Our Rich History: Has it been Lost?

My experience of the International Workshop on the Frankfurt Constellation in Frankfurt hosted by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gruppenanalyse und Gruppenpsychotherapie (D3G)

This workshop was eventually held in May 2024 after it had been postponed from last October when the outbreak of the Gaza War made it impossible for Israeli colleagues to attend. It was the brainchild of Thomas Mies who has long been concerned with the loss of the legacy of the Frankfurt Constellation to Group Analysis when Foulkes was forced to flee Germany in April 1933.

I found the experience, taking in the atmosphere and innovative thinking that Foulkes was a part of inspiring. I came away full of new ideas and connections, but I also felt deep sadness that so much of the fruits of their sustained and combined creative endeavour seems to have been lost to group analysis. The days in Frankfurt echoed my own history. Perhaps the strength of my reaction related to the loss of what came with the daily bread in the part of my family that also had to leave Germany in a hurry.

Thomas opened the workshop with a question that had previously puzzled many of us.

Why do we need the concept of constellation? Why not the concept of network, which is quite familiar in group-analytical thinking?

He answered by referring to the German philosopher, Dieter Henrich (1927–2022) whose research into German idealism shifted focus from individual authors and texts to various forms of constellations. Mies clarifies that by attributing the development of ideas to ‘self-sufficient heroic figures of thought’ does not adequately explain how ideas emerge and proposed instead, that ideas should be attributed to philosophical constellations that emerge from ‘thick’ interrelations between persons, theories, problems and documents in the context of face-to-face communication and joint presence. A constellation also encourages a form of research that seeks to make a past understandable in terms of its potential to enable fruitful transitions from the historical to current ways of thinking that fits perfectly with the richness that emerged in Frankfurt in the 1920s and 30s and was so cruelly shut own. He then asks,

… what subject would be more urgently in need of such orientated research than the Frankfurt constellation, whose brutal destruction by the Nazis is unparalleled in modern European intellectual history? And how much more urgent is it for a new reading of Foulkes, whose thinking was fundamentally influenced by this destruction and whose greatest fruitfulness is shown not in what he was able to work out, but in the numerous and promising germs of thought that can be found in his work on careful reading.

It was an inspiring period described by Norbert Elias when he was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno Prize in October 1977.

The Frankfurt University under its chancellor Kurt Riezler had attracted a circle of men whose names and works still enjoy great respect today, men such as Wertheimer, the Gestalt psychologist, Goldstein, the neurologist, Tillich, the theologian and philosopher, Adolf Lowe the national economist, Erich Fromm, Marcuse, Mannheim, Horkheimer and Adorno, to name but a few. Not all circles were in close contact with each other. But in any case, these Frankfurt years were among the richest and most stimulating of my life.[1]

The constellation centred around the Institute for Social Research [Institut für Sozialforschung] which was opened in 1923, closely connected to the Department of Sociology of the Frankfurt University and housed in the same specially built Avant Gard building. Their intention was to devote themselves to connecting the theory and history of socialism with the labour movement. It was a unique gathering of German, mostly Jewish historians and sociologists, who were concerned with rethinking Marxism, its praxis as a form of self-creating action, discovering the connection between political authoritarianism and the beliefs of individuals. They organized joint activities where fruitful cross fertilization between un-orthodox Marxism and red psychoanalysis took place. Their concern was with understanding the structural dynamics of society, through critical theory to confront the prevailing social and political conditions with their unrealized possibilities. With the rise of National Socialism, they devoted themselves to research on authoritarianism, the analysis of anti-Semitism, and the struggle against fascism.

Its destruction when Hitler came to power in 1933 had far-reaching consequences right up to the present day. Closed in July 1933 by the Gestapo, it relocated to Columbia University in New York via Geneva and although it returned to Frankfurt as the Frankfurt School in 1951, it was without many of its original members. In the meantime, they all had to flee Germany, or be murdered, not only because they were Jews, apart from Paul Tillich who was a protestant theologian, but also because they were Marxists. The remnants of this time constituted a lost dream that could not be mourned and although much of the thinking underpins group analysis, the connections to this period have now mostly been lost.

