The subject and the group

As the American epistemologists at MIT (Massachusset Institute of Technology) say, a science is defined by its field, its object and its method.

This is the case for all the human sciences, including sociology, which studies social phenomena (Durkheim), psychology, which studies the subject (Piaget), and, with Jean Stoetzel, social psychology (1948), which studies the group. The first French author who thought about group’s psychological effects was Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) in his book “Psychologie des foules” (Crowd Psychology, 1895). His work has been discussed by Freud in “Massen Psychologie und Ich Analyse” (1921).

The subject, the group and society were the subject of much research throughout the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis was to play an essential role in influencing all the other sciences, when Freud introduced a new paradigm in 1895 that revolutionized the way in which the study of the human being was carried out, with the concept of the unconscious.

This set of disciplines will sometimes focus on the subject, sometimes on the group and the collective. The dilemma facing all these disciplines is whether to start with the subject and move towards the social, through his environment, his culture, his family group, or whether to start with the collective and question each individual, as is the case in opinion polls.

In the Second World War, Foulkes and Bion, in England, developed not only the first therapeutic group devices but also theories of unconscious phenomena in groups.

It was then in Argentina in the 50s and 60s that, E. Pichon Rivière, developed new concepts and a method for working in groups: the grupo operativo technique. In the same way, the work of J. Bleger on the framework. And J. Puget and I. Berenstein did a great deal of research on link configurations: the group, the family, the institution and the couple.

Finally, a decade later, from 1962/1963 onwards, the French group psychoanalytic movement developed. D.Anzieu and R.Kaës, starting from the fundamental rules of psychoanalysis, gathered groups of professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists) who volunteered to try an intense group experience for a week in order to observe the main unconscious psychic processes. They initiated French research on groups, which has since been developed under their impetus.

From these three great currents and all their theoretical developments, we have also seen the establishment of specific training courses which have enabled thousands of practitioners in Europe and Latin America to be trained (GAS, AAPPG, CEFFRAP…) Some of them, advocate training in the group from an individual psychoanalytical experience or training.

However, at a certain point, a scientific revolution (in the sense used by historians of science) will appear on this fertile ground and will propose a new paradigm that will go beyond the distinction between subject/group/society. This new concept starts from the Freudian conception of a psychic apparatus in the subject, composed of several entities as in the first topical: Conscious/ Preconscious/ Unconscious or in the second topical: Superego/ Ego/ Ego Ideal/ Id. This configuration of the psychic apparatus bears witness to its complexity and to the fact that for Freud the plural and group dimension of the psyche is not in doubt (Massen Psyche).  Didn’t he say that “all psychology is first of all social”? In Line with this idea  René Kaës went further by proposing the concept of the group psychic apparatus (1976) supporting the idea that there are subjects in the group but also and above all that there are (internal) groups in the subject. This conception will join that of Pichon Rivière who also speaks of grupos internos at the same time.

From now on, the question will no longer be to study the subject or the group, to go from the subject to the group or vice versa, but to consider an apparatus common to the subject and the group, a psychic apparatus whose particularity is to have a group-like organization.

This must be studied in greater depth by us and by all the researchers who will use this new notion and conception from their practices to better understand, clarify and theorize them.

The concept of Group Psychic Apparatus

The concept of Group Psychic Apparatus appears in a central and federating position in the conceptual corpus elaborated by René Kaës. It is part of the most rigorous Freudian metapsychological tradition and the most classically Freudian conception of the psychic apparatus. But it is also an innovative concept that poses in a totally different way the question of the articulation between the unconscious psychic processes specific to the subject and the unconscious psychic processes that concern the group, the social and the collective. In fact, it is no longer a question of opposing the subject to the social, nor of having to choose to approach the social in order to access the individual or to start from the subject in order to understand the collective, it is resolutely a question of posing these questions in a completely renewed way from an epistemological point of view. By postulating that the Group Psychic Apparatus is common to the subject and the group, René Kaës proposes a true epistemological revolution. He studies all the dimensions that the organizers of the psyche take on, which, from the socio-cultural point of view, as much as from the group psychic point of view, concern, mobilize and structure both the singular subject and any human group.

This concept cannot be dissociated from those of psychic group dimensions, group associative chain, diffraction of transference and unconscious alliances. But it is also the structural framework in which the main group positions (ideology, utopia and mythopoesis) and the main phantasmatic organizers based on the body, origins, family complexes and the subjective apparatus are inscribed.

The group psychic apparatus is common to the subject and the group. The subject and the group have in common a psychic and unconscious organization, essentially orchestrated by the principle of group dimensions. It is governed by two types of organizers. On the one hand, these are the group psychic organizers and on the other hand the socio-cultural organizers.

