The Polyhedral Aspect of the Group Matrix: the Necessary Structure for Integration
Abstract
Based on what Foulkes has underlined, it is possible to catch different levels in the intersubjective interviewing among participants in a clinical group. One of them has to do with the primordial level that, in the Jungian perspective, is structured through archetypical patterns.
The archetypes are the expressions of the psyche and the foundation matrix and they can explain the universality of some recurrent images emerging in the group association. The appearance in a group of archetypal images, which we can identify through dreams or other imaginal forms, indicates the evolutive process crossing the group. These images are numinous and can activate a deep emotive involvement in the participants and mobilize different configurations able to interconnect the individual selves. We hypothesise that the integrative dynamic in a group is allowed by the creation of a matrix with a polyhedric structure. Each participant assumes in it, with a part of the own self, a transpersonal function. An integrative process aims to orient the group toward open alterity and projection in the future.
Keywords: group analytic psychodrama, foundation matrix, archetype, intersubjectivity
The setting
The group analytical psychodrama setting (Gasca,2012) is circular (there is no stage and separation between the protagonist and the audience). There is no warming up, but a group-free association. The leader’s attention is focused on the group process and he selects a scene based on the group dynamic.
After the representation of a scene, another one can follow. It can belong to the same protagonist (based on his/her free association) or another participant. The protagonist’s doubling is made by the leader and it aims to an emotive amplification, based on the character’s position in the theatrical situation. At the end of the psychodrama representation, each person who has interpreted a role expresses his/her feelings and associations related to playing that specific character. At the end of each session, a recorder says something about what he/she perceived about the symbolic process in the here and now. The leader’s focus is to let emerge an imaginal process and to synchronize the individual and the group self. Storolow (1992) to define the connection between individual and group used Kohut’s definition of transmuting relationship. Napolitani (1987) spoke of the introjection of others’ psychic parts.
Brief clinical vignette
A 40-year-old patient, who entered our psychotherapeutic group for her generative difficulties, aroused after sexual abuse when she was 15, narrated a recurring dream:” I kill a person, a woman. I do not know who she was. I buried her in my parents’ garden. The police officers come and accuse me of it, but I deny the responsibility. At the same time, I feel deeply guilty. I woke up suddenly and I felt a pain in my breast”.
During the psychodrama role-playing, the patient imagines being close to an open hole, but she realizes, while she is representing her body in this situation, that she is not seeing any cadaver’s body on the hole. Anyway, she thought that the woman had her face addressed toward the ground, so her eyes could not see what was happening behind her back. It was evident that the dream was re-enacting something deeply hidden in the memory of her body.
After the role-playing, she made a verbal association, the absence of the cadaver made her feel like she was without vital energy. She felt touching something burning, similar to the impossibility of giving life to a baby after her early abortion due to abuse.
The invisible cadaver emerges in a group phase characterized by fear and death topics due to Covid 19 and when the media narration was particularly underlining the impossibility for many people to see their dead relatives in hospital or other sanitary recoveries.
The dream shared in the group makes visible what was unconsciously removed, or dissociated, not only in the patient’s life but also in the group’s social unconscious.
The question arousing in the leader’s head is: “Why did the mortification of the patient’s feminine identity come up so strong in that phase of the group dynamic and after so long time in the patient’s life? “.
The therapist had the perception of immanence, something that while emerging was synchronizing the patients’ inner world with the group, as in the Kubrick cube. The image of the invisible cadaver presented a strong mythopoetic connotation because the group recognized that it was representing for everybody the feeling of something stolen, not buried and able to activate a big intimacy among all participants.
Theorization
Jung, differently from Freud, considered the unconscious not the space of repression, but a creative dimension of the psyche and the archetypal forms are responsible for the figuration emerging in the relationship between unconscious and consciousness.
The main function of the archetypes is to protect, to contain, to allow the representation of negative experiences and their patterns and to hold the dissociating pressure of strong emotions.
Also, the dream responds to this goal, projecting the subject toward a solution to his/her conflict and overcoming dissociation.
Jung conceived the dreaming process similar to the representation of the tragedy in the Greek Theatre. There is a stage, an exposition (the problem Presentation) the peripetia (representing a catastrophe or a transformation as the hero in a fairy tale) and lysis or solution. In psychotherapy, we can find this structure in a singular dream, or along the progression in a series of dreams. Some characters in the dreams are governed by archetypical figures and mythological dimensions, while others can reflect real psychological dimensions, belonging to the personal history or the here and now of the relational network. Sometimes many members of a family or a group can produce in the same night similar dreams, related to what is crossing the intersubjective context. The archetypal images help the individuals to visualize what is dissociated, the unknown or unconscious aspects of their experience (for example transgenerational events).
Jung (1934,1967) pointed out that trauma has the effect of disintegrating personality. The dissociated parts function as autonomous complexes which reveal themselves as aliens in personal life. These complexes cannot be approached through verbal and rational consciousness but through symbolic representation. In the clinical vignette, the dream narrated at the beginning of the session expresses something unsolved in the patient’s history, not only for the symbolic meaning of the dead woman but also for the failure in the dream structure, which did not help the patient to find a solution. The dream was like a nightmare and the only way to come out was to wake up suddenly. The opportunity to symbolize what was hidden and to let emerge what was dissociated came up during the psychodrama enactment.
The topic of the cadaver who does not receive adequate sepulchre is recurring in many myths and fairy tales. We found it in Sophocles’ tragedy: Antigone represents the traumatic conflict between the logic of power and the logic of the heart. To solve this conflict, Antigone chooses to give a sepulchre to her brother, even if it implicates her death.