An early and important protagonist of the Frankfurt Constellation, the Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, author of the poetic little book, I and Thou, declared a few months after he was forced to leave Germany in March 1939, that a period of unprecedented cultural and intellectual cross-fertilization, evident in the work of poets, philosophers, and religious thinkers had ended.[2] “It is”, he said, “the end of the German-Jewish symbiosis” echoing Paul Tillich, who suggested that expelling the Jews from Germany caused an irreparable fissure within Deutschtum [Germandom] itself: a separation of Germans from themselves. While expressing hope that some form of continuity with the past would eventually be possible, Buber concluded, “But the symbiosis itself is over and it cannot return”. This was after the Reichsprogromnacht, when the glass fronts of Jewish shops were smashed, and most synagogues burnt down while the fire brigade stood by and watched.

When Foulkes started as a junior psychiatrist in 1926, he worked alongside the pioneering neurologist Kurt Goldstein as his assistant at the Neurological Institute, which was also attached to the Institute for Social Research. There he took part in the interdisciplinary discussions for which the Institute became famous. In 1928 Foulkes went to Vienna for his analysis with Helene Deutsch until 1930 when he returned to Frankfurt and took up the position of Director of the new Therapeutikum set up to take patients at low cost for training psychoanalysts.

Ilse Seglow (1981: 220) who knew Foulkes then, describes the atmosphere and meeting Foulkes in Frankfurt,

… for the first time in Kurt Goldstein’s lectures which I attended as a student of psychology and sociology at Frankfurt University. […] Kurt Goldstein […] had an enormous influence on lecturers and students of psychology and sociology at the then and still now famous Institut für Sozialforschung [Institute for Social Research] associated with Frankfurt University. [… ] I never experienced again an intellectual life so rich and refreshing as that of the Sociology Department at Frankfurt University in the years just before Hitler came to power. Neither the sociologists nor the philosophers, psychoanalysts, psychologists or economists, retreated in their own narrow academic specialism, but contributed from their field of knowledge and experience a liberalising approach which helped to illuminate many aspects of the current social-political climate. […] I think that Michael’s basic learning about dynamic interdependence in groups was born there in Frankfurt and associated consciously or unconsciously with […] Kurt Goldstein and with the intellectual and very specific relationships between psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists and others.[3]

For Foulkes, these were key people who influenced his thinking and sowed the seeds of group analysis. Kurt Goldstein’s open and non-hierarchical approach was key for many at the Institute including Foulkes who says, “He was my most influential teacher”. When Goldstein came to Frankfurt, he joined the pioneering work of Ludwig Edinger who had begun contacting Gestalt psychologists. Goldstein then developed these contacts into his ground-breaking co-operation with Adhémar Gelb in his clinical work with brain-damaged soldiers of the First World War. It made them both important pioneers of neuropsychology as they developed a holistic or Gestalt approach to healing brain injuries by focusing on what was healthy within the context of The Organism.[4] Elias was one of his patients.

Goldstein’s explanation of Gestalt is important for group analysts.

The ‘Gestalt’ is never a real unity, totality, or wholeness, although very close to a whole.  … although perception often tells us that the figure is separate from the ground, they always exist as a unity through the potential of creativity and openness growing out of an underlying matrix. Whether one or other of the contributing correspondents to the whole emerges as the intentional agent or as the ‘resonance chamber’ depends entirely on the frame and the wider meaning that determines the structure of the pattern/gestalt relationship.

Like a brilliantly performed tango, both dancers will never be the same and never unite. It is only through their creativity, the abstract form they jointly invent, that enables them to turn their ongoing contradictory movements into a figure of new unity, beyond anything a physical merger could achieve.

