Ceci n’est pas une pipe: From the circle to the screen – Using video-links to do GA?

Some critical questions concerning radical changes in treatment caused by the onset of  the Covid19 virus and the name of the new game. A critical essay

Introduction

The nice heading taken from Haim Weinberg’s webinar about online group therapy is significant and is already saying much. I’ll try to formulate myself as much as I can, question wise, so as not to pretend I’ve got the answers.

However, I want to remark at first that I do not mind working online to help groups in different settings, be it kind of therapy, supervision’s exchange of ideas or whatever. I work at times this way myself and if it means applying GA knowledge that the therapist or leader has, no problem.

In this time of crisis, I’ve put my groups on hold, 14 days, as an early holiday break and offered individual consultation to those who wanted it, having phoned all of them. I have five groups, 40 patients, and for the time being 10 persons in individual therapy one in psychoanalytical training therapy and two in supervision. In addition to this, comes continuous evaluations.  Now I’m online with all groups, but not with Zoom.

Reason for reaction 1: Medium is the Message I

The reasons for producing this essay are twofold. Firstly, and this didn’t become so clear in my response on the GASi forum, was the strong reaction I had to what looked like a little too fast reaction on behalf of the GASi administration. They seemed to just accept an offer from Haim Weinberg for a free webinar on the media platform Zoom. That’s all fine, if you look away from the fact that the medium is the message as H.M. McLuhan (1989) formulated it. That means that Weinberg was not just giving a lecture on doing online groups, out of his good intentions and generosity. Implicitly he was also selling the message that Zoom is the tool to do it with. Usually that is no problem, but in this case the implications are what follows. How many of the GASi members would start using this tool, on how many patients and groups, and had the platform been validated against the European standards for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)? It had not! One could argue that this was a crisis and GASi was in good faith, because Zoom was supposed to have end to end user security on their more advanced program. It turned out that this was not so, and the security was only user to server secured. The server was located in the US and China, then, with a cultural custom for buying and selling information far more unregulated than in the EU. Also in the EU, there is the law of the right to be forgotten on the net. Individuals can demand that their data on the internet shall be erased. So, my reaction was that this was acting in a crisis situation, without proper reflection on what the implications of this acting might lead to.

It seems that Zoom is used now everywhere, and I’m sure security will come by and by. But when looking up this in the homepages of the Directorate for E-Health, Zoom was not included.  I now work with online groups on another, security-validated platform.

Reason for reaction 2: Is this Group Analysis?

My second problem is when someone equalizes (=) online therapy with Group Analysis because I believe it’s not the same – as in Magritte’s (1929) picture of a pipe is not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe.  Earl Hopper called a manuscript of mine “mashed potatoes” in an exchange on the group analytic forum. He is himself a great potato-masher, by the way.  I think this is also a good characterisation for Group Analysis – a mixing together of theories from many traditions: Psychoanalysis, Gestalt theory, Systems thinking, as Group Analysis is becoming ever more internationalized. This is all well and maybe good, but if one does not sort out something special in the method that deserves the term “Group Analysis”, we easily will find ourselves in a situation where anything goes.

This second problem I have therefore, concerns definition of the theory and practice of Group Analysis. On the one hand we have theories, on the other we have the practice. These two things have to be connected by what we call method, preferably scientific method in some form. Now a theory that is not connected to a practice, remains an academic intellectual activity without any pragmatic implications. Besides if a theory should be used in any practical manner it should be embedded in some first cause concepts. That is concepts that are accepted as fundamental and not in need for further casual arguments. Such concepts only need inter-validation with other fundamental concepts and some form of reliability, to justify as sound theory. This does not mean that the theory is beyond scrutiny and critique. This is one of the reasons for defining Group Analytic concepts, that I have been working on the last five years within GASi.

Concerning practice, it has to be connected to theory and epistemological sanity embedded in a sound conceptual framework. If not, the practice will remain among the likes of a sect or religious flock! That is why method is so important as a connector of theory and practice into the method we call Group Analysis.

A clinical method cannot therefore be adjusted to change by other means than sound arguments. Not because of a crisis is happening, or maybe because a majority want it to be different. Because of this a turn from the circle to the screen cannot be called Group Analysis, in my view, however much influential persons want it to be so. It has to be given another name, or at least credential arguments, so that the clinical method has a reliable and valid base calling it Group Analysis.

It’s a question also if Group Analysis is something residing in the conductor, only, or if it’s something in the frame and the organizing of the communicational exchange. I believe it’s both. If we stay true to the belief that the group is more than the sum of its parts this have to be so.

Remember in times of crisis truth is often the first victim. Therefore, I believe it’s important to see if Group Analytic Method, as a clinical practice, have something special that can merit its’ name and not be easily exchanged for something else.

The room (square) with the circle

The space of the room becomes such a special place, shared by all the participants. When I started GA the frame or boundaries was something very much held in high esteem. Everything in the room was to be held as much as possible constant so not to conflate the free-floating discussion. I remember how strong reactions I got from a group in 1992, when I was moving to a new office. It was the topic of discussion in the group for several sessions.

Also, the room soon become a kind of sacrosanct place where the group establishes rituals and strong norms when they attend. For example, the silence when I come into the room, signalling we start the group at the strike of the hour. Some patients even told me you should not be in other places, you belong here. This all belongs to the imaginary and the symbolic.

Then nature strikes back as the real crushes in with the plague and creating floating realities. Mind you the real and reality are not the same. Realities are something we create as we are inscribed in (the Oedipal situation), and something we react to in imaginary or symbolic ways to whatever happens to us. Some psychoanalysts are calling it psychic reality. Than you have consensual and conventional reality that still belong to the realm of the symbolic but socially connected. The real is what we experience when crisis strikes verging on catastrophe from nature, and annihilation threats are overwhelming. Bion called this the big O.

