Fishers in the Maelstrom – Involved Detachment in the Spiral
Using Poe’s story ‘A descent into the Maelstrom’ (1842) and drawing upon the commentary of the story by Elias in his ‘’The Fisherman in the maelstrom’( Elias 2007), this presentation aims to explore the continuing relevance of this image to Group Analysis and our contemporary world.
‘The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways ; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.’ (Foreword to Descent into the Maelstrom, Poe 1845)
(NB: the story’s epigraph, from a seventeenth-century essay by Joseph Glanvill, references the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, who thought truth could be found at the bottom of a well. This obviously has relevance to the ‘maelstrom’ in Poe’s story.)
The story begins with a man whose hair has been turned white telling the narrator of his survival of an appalling encounter with the maelstrom which they look down upon from a nearby mountain. In Poe’s story 3 brothers set out to fish the northerly ocean in an area fraught with danger from whirlpools (the maelstrom) . An unexpected change in weather precipitates them into extreme peril but let us first consider some further images.
Produced at the outbreak of the 2nd world war, Picasso’s Night Fishing in Antibes (1939) evokes for me the group working to get hold of deeper and perhaps unconscious processes in their developing matrix.The paradoxical Beauty of the natural world, both violent and peaceful at the same time, seem to anticipate the international conflict to come at a transitional time. Two young women look on at the scene. One is licking an ice-cream whilst holding her bicycle.The world on the edge of the maelstrom perhaps as it is today.
Paul Klee’s Goldfish (1925) speaks of the ineffable beauty and complexity of our unconscious life. The other fish seem to be fleeing its presence or making way for its significance. But in seeking to capture these qualities in the group perhaps with the spears of interpretive exploration, what are the risks of destroying that which we seek to articulate or does all transformation engender processes of loss?
Our structures of sitting together whether they be the snowflake pattern seating of social dreaming, the spiral or concentric arrangements of the Large Group or the simple egalitarian circle, produce interactive possibilities whose dynamics could be understood as predictably unpredictable or unpredictably predictable. The pattern produces familiar and recognisable phenomena but in expressions or configurations which maybe or perhaps always are, novel like the Mandelbrot Set with its infinite self-replication but also infinite complexity (God’s thumbprint). Thus possibilities arise through the participation of the unique individuals involved where patterns repeat themselves but potentially in infinitely complex ways.
Relief Disques, Robert Delaunay, 1936
The paintings of Sonia and Robert Delaunay use the circular motif to explore the dynamism of relationships of colour in a manner which evokes for me the complexity of relationships within the group.
Responses to situations within the group may be determined not only by present circumstances but also by the accumulated and intergenerational experiences embodied over millennia for example fight flight and pairing tendencies or the complex politics of primate hierarchies with their aggression, reparation and alliance negotiating dynamics (De Waal 2019).
“But the actual decision as to what to do, what skeletal muscles to move, had to be taken at the non-automatic cerebral levels, patterned by collective and individual experiences” (Elias 2007)
.
The decentering of people through the Copernican revolution is mirrored through the group analytic process where the narcissism of the individual has to adapt to the presence of others. “The severe jolt to people’s elementary self-love entailed in the assertion of learned people that the earth was moving around the sun is often forgotten today.” (Elias 2007).
We return to Poe’s story where the brother’s ship has been drawn into the maelstrom. One is instantly killed, another lies panic stricken at the bottom of the boat. However one brother manages to observe that small objects are rising to the surface and sees a means of rescue. He determines to strap himself to a barrel and throw himself into the maelstrom.This is the quality of action which fascinated Elias which he termed ‘Involved Detachment’, the ability to be immersed in experience but to be able to think at the same time. However Elias thought that our achievements in detachment eg through scientific accomplishments were not matched by a corresponding emotional maturity. We were still over involved and at risk of destroying each other.
“At the level of people’s life with each other, at the social level, the measure of detachment in thought and action lags far behind that which we have reached at the physical and biological levels.” (Elias 2007). In their dealings with “nature”, people have reached a steadily advancing standard of detachment and danger- control. In their dealings with each other, standards of detach ment and danger-control are lower, and in some spheres, for example, in inter-state relations, not much above the level of early people (Elias 2007).
And so one brother ropes himself to a barrel, throws himself overboard. We will see later what happens next but for me the analogy is one of risk taking in the group. There are times when the risks of speaking in the group seem fraught with danger. Better perhaps to keep quiet rather than question existing narratives which might threaten the status quo power relations of the situation and jeopardise the implicit alliances that might preserve one from becoming a scapegoat. The maelstrom stands therefore for the powerful forces of these dynamics which threaten not only destruction but also the significance of processes of seperation and transformation.
Magritte’s 1937 painting (La Reproduction Interdite) evokes the significance of the reflexive process in the development of involved detachment. Reflexivity allows for the possibility that we can ‘see’ ourselves as if from the eyes of others. Metaphorically we can see the back of our head.
Elias had a temporal view of the development of the capacity for involved detachment.He believed that earlier societies were more driven by emotional involvement and magico-mythical ideas and had not yet developed the benefits of detachment which came with the scientific revolution. He can be critiqued for a Eurocentric view which tends to privilege detachment and splits the capacity for reflexivity from knowing the world through emotional receptivity.
This painting of Joseph Wright of Derby (1785) depicts the widow of an Indian chief watching the arms of her deceased husband spreading out the skies of a sunrise.
In Wright’s 1771 painting ‘The Alchymist”, the German alchemist Hennig Brandt can be seen discovering phosphorus during an experiment with fermented urine in 1669. Like other alchemists, Brandt had been trying to make the Philosophers Stone; a magical substance that could turn base metals into gold.
Elias saw particular situations as transitional in the sense that both magico-mythical ideas were present alongside the insights of scientific inquiry.