Norbert Elias is most often referred to in British circles as a central influence on Foulkes but although they met in Frankfurt, they did not know each other well until after they were both in England. Like Foulkes, Elias had been a telegraph operator in the trenches during WW1 but on the Eastern Front. He too was profoundly influenced by Goldstein as he was one of his brain damaged patients having been buried alive during the war.

According to Elias they hardly met before 1930 and it wasn’t until Foulkes first discovered Elias’ original thinking by reading his book The Civilising Process in 1936 and then wrote a very comprehensive review for Imago, Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften [Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Humanities] that he took in Elias thinking, particularly his concept of the “I-we dialectic”, and suggested that all psychoanalysts should read it.

So, what happened to this amazing flowering of ideas? As Thomas Mies explains,

At the beginning of the Nazi regime, the Frankfurt constellation was a constellation of banned authors and burnt books. But it didn’t stop there and Sigmund Freud’s audacious hope that it would be a step forward in civilisation if “only” books rather than people were burned proved to be illusory. And the books themselves were later hit much harder and more severely damaged than by this unique act of extreme intellectual barbarism. Many important books could never be written or completed; others could not find a publisher in their original language; for others, the translation problem proved to be a difficult and sometimes insurmountable hurdle; others found no interested readers in a foreign linguistic and cultural environment. In the long term, the constellation was also a constellation of texts that were sometimes published with extreme delay, sometimes even literally lost. This naturally had far-reaching consequences for the theoretical and research traditions that followed on from these books or were – however loosely – connected to them.

Foulkes (1990: 127-136) never left any doubt about the importance of his Frankfurt years not only for his professional development but for his group-analytic thinking also.[5] In his lecture in 1946, to the British Psychoanalytic Society, this was soon after Northfield, he presented his group-analytic approach to a psychoanalytic audience for the first time and draws on his Frankfurt experience to explain what he means by ‘analysis’ in group-analytic thinking. As he says,

In my approach the qualifying word ‘analysis’ does not refer to psychoanalysis alone, but reflects at least three different influences, all of which operate.

The principles evolved by Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb in their epoch-making work[…] on patients with brain-injuries […]. They termed it ‘psychological’ analysis. […]

The second influence is psychoanalysis itself. […] This refers particularly to the appreciation of unconscious meaning and the dynamics of the unconscious mind. […]

The third contributory to the meaning of the term group analysis is what may be called sociological analysis or socioanalysis. […] Karl Mannheim, in his book Diagnosis of our Time (1943), has used the term ‘group analysis’ independently, from a sociological point of view. […].[6]

As Thomas Mies explained,

To understand Foulkes’ thinking both historically in terms of its development and systematically in terms of its potential, it will therefore have to be located in what we call the Frankfurt Constellation.

Erich Fromm described himself as a social psychologist. This was a new term to explain how he considered the social dimension as crucially involved in individual psychological development. Although like most of my generation, I had read many of Erich Fromm’s books but had not discovered perhaps his most important work, the result of a very extensive psychological and sociological research study into the German Working Class in Weimar Germany in 1929 that sought to find connections between upbringing, personality, and what he called ‘Character Structure’ (‘Habitas’ by Elias) and the socio-political context all from a Marxist perspective.[7] Fromm was recruited by Horkheimer to do this research because he was a Marxist and also both a psychoanalyst and sociologist and although the research was completed, publishing the results were delayed for many decades. There have been several explanations, but it may be that the delay was due to its politically explosive potential, particularly in the context of rising National Socialism. In the 1980s it was reclaimed from the archives and published as an historical document.

Fromm description of the connection between the individual and society as a dialectical relationship between the socio-economic structure and the personal character structure linked by libidinal forces. This construction gives me a way into understanding what makes it so difficult to immigrate into a new country, a new idea or a new society.

Franz Rosenzweig, Jewish theologian, historian and philosopher, was perhaps one of most surprising discoveries for me. Although I had heard his name, I hadn’t known about his thinking and his important role in developing the concept and process of dialogue. Although de Maré quoted Martin Buber, with whom Rosenzweig was a close friend, de Maré never as far as I know, quoted Rosenzweig, despite their thinking having an uncanny similarity, not only in their approach to dialogue but also in the importance of finding meaning.

