Mourning the Loss of the Truth

The desire to write about group analytic knowledge and experience has been very tempting for some time now, since I started studying group analysis in 2015. A wish to go through my group analytic training experiences over the last five years was often prohibited by my resistance to expose myself to readers. A group analyst would comment on this as a difficulty in exposing myself to myself. It is the same feeling I had (maybe still have) when experiencing large groups. This self-exploratory paper represents a modest attempt to review the impact of past social-political accounts in relation to the present meaning of my encounters as a trainee. Taking it as a challenge, I focus on my recent personal perplexities triggered by one of the modules of the qualifying course in group-analysis during the time of forced isolation.

Listening to the seminars on group analysis by prominent group analysts has been inspiring. Although at first, starting to organize my own thoughts into writing was paralyzing. With time, this discomfort vanished away, as I sat alone with my feelings left from the last seminar about large groups. Closed down at home, quarantined, who would have thought of a better time to talk about “large groups”, those, which are mostly unknown thus, mostly resisted against. The present public health situation kept me locked in torturing thoughts and feelings like: “what is going on?”; “is this a survival crisis of humanity, or a personal one?”; “what’s the meaning of this struggle?”; “what is a pandemic really?” I recalled some notes from Teresa von Sommaruga Howard’s seminar about “the role of physical environment in keeping people away from understanding the fears pertaining to the malignant normality – a reality constructed purposefully by the socio-political environment” (2020).

I felt a considerable amount of agitation during the module. Projective tasks during these seminars placed in an unusual context brought me closer to new emotions, which I assume have been resting in my social unconscious as a result of the enforced isolation from the self in my past. Instructed to travel back in time and space, I remember I was struggling to focus on the task. Confused by the imaginative experience, which didn’t correspond to the biographical details of my grandfather (my traveller companion), I felt trapped in the dissociative journey. I couldn’t at the time, and still cannot, determine if I was experiencing a memory of mine, pieces of memories as told by others, a perception of my presence in my past and in the present, or an anticipation of the “unknown”. I couldn’t find the words to express myself.  The context of going through these images was already overwhelming. The increased anxiety of the “modern pandemic times” could have reactivated the fear of annihilation, which I might have repeatedly dismissed. During the course of the following weeks, I felt as if these new feelings were taking over me. I felt powerless and ashamed. The past was being replicated in the present, and the present is resonating with my past. This is the time I decided to sit down and write this paper.

There is not yet a well documented and comprehensive written history of Albania. The historical facts have been largely contaminated by the haunting totalitarian ideology of the past. Thus, it cannot be clear if people unconsciously refuse them, or if the “painful facts” are kept away from people. However, historical memories cannot be lost. They are part of the social unconscious and are represented in very rich and vivid forms in any of us. To hide the truth from any surrounding group was an unwritten norm of that time because the attack, if not death, was unavoidable. The group of primary belonging (family) had to be protected, while the groups of secondary belonging (work, school, etc.) needed to be defended against. I was shaped by both realities. I could not understand where the safety was, inside or outside the house. All I knew was to hide and learn to be invisible. Some secrets were shared with me while growing up, apparently only those that would not put my life in danger. While outside, I could have often questioned in silence myself and others around me. During the communist regime, Albanians were either deprived of the process of socialization, essential for the internalization of the norms and values (Hutchinson, 2004), or they surrendered to merge with the dictated profile of the “New Albanian Man”, a man with a stolen conscience and a fragmented identity, as Rouchy (1995) would define it.

It seems like nothing has changed since Camus’ lecture on “The human crisis” 74 years ago at Columbia University, in United States:

Look around you and see if it isn’t still the case. Violence has a stranglehold on us. Inside every nation, and the world at large, mistrust, resentment, greed, and the race for power are manufacturing a dark, desperate universe in which each man is condemned to live within the limit of the present. The very notion of the future fills him with anguish, for he is captive to abstract powers, starved and confused by harried living, and estranged from nature’s truth, from sensible leisure, and simple happiness. (Camus, 1946)

The truth keeps being hidden, thus I am not able to carry any longer the menacing paradox of the coronavirus pandemic. How is it different from the same deprivation I felt when growing up? Where does it come from? Where does all this confusion come from? A new way of thinking about questions like these, thus a new method of understanding symptoms through meanings brings group as the fundamental psychological unit for the individual (Foulkes, 1964, as cited in Dalal, 1998). The group (which I am partially introducing in this essay) may be represented by a matrix of neurotic society, which resembles Karen Horney’s view of the child’s feelings of isolation and helplessness in a threatening and hostile world (Coolidge et al., 2001). Our reactions to the world in the present, as she puts it, can be argued in terms of isolation, rebelliousness, or dependency to the rules being served to us throughout the space and time of our individuation process.