In Wright’s 1766 A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on an Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in the Place of the Sun, the decentering of man is further apparent.The emphasis here is on scientific rationality. However the image still retains a sense of intense wonder and emotional involvement.
Elias remained pessimistic about the stability of achievements gained through what he saw as civilising processes, the ability for peoples to moderate their impulsivity and potential violence through increasing capacities for detachment. The veneer of apparent civilisation was thin and easily undermined as is apparent in Paul Nash’s 1919 painting ‘The Menin Road’ which depicts the ravaged landscape of the first world war.
‘The lowering of status and the loss of caste of a nation-state within the hierarchy of states is widely felt, among the individuals who form this state, as a personal loss of caste. Not infrequently, they revolt against their collective fate and try to turn the clock back – even violently. Unable to adjust their we-image to the realities, they may engage others in power probes and tests of strength and build up fantasy images of their country, trying to prove to themselves and the world at large that nothing has changed.’ (Elias 2007).
Alongside the hypothetical ideas of tentative progression which Elias postulates are the ever present ways in which people tend to configure themselves in terms of identity. It is difficult to conceive of a sense of I without a corresponding We with whom to identify with.
We return again to Poe’s story and witness our narrator as he slowly rises to the surface only to see his boat and siblings go to their doom in the depths of the maelstrom. Thus it is this person’s ability to detach himself in his intense involvement which saves him. This forms also a helpful analogy to the difficulties of group work where over involvement without the capacity to think can be overwhelming although this may be indeed a phase. Similarly too much detachment makes it impossible to connect with others and may result in dehumanising.
In order to live, we need to be able to differentiate, to establish that This is clearly different from That. We seem particularly drawn to the simplicity of binaries and create endless reductionist dichotomies:
Black or white
Women or men
Success or failure
Good or bad
Friend or enemy
Involvement and detachment
Body and mind
Reason and emotion
Primary process and secondary process
Often particular dichotomised qualities may be conflated with groups of people in highly reductionist ways eg:
Women=emotion, Men=reason
Paradox and complexity are avoided, possibly even subversive within particular ideologies, particularly those which rely upon Us and Them formulations.
Barnet Newman’s 1970 ‘Unfinished Painting’ speaks to this binary tendency which suggests that a view is complete and somehow unquestionable. The world is constructed as ‘we’ say it is. Nothing more to think about. Yet Newman deliberately undermines this notion by calling his painting unfinished. Newman thought that none of his paintings were ever finished and that the process of ongoing becoming was a feature of his practice. As we view his image our experiences of the interdependencies of these two colour blocks may shift and change.
Although Elias tends to emphasise the benefits of detachment and the difficulties of involvement other commentators on modernity have seen numerous problems with an inflation of rationality, technicality and detachment. Baumann (2000) explicitly connects modernity with the horrors of the Holocaust citing moral indifference, instrumental reasoning and bureaucratic rationalities as formative features.The holocaust is not here seen as an isolated event but a product of modernity that reappears in various forms . Giorgio Agamben develops this in his notion of Homo Sacer (Kanwar 2006), the rendering of some human beings as outside of the law so that anyone might kill them.
Arendt (Baehr 2010) who inspired Baumann held similar views, arguing controversially that Adolf Eichmann was a very ordinary German man caught up in a society that legitimised and spoke in euphemisms about the Final Solution (The banality of evil). According to Eichmann, he was just doing his job and according to the law.
If we collapse either pole of the involvement detachment dynamic then difficulties may arise. We have discussed the difficulties presented in modernity by a focus on technical achievement devoid of moral ethos, the overly detached position.We have learned increasingly how to differentiate, categories and control the world around us and that has brought many achievements. We have been to the moon and nearly eliminated smallpox and polio for example but we are still at risk of destroying each other and the planet on which we depend.
One way of thinking about these poles of involvement and detachment would be to return to Freud’s notion of primary and secondary modes of thinking (Freud 1999).Secondary process is the differentiated world of consciousness with detachment a cumulative capacity whilst primary process is exemplified by the world of our dream lives where time, space and differentiation can all be reassembled and condensed through free association. It is also potentially the world of psychosis when we cannot maintain the filters of consciousness and are overwhelmed by undifferentiated unconscious processes.The above is an image by the Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner which to me suggests a human maelstrom. Pushwagner himself, suffered for many years from difficulties with psychosis.
Here is De Chirico’s 1918 masterpiece ‘The disquieting muses’ which seems to position the viewer in a complex relationship with reality. So perhaps inevitably, given that we have evolved both consciousness which differentiates and has a predictable spatio temporal context and an unconscious way of relating that is not bounded by the former constraints, I argue for the mutuality and interdependency of primary and secondary process. Involvement and detachment should be seen as not separate or split apart but but paradoxically both necessary and inter-permeable.Therefore without collapsing this paradox as a polarisation, Involved detachment or detached involvement then becomes a quality which following Elias might be seen as a healthy and developmental achievement for help with life’s maelstroms and perhaps also as intergenerational and inter cultural achievements.
The spiral image of the maelstrom occurs throughout the observable universe through galactic processes which may draw light and matter into a black hole where gravity is so dense that nothing can return. The Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven suggests that each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another “baby universe ( Popławski 2021). These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.
Finally Elias points to the tendency in an evolving universe to develop ever increasing relationships of complexity and interdependency. He contrasts this idea with one in which the universe is seen as unchanging and representing immutable law.
“It is tied to a hierarchy of values according to which it is the highest task of science to disclose immutable patterns and abstract them from diachronic change, which is usually devalued as the merely historical. The adherence of many present day theoreticians to the immutable law corresponds to the reverence for the idea of immutable truths the highest symbol of the task of all scientific research” (Elias 1987).