Before meeting Buber, Rosenzweig published Der Stern der Erlösung [The Star of Redemption] in 1921, a synthesis of philosophy and theology that he named ‘new thinking’.[8]

It sets out an approach to dialogue that describes the relationships between God, humanity and the world, connected by creation, revelation and redemption, always critical of any attempt to replace actual human existence with an ideal. In Rosenzweig’s scheme, revelation arises not in metaphysics but in the here and now. We are called to love God in the world, and that is redemption. In this I am reminded of de Maré’s view that the large group brings out something that is beyond human understanding, what he called a sense of “the cosmic”. Later in his life Rosenzweig continued to work closely with Buber on dialogue and translating the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible] into German, not as a story, but as a play.

From a group analytic point of view, Rosenzwieg’s approach to education was also groundbreaking. Unimpressed with the impersonal learning of the academy, he founded the Freies Juedisches Lehrhaus [House of Free Jewish Studies] in Frankfurt in 1920. There he sought to provide an open forum for people to engage in dialogue as a form of learning that allows ideas to emerge between people, rather than accumulate knowledge. Many intellectuals including Martin Buber, Erich Fromm, the feminist Bertha Pappenheim, and psychoanalyst Leo Loewenthal were involved.

According to Thomas Mies, the important role that the Lehrhaus played in Frankfurt in the early history of the constellation is largely forgotten. Rosenzweig too was ignored for a long time and only recognised in the late 20th century through Martin Buber and Emmanuel Lévinas. A quote from Rosenzweig that stayed with me in afterwards, “There is no hope in the world, but it is something we have to work hard to create.”

Martin Buber also a Jewish theologian, philosopher and sociologist, who is mostly known for his little poem-book I and Thou (Leipzig, 1922). With the outbreak of the World War, Buber witnessed what he thought was a form of Gemeinschaft [a traditional form of community that was marked by fraternal bonds of mutual solidarity] but over time, he came to realise that it was a pseudo-Gemeinschaft designed to blind the nation to the macabre, gory reality of war, fuelled by the enmity and mistrust between peoples and engendered by exuberant patriotism when the Kaiser’s armies were mobilised. As he struggled to wrench himself from the spell of Kriegserlebnis [war experience], I and Thou (Ich und Du) emerged from Buber’s personal struggle by creating a kind of manifesto for working out the existential grammar of Gemeinschaft, grounded and sustained by interpersonal relations bonded by mutual trust, which he thought had been eclipsed by the onrush of the bourgeois urban culture driven by a competitive, socially divisive ethos.

He was appointed adjunct Professor of General Religious Studies in 1930 and before that, lecturer in the study of Jewish Religion and Ethics at the University of Frankfurt from 1923. Buber knew Fuchs through the open discussions at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus. Mies suggests that it is possible that Group Analysis, such as the primary socialization of the individual and corresponding concepts of interpersonal dynamics, relate to Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. It certainly relates to de Maré’s ideas.

During the Cold War, the language of dialogue – of “genuine conversation” – seemed to Buber to be the most urgent and indispensable prerequisite for overcoming the causes of war and violence. In his definition of “genuine conversation”, he drew on the elements of the philosophy of dialogue that had dominated his thinking since the First World War and came to the fore again in the 1950s. He suggested it is a conversation,

… in which each of the partners perceives, affirms and confirms the other, even where he stands in opposition to him, as this existing other; only in this way can the opposition certainly not be eliminated from the world, but it can be humanly carried out and brought to overcoming.

Karl Mannheim was a professor of sociology and political economy of the Sociology Department of the Goethe University in Frankfurt from 1930 to 1933. His theory challenges the notion that intellectual history is an autonomously developing sequence of ideas suggesting that there can be no neutral knowledge about history or society, no knowledge that is possible for all groups to endorse.