M.L.Von Franz (1974) describes many popular tales in which a spectre or a part of it meets the hero along his journey. Its symbolic presence is usually related to grief not elaborated. The spectre personifies something of the hero’s shadow and his evil dimension is deeper in relationship to the unrecognition of his pain.
Usually, when dissociation comes out in a group, it attacks its unity and the leader is often fastened to a witness function, but in this session, this did not happen. The dramatization gave development to the dream and to the related anguish opening a symbolic image of what was not experienced, denied to the individual and collective self. The dramatization opened the embodiment of emptiness.
The function of the body in the group analytic psychodrama
In Group analytic psychodrama, the enactment unveils the twist between the patient’s inner world and aspects of the foundation matrix. The enactment shows the purpose of the complex, of what is dissociated, but at the same time, the archetypal process governs the interviewing and allows the possibility of a transformation, giving birth to a project, with a new perspective of the world. In our clinical situation, the surprise related to the absence of the cadaver’s body came up thanks to a group co-construction: the therapeutic doubling (a sort of amplification of the patient’s active imagination), the way the group interpreted the different characters and to the translation of the feelings in a symbolic association. So, the patient’s embodiment is related to an intersubjective process.
In this interconnection, the psychodramatic scene assumes the same function of dream telling (Friedman, 2004): something that opens a hermeneutic process keeping visible what is invisible. The context of the meta-theatre (relationships within all the inner theatres) is the main media transforming the individual objects into collective symbols. It is not the individual act to be interpreted, but the inter-bodies play (Husserl,1913) (a body in action in relationship with other bodies in space and in time) as the space able to reveal the group configuration and the new evolutions.
The inter-bodies play lets emerge an emotive experience of surprise (Stern, 2004) that changes the perception of a situation and its emotive state of mind, without a verbal and rational consciousness (Stern, 2004).
Now a second question arises from these theoretical assumptions:” Which relationship there is between the group configuration and the image emerging during the representation of the patient’s dream?”
Foulkes (1990) defined different levels in the group interconnections. One of these has to do with the primordial level, that in the Jungian paradigm is structured through archetypal forms. The archetypes are the expression of founding aspects of the psyche and are responsible for the universality of certain images and role patterns. Archetypes reflect aspects of a relationship; their evolution gives us notice of the change in the group. The emergence of specific archetypal images reveals something of the convergent process. This convergence can explain their numinous effect and the deep involvement within participants, mobilizing the inner complexes inside each one of them and the shadow aspects crossing the group.
The polyhedral aspect of the group matrix and the otherness
Foulkes’ concept of dynamic group matrix implies the disappearance of the polarization between object and subject, underlying what is linking, joining the different parts. The dynamic group matrix represents an organizing system of the relationships among participants at different levels, connecting the unconscious to the conscious.
The concept of a network, with a meta psychic and unifying effect, supposes a constant transcendent process either from the collective, social, transpersonal, or transgenerational unconscious, then from the individual unconscious ties, such as the inner familiar matrix (Lo Verso- Di Blasi, 2011) opening a differentiation process. The transcendent process is at the basis of individuation, but at the same time, it is based on a group well interrelated. Our hypothesis considers the dynamic group matrix as a field not hierarchically structured but organized as a polyhedron (Sordano, 2023). A polyhedron, in geometry, is based on connections within the different vertex of the structure crossing a midpoint. On the vertex, we locate the different inner roles, related to specific states of mind (including those related to autonomous complex), joining each other not based on a twin ship, but based on complementariness, like a symbolic marriage. In the core, the transmuting selves process. Considering the complexity of this process, based on unconscious partnerships, it is impossible to predict the structure underlying a group dynamic matrix, but we can observe this alchemic mating based on what emerges in the group. If the polyhedral is dynamically interconnected, without splits or interruptions, and the mating is unstable (the couples are connoted by weak bonds and triangulable), it opens to the integration of the new, of the otherness, as Levinas (1980) defined the unknown, the experience not based on similarities.
The change in the leadership
If the leader, or group conductor, moves in this theoretical perspective, his role in the group is more active than the previous Foulkes’s definition. His function is not restricted to the space of mediation or opening a corrective emotive experience, but he contributes actively to the transcendent process in the group. He must use a theatrical mind, observing the common symbolic scenario, holding the group dialogue in the crack of the symbolic process, in the splitting phenomena, in the stiffness of the partnerships and so on.
The leader has the opportunity to perceive the cohesion in the polyhedral group matrix through: the archetypal images and the process developed after their emergence; the flexibility in the triangular interconnections and the translation of reflective competencies within participants; the development of the belonging feeling and the appearance of new and surprising contents while playing psychodrama.
This leader’s position is closer to the one described by Bion (1970), Bleger (1967), Baranger (1990) and particularly Ogden (2005) while defining the concept of intersubjective third. The focalization is on the content emerging while acting in the therapeutic relationship.
Discussion
Closing this presentation, we can affirm that the Jungian Groupanalytic Psychodrama is not focused on the adaptive function of the Ego (Ego training action), but on the necessity to manage the extensive part of the self, which does not coincide with the individual inner mind.
The main goal of this approach is to transcend the Individual Ego and to work on unconscious group patterns so as to create a whole, interconnected self, able to redefine what is broken and dissociated in the inner and transpersonal relationships.
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Angela Sordano,
Full Member of Group Analytic Society International, FEPTO (Federation European Psychodrama Training Organizations, I.A.G.P. (International Association of Group Psychotherapy and Process), C.O.I.R.A.G (Confederazione delle Organizzazioni Italiane per la Ricerca Analitica sui Gruppi), Past President APRAGIPSICODRAMMA. Actually, she is a trainer in COIRAG as a Supervisor and for Group Analytic Psychodrama; a member of the Editorial Staff for the review: “Gruppi” and a researcher in the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association ARPA .