As Robert Esposito claims his philosophical views on how life is being oppressed by the political, he explains his thinking about the notion of the individual:

… the individual will no longer be seen as simply the site in which previous genetic programming is executed, no mere hardware for a genetic software, but instead the space in which individuation takes place thanks to every living form’s interdependence with other living forms. (Esposito 2004, as cited in Campbell, 2006)

To go back to my imaginary experience, it seemed difficult and exhaustive to get back what was missing from my “there and then”, my “then and now” in the “here and now”. It makes me think of mourning the loss/losses and my inability to mourn, which as Klein (1935) suggests, can re-awaken and intensify the fear of annihilation (as cited in Hopper, 2003):

All loss must be mourned. Not only the dead. Not only the perfect breast. Not only the good enough mother. The loss of self-esteem, of certainty, of group charisma, of physical power, of the rights and privileges associated with a particular phase of life… must all be acknowledged. (Hopper, 2003, p.62)

Powerlessness was the response, similar to the day when I couldn’t match pieces of the itinerary of my grandfather’s life with what I came to experience emotionally through the imaginative task. On a totalitarian note, the power belonged to the group; the individual was expected to develop a dependency on the group, at a price of personal freedom. On a post-totalitarian note, I started to get introduced to unknown parts of myself, while in personal training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy more than a decade ago. The clash between shame and powerlessness brings to my attention now, a conflict of which I may have not been fully aware. Was I ashamed of my vulnerability facing some hidden truth, or was I ashamed of the anticipated results of my discovery? Was it really about the untold truth? Was my agitation about the truth of my unsettled sense of power, which felt lost? Perhaps, shame is a derivate of the loss of power in todays world, which to me, could have been triggered by the absence of power in the past (even more shameful). Maybe trying to find the words about the feelings related to my perception of the experience and putting them into writing is an attempt to “unblock meanings” (Dalal, 1998). Hesitance to share them in writing at the very beginning, makes me think of my resistance to mourning. Acceptance is hard work, and the fear of being rejected (regardless of the amount of truth) derives from the lack of self-acceptance.

Human life is all about traumatic experiences and the long-lasting corruptions of the human soul. The trauma controls our lives. In my case, it succeeded to lead me quietly to a self-imposed isolation and fear. Thus, the human crisis, as Camus (1946) puts it, “has to be understood” because “the awareness of the absurdity of our lives” can only be inevitable. Analytic groups have the power to assist people to deal with their self-restrictions and to recreate their own truths about self in relation to the social.

References

Campbell, Timothy (2006). Bios, Immunity, Life: The thought of Robert Esposito. Diacritics 36.2: 2-22.    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2008.0009.

Camus, Albert (1946). “The Human Crisis”. Unpublished. Retrieved fromhttps://thechaibrewer.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/resonance-of-albert-camuss-speech-the-human-crisis/

Coolidge, F.L, Moor, C.J., Yamazaki, T.J., Stewart, Sh.E., Segal, D.L. (2001) “On the relationship between Karen Horney’s tripartite neurotic type theory and personality disorder features”. Personality and Individual Differences, 30. 1387 -1400.

Dalal, Farhad. (1998). Taking the Group Seriously: Towards a Post-Foulksian Group Analytic Theory. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Dogan, Sevgi. (2020). “Our destiny attached to life and exposed to death: An interview with Roberto Esposito”. Retrieved from securitypraxis.eu https://securitypraxis.eu/destiny-life-death-roberto-esposito/

Hopper, Earl (2003). “The Fear of Annihilation and Traumatic Experience”. Traumatic Experience in the Unconscious Life of Groups. (63-66). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Hutchinson, Sylvia. (2004) “The Dynamic of the Social Unconscious at Work in Therapy Group”. Paper presentation.

Von Sommaruga Howard, Teresa. (2020). “An Architect’s View of the Large Group”. Unpublished.

Dr. Anxhela Gramo
Chair, Group Analysis Albania
www.groupanalysisalbania.org
anxhela.gramo@acpps.org