Three quotes from René Kaës:

“Psychoanalysis does not account for social objects, but only for their function of support or deposit, or even of framework in the formation of psychic reality: it is in this capacity that also questions them as places of inscription of the psyche”. (1993, p.99)

“The group allows the analysis of the effects of the unconscious at the knotting points of the relationships of the singular subject and the intersubjective ensembles. ” (1993, p.108)

“The group psychic apparatus (GPA) is the common psychic construction of the members of a group to constitute a group. Its main character is to mediate and exchange differences between psychic reality in its intrapsychic, intersubjective and group components, and group reality in its social and cultural aspects. ” (1976, p.171)

1/ The group psychic organizers

On the side of the singular subject and the group dimensions of his psyche, the phantasmatic of the body is the first psychic organizer of a group nature – the body is itself constituted of multiple apparatuses. The body is equipped and structured from organs and limbs that form the whole. Thus, the phantasmatic of the body is found in language to designate human groupings: to be at the head of, one’s right arm, an army corps, an esprit de corps, a group that loses a member. It is the underpinning of the representation of the group on the phantasmatic of the body.

A second group psychic organizer is the phantasmatic of origins. The original fantasies of seduction, castration and the primitive scene can be found both in the subject and in the group; they are common to both.

The third group psychic organizer: the family complexes. The subject, like the group, bases its identity on the psychic representations of the two parental imagos and the fraternal complex to which every subject refers in the play of identificatory exchanges that found our sexual and bisexual identity.

The fourth group psychic organizer is what René Kaës calls the subjective psychic apparatus, i.e. the capacity of the subject as much as the group itself to represent itself as having its own psychic life and reality, in a state of functioning, capable of giving or not giving pleasure to thinking and to thinking oneself in intimate link with oneself and in link with the other or more than one other, i.e. the group.

2/ The socio-cultural organizers

There are three group positions. They can alternate in turn, as a group can always return to a previous position that has already been overcome.

The first of these positions is the ideological position, which was the subject of a book devoted to it in 1980. René Kaës distinguishes two types of ideological position, one that is systematized, organized into a political, economic and social system, it is the ideology that is realized and which, in response to a situational or historical crisis, tries to find the supreme, absolute solution, without fault or defect, based on the ideal-self. It has a totalizing and totalitarian vision of the universe. It tolerates no difference, no dissent, no creative or innovative thought. It produces a discourse that closes off thought, erasing all difference. It is based on a triple logic of the ideal, the idea and the idol. This ideology is found deployed in all dictatorships, which was the subject of a specific work that René Kaës developed on “State Violence”.

The other form that ideology takes is more tolerable, since it is at the origin of any founding process. This ideology, based on the Ego Ideal, allows individuals to stay together, to work, to live and to make the common values and references that the group needs, to exist. The configuration that the group psychic apparatus takes on in militants, fanatics and extremists of all kinds.

This position is followed by another attempt to respond to the crisis, namely the utopian position. René Kaës tells us that this position is situated “between play and reasoning madness”. Utopia can take on a systematized form and be concretely realized in a society. As its name indicates (u-topos), it is situated in an off-place, focusing primarily on the management of space, a space elsewhere, which must be a better elsewhere. It attempts to produce change by imagining an ideal city, a well-defined island. Utopia is an illusion of change because it uses the same group or social ingredients to reorganize them differently in a specular mode.

The third position, the most theoretically accomplished, is the mythopoetic position. From the Greek mythos (history) and poesis (creation). It is in this position that the group is most creative. The group invests an object from the common cultural heritage (myth, legend, story, poem, …) and seizes it to find-create a new meaning that is relevant and highly significant for it, at this moment in its history.

By transiting through the cultural object, the members of the group exchange and share imaginary productions that unfold in the preconscious. The mythopoetic position is characterized by the potentiality, creativity and transitionalness of the processes. It is the most symbolic and symbolized position. It is the only position that engages the subject and the group in an authentic psychic work of mourning and collaborative working through.

From these three positions, René Kaës identifies a relationship that is declined according to two essential and distinct modalities, the relationship between the subject and the group, but above all the relationship of the subject to the ideological, utopian or mythopoetic object. If the subject and the group have a perfectly identical relationship with the object, René Kaës qualifies it as isomorphic in reference to a mathematical model of morphisms. If the subject and the group have a relationship with this object that tolerates ambivalence and differences (of sexes, generations and cultures), René Kaës calls it homomorphic. He calls it homomorphic, which I would translate as ‘both similar and different’.

Between these two major polarities a third modality is interposed, an unstable field that oscillates between the members of the group like a vortex, the result of the chaotic instability of the tuning of the psyches. In this case, the subjects establish a tuning in the mode of non-attunement, a non-linkage constantly attacked and displaced like a whirlpool.

Bibliographical references

Freud S. 1895 – Massen Psychologie

Kaës R. 1976 – L’appareil psychique groupal, Paris, Dunod

Kaës R. 1980 – L’idéologie ; l’idéal, l’idée, l’idole, Paris Dunod

Kaës R. 1993 – Le groupe et le sujet du groupe, Paris Dunod

Kaës R. 2007 – Un singulier pluriel, la psychanalyse à l’épreuve du groupe, Paris Dunod

Le Bon G. 1895 – Psychologie des foules, Paris, PUF (1991)

Stoetzel J. 1963 – La Psychologie sociale, Paris, Plon

Claudine Vivier Vacheret

Claudine Vacheret is Full Professeure of Lyon University, retired, psychoanalyst, member of IPA and of SFPPG (French Society of Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy). She has published many articles and chapters, published a collective book “Pratiquer les mediations”, Paris, Dunod 2016.