The Medium is the Message II

One can argue that there always have been changes in treatment procedures, and the difference now is the speed of adaption because of the crisis. I think however there are changes and changes. When we move into the virtual world we go into a different world of the imaginary, and that this kind of change belong to a different order.

I believe a good place to start is reminding of H.M. McLuhan’s principle that the Medium is the Message. This principle was given axiomatic status when the online and video world exploded in the 90s.

Simply put this principle says that the medium we use (online channels of communication or other things) greatly influences the frame and what is in it. It also influences the observers outside and gives a lot of power to those that master the medium.

An example used by McLuhan is that one of the reasons that Kennedy won the president election against Nixon was that he was trained to appear on TV and Nixon was not. Therefore, he made a much better appearance.

That means when you use an interface (a medium) between yourself and the one you address, you are in a power defining position, if you set the rules, more than if you meet face to face. This started what can be called the process of perfection of pretending, and the age of voyeurism on a mass scale.

The screen

Between people there develops, and has to be different kind of contact barriers, as an individual grows in independence from others.

This can range from a spectrum of autism to infantile symbiotic emotional over-dependency, as an example. This reveals itself in ways of communicating from very distant to overclose. Foulkes regarded the symptom as something that has been shut out from communication or never included, like autism, and had to be included. The murmur (emotions?) had to come into a communicational matrix through a dialogue.

If communication would be made possible there has to be some abilities for penetration or interchange from the one to the other, like permeable possibilities. Online activities put a virtual interactive connectivity on people where half of our senses are blocked out.

Talking heads are what we see on screen

What do we experience?

• Can we feel the others being there, not just imagine, but perceive in a haptic mode? I think no.
• Can we smell the other patients? I think no.
• Can we touch them? I think no.
• Can we register kinaesthetic movements as we do in ordinary groups? The group- dance and other primordial reactions? I think no.
• Can we see patterns over time stemming from the process? I’m not sure.
• Can we translate the dynamics when we are not in a common room with the same frame? I doubt it’s the same.
• How can we relate to unconscious process when we don’t perceive what is happening with all our senses in unison sense?
• What about the important part that define the figure and the (back)ground? It becomes scattered and shifts the responsibility for confidentiality from the conductor to the participant. How do you know that someone is not listening to the stories of the others behind the door? We don’t, but earphones can be used.

To me the screen is the difference between a Potemkin backdrop and a three-dimensional room with double doors that is a solid reminder of what is put in there remains there. Haim Weinberg in his webinar, illustrated this beautifully when he showed us that his background was a mere illusion – a picture of a book shelf, not a book shelf. So how do the vulnerable participants know that the figure (the therapist) are not the same as the background, a humbug and effect-maker as in the story of the Wizard of Oz?

The medium is the message!

In the 70s a behavioural therapist of the operational kind put his child in a Skinner box and stated that this was where he intended let his child live his first two years exposed to operational conditioning.

In my training as a psychologist we used Skinner boxes to condition rats to do lots of things to get rewards of sugar water. It worked. Talking online also work, but to what aim? Is it Group Analysis or just sugar water?

Skinner wrote a fictional novel he called Walden II where everyone in society was conditioned according to operational conditioning. To have a screen between the subject, or conditioner and the object of condition is mandatory. When we call our grandchildren via FaceTime they are interested in talking to us on screen for 3 to 5 minutes. Then they disappear to the more concrete activities that occupies them. When we are actually physically there they engage us in play of all kinds. Grownups can talk about important things. The visual and the auditory senses are the main communicational channels in this.

This membrane, or contact barrier that a screen is, in addition to be a means of communication, is not just a conveyor of contact, but it has an impermeable quality that excludes half of the human sense apparatus. We cannot smell, we cannot touch not sense the primordial evocative movements, in short, we eliminate probably three of the four levels of processes that Foulkes described.

The end

When we uncritically, moves from the circle to the screen, we actually do quite much in introducing an impenetrable barrier against genuine contact and this introduces a paradox. This has to do with the symptoms exclusion from communication – the autistic element. We reintroduce the autistic element as a common psychological condition. We communicate that three of our senses are not so important in the communicational acts. Also for the time being it gives you a phantom like quality of bizarre objects. Even in TV channels we see at times lack of synchronicity in speech between sound and mouth movements. Untimely delays, noise, and other distortions.  We cannot smell (the olfactory sense), we cannot touch (the tactile sense), cannot feel primordial evocative movements. In short, we shut out and exclude maybe three of the four levels of the communicational process that Foulkes regarded as important in the dynamic unconscious of groups. We maybe take the part for the whole in this, the ocular and the acoustic thus making Group Analysis into some kind of behaviour exchange –  by taking talk as behaviour that is.

When we move from circle to screen we do what Haim Weinberg actually pointed out, going from a three-dimension to a two-dimension quality of experience- into the autistic modus that Foulkes wanted patients to come out of. Could it be that when we move from the circle to the screen, instead turns the group into an autistic arena –  making this the triumph of the symptom! Could it be that we impose an impenetrable barrier against genuine contact and make the part into the whole in this hasten way of communicating right now? Can we pretend that this have no consequences on how we will be conceptualizing Group Analysis in the future? I think we can’t.

If – a hypothetical – they found that what went into making smartphones was part of the problem, would you give up your phone to be able to go to a bar? If you have to think about that, you’ve already lost your humanity. You’re already a droid.
Bill Maher

Svein Tjelta
26th March 2020
svtjelta@gmail.com