There are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured (Mannheim 1955: 2).[9]

When it comes to questions of how to interpret society and history, we will forever stand against one another. Worlds will always struggle against worlds (Mannheim 1986: 55).[10]

Mannheim’s main point is that different thought styles not only deliver different answers to substantive political issues, but each thought style also specifies a certain realm of reality that prescribes the thinking.

Paul Tillich was a Philosopher and Protestant theologian who taught theology at the University of Frankfurt from 1924. He was among the first group of professors and the first non-Jewish professor to be dismissed by Hitler for opposing Nazism. There is a story about how he led a group of 80 frightened students out past an intimidating gathering of brown shirts, by instructing them to look away and walk silently. “The courageous, inoffensive, silent exit from the building may have surprised the horde of thugs so much that they remained inactive at the crucial moment” (Korn, ).[11]

His description of his living experience provides a crucial lesson about maintaining relationship in the face of the other who is completely different.

I thought that the concept of the boundary might be a fitting symbol for the whole of my personal and intellectual development. At almost every point, I have had to stand between alternative possibilities of existence, to be completely at home in neither and to take no definitive stand against either (1936).[12]

Tillich did not see it as the mediation of two spheres within a third, which consists in the border as such. For him the symbol of the border, aims at the equal existence of two different spheres that are clearly differentiated from one another and cannot be converted one into the other. Both maintain their right to exist, in the face of the other: and not in the sense of a complementarity, so that one would need the other, but in the sense of a genuine independence, which nevertheless does not represent a lack of relationship, but leads to the fact that one gains its emphasis from the contrast of the other.

Tillich’s love of communication was combined with the talent for being able to stay in both spheres separated by a border as in the world of the secular and the world of the religious [Protestant and Jewish] and in the culture of Europe and the culture of the United States. Precisely because Tillich was aware of the existence of the other as a genuinely equal possibility – this is how his statement must be understood – it was not possible for him to decide unconditionally in favour of one in a way that would have resulted in a narrow-minded positioning against the other.

Both psychotherapy and theology, doctor and priest, have to do with fear.

Ilse Seglow was a group analyst, a communist and long-time friend of Norbert Elias. She knew Foulkes in Frankfurt and in London. It is rumoured that as she was a woman she was excluded from the initiation of the Institute of Group Analysis London. Not daunted she started the Institute of Group Analysis Heidelberg. It was based on an open and emancipatory ethos, welcoming training for people who were not in the health professions. There was a problem though, they could not get recognition for their work with specific client groups or become members of the German statutory health insurance system.

The Café Laumer was nearby and a place of meeting for. Some of us got a taste of this gorgeous place imagining the fiery discussions that must have taken place there.

By the end of the last large group many of us were feeling very sad. We had to bid farewell to each other, to the richness of our encounters and also concluding that we had witnessed a forgotten history that is an important part of the Foundation Matrix of Group Analysis.

References

[1] Elias, N (1977) Adorno speech: Respect and Criticism. Speech for the award of the Theodor W. Adorno Prize on 2 October 1977.

[2] Buber, M (1937) I and Thou (Trans. R G Smith) Edinburgh: Clark.

[3] Seglow, I (1981) Michael Foulkes Remembered, Group Analysis, 14.

[4] Goldstein, K ([1934] 2000) Der Aufbau des Organismus [The Organism: a holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man]. New York: Zone Books.

[5] Foulkes, SH (1990) On group analysis. In Selected Papers of SH Foulkes: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis. London: Karnac.

[6] Foulkes, S H (1990). On group analysis. In S.H. Foulkes, Selected Papers: Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis. London: Karnac.

[7] Fromm, E (1980). German Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Trans. W Boss). Stuttgart: Berg.

[8] Rosenzweig, F (1985) The Star of Redemption. (Translated W Hallo). Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press.

[9] Mannheim, K (1985).

[10] Mannheim [1925] 1986). Conservatism. A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

[11] Korn, K. ( ).

[12] Tillich, P (1970). My Travel Diary, 1936: Between Two Worlds. SCM-Canterbury Press.