1987). The Transformational Object in The Shadow of the Object. Free Association Books, Columbia University Books, pp 1 – 29.

Foulkes, S. H. & Anthony, E. J. (1957). Group psychotherapy – The Psychoanalytic Approach. Second Edition London: Karnac, 1984.

Hopper, E. (1981). Social Mobility: A Study of Social Control and Insatiability. Oxford, Blackwell.

Hopper, E. (1998). On the Nature of Hope.  Presidential Address. IAGP

London. Published in Hopper, E. (2003a) The Social Unconscious: Selected Papers. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Hopper, E. (2003a) The Social Unconscious: Selected Papers. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Hopper, E. (2003b). Traumatic experience in the unconscious life of groups: The fourth basic assumption: Incohesion: Aggregation/massification or (ba) 1:A/M.  London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Hopper. E. (2014).  “Making creative use of trauma in Group Analysis in convening large groups”. Plenary Lecture Rafael Institute & Prix Irene Conference. Prague.

Hopper, E. (2019).  The clinical realities of the appreciation of the importance of the social context of groups and persons in Group Analysis – IAGP – Webinar session – June 2019.

Kleinot, P. (2017). ‘One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist: a selected overview of the psychoanalytic and group analytic study of terrorism’. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 1-14.

Marquis de Sade. 1795 /1971. Philosophy in the Bedroom. New York: Grove Press.

Mitchell, J. (2003). Siblings. Cambridge. Polity Press.

Michel, S. (1993). “The Dialectics of Hope” in Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis. New York: BasicBooks.

Michel, S. (1993). Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis. New York: BasicBooks.

Motz, A. (2010). Self-harm as a sign of hope in Psychanalytic Psychotherapy, Vol. 24 (pp. 81-92).

Pirandello, L. (1921) Six Characters in Search of an Author. J. Lorch (2004). Cambridge: University Press.

Rycroft, C. (1979). “Steps to an Ecology of Hope”. In R. Fitzgerald (Ed) The Sources of Hope. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Welldon, E. V.  (1997). 20^th Foulkes Lecture ‘Let the treatment fit the crime: forensic group psychotherapy, Group Analysis, 30 (1): 9-26.

Winnicott, D. W.  (1967). Delinquency as a Sign of Hope in Home is where we start from: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, M. Davis, Penguin Books, Britain, 1990.

Winnicott, D. W. (1984). Some psychological aspects of juvenile delinquency and The Antisocial Tendency in Deprivation and Delinquency, ed. C.

Winnicott, R. Shepherd, M. Davis, London Tavistock pp 113 – 131.

Earl Hopper, PhD
earlhopper@btinternet.com