The Saudade Matrix
Presented at the 1st GASi Online Symposium “The Languages of Groups: the power to include and exclude”, 4th – 6th September 2020
Abstract
This paper addresses the intersubjective unconscious dimension of saudade in the portuguese social matrix. Saudade is one of the most present words in Portuguese language, love poetry and popular music, describing a mixture of feelings of loss, lack and love. The word comes from the Latin “solitas, solitatis” (solitude), in the archaic form of “solitude” and “solitude”, and under the influence of “salute.” It defines a singular kind of melancholy caused by the joyful memories of people, places, things, states or actions, absent because of a separation and at the same time the experience of longing that suspends that lacuna, in fantasy. The concept of longing is therefore endowed with ambiguity because it crosses the affections of absence with desire, happiness and wholeness: “it is a suffering we love, and a good we have suffered.” (…) (Melo, 1660). In our understanding this kind of Saudade longing edifies the Lusitanian fado as a fate of tragic destiny, the destiny of loss, as well as the corresponding salute or nostalgia for returning to a space-time situated experience of happiness. This creates a singular feeling of boredom, such as displeased contentment and other paradoxical emotional states, that can expand a particular aesthetical experience or damage the vitality and action of the subject as an agent of transformation of his own destiny,
Keywords: matrix, saudade, melancholy, history, intersubjectivity, boredom
Ah, there is no more painful nostalgia than the things that have never been!
Fernando Pessoa
The original understanding of S.H Foulkes (1964) that “The matrix is the common shared ground which ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events” and that the “location of all psychological diseases is not found inside individuals but in the space between related people” (Foulkes, 1948) can be enriched by investigating links between life events and collective responses to those, that history uncovers. Culture, language and costumes, as responses to life events, have an important impact in psychopathology, affective abnormalities and irrational behaviour. Accordingly, we believe it’s fundamental to examine the historical dimension of the interaction between the self and the Nos (Ormay, 2012).
This work is an effort to disclose the importance of regressed configurations of the matrix, that replicate responses to historical events, because those occurrences have impact in the development of identity and psychopathology.
We propose that Saudade Matrix has a configuration of a regressive matrix, that emerges from an identification to a ghost group (Lobo, 2014), intersubjectively fed by myths and narratives, spread by cultural habits and language. This regressive matrix is core to individuals because it shapes their subjectivity – feelings, beliefs, values and disposition to specific behaviours – in an unconscious way.
Intersubjectivity, history and the matrix
No man can bathe twice in the same river …
because the second time the river is no longer the same,
neither the man!
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Many kinds of intersubjective experiences become inaccessible because they have a space-time situated dimension. We cannot have access to some forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity because of historical and culture contexts, divergent from ours. When we look to an inscription in an old monument we cannot live – only speculatively – the same phenomenal experience (Chalmers, 1996) of our ancestors. However, we think it is possible to understand similar phenomenal experiences, that are inaccessible per se, because of the compulsory intersubjective replication of feelings, cognitions, and behaviours, unaware for the subjects, mandatory? to a regressive and trauma bounded matrix.
In an interesting article Robi Friedman (2015) conceptualizes a Soldier’s Matrix, a configuration of the matrix that reveals an omnipotent and “paranoid-schizoid” position (Klein, 1946) that dominates the matrix. The anxieties that are preponderant are the existential anxieties, specially annihilation anxiety, the driving motor in any Soldier’s Matrix. If the elements of the Soldier’s Matrix deviate from the command of fighting against this menace they suffer marginalization, rejection, loneliness and destruction. We think it is important to expand the strong intersubjective implications of this approach.
Volkan (1998) defines that the “major task of the large-group is protecting their identity feeling, as a persistent sense of sameness with others”. This author also raises the possibility of an unconscious choice of a traumatic historical event, by the large group. We believe that is accurate and that facing a menace, reactivates the chosen trauma (ibidem), triggering a demand to the actual group to engage in certain behaviours, similar to the original group. This identification to a ghost group (Lobo, 2014) that responded in the past in a certain way, is nourished by myths and narratives giving form to a regressed matrix that “ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events” (Foulkes, 1964).
The chosen trauma in Saudade Matrix seems to be a hurtful experience of separation of attachment figures, promoted by a profound identification with the experience of departing, linking to the historical experiences of sailing (discoveries) and immigration, as a source of survival. The impossibility to mourn something that isn’t really the final of a relationship, suspends the present, paralyzes the action, between a fixation with something that isn’t integrally lost, of the past, and an idealized reunion, in the future. The fixation in that state disposes the individuals to a melancholic and dependent character. The cultural identity characterized by a sad heartbreaking frame of mind, visible in poetry and popular music, describes a mixed feeling of loss, lack, love and hoping for a future reunion, symbolized by Saudade and Fado.
The hope for reunion that Saudade Matrix expresses has also a religious essence, summarized in Teixeira de Pascoaes’s ontological concept of Saudosismo (1913) a special spiritual standpoint of the Portuguese, that the author believes may well be widespread into the world. The specific strong activation of religious feelings and thoughts, ruled by beliefs in a mystique order (Lévy-Bruhl, 1922) and in the circularity of time, (Nietzsche, 1882; Eliade, 1954) is Fate (Fado) in the hands of God.
These messianic beliefs mix both Bion’s basic assumptions of dependence and pairing (1961) in a specific form – there´s no sexual desire responsible for a gestation of a child, but an immaculate conception of a Messiahs, through the will of God – of utopic and mystic national imprisonment, for the elements of the large group, in a “mythical and glorious past forever lost, and a future dreamed reunions” (D’Elia, 1999).
This Saudade Matrix and its oracular language can be recognized in Os Lusíadas of Camões, Padre António Vieira works and his concept of Quinto Império, Fernando Pessoa´s Mensagem, Saramago’s Jangada de Pedra (“Stone raft” – Saramago was an atheist but it’s possible to recognize some kind of mystic religious beliefs like the stone as a symbol of the Quinto Império), and in many more Portuguese authors.
A strange form of life: the pleasure of boredom
A strange form of life as in Amalia’s fado is identifiable as a tragic destiny, the destiny of loss, as well as a connection to the non-inscription concept of José Gil (2007), characterized by a lack of commitment to an effective action. The game between real and unreal generates a strange form of a-historicity by inaction and a feeling of dying from boredom. Following Fenichel´s (1951) definition “boredom is characterized by the coexistence of a need for activity and activity-inhibition, as well as by stimulus-hunger and dissatisfaction with the available stimuli.” In boredom the longing for objects becomes the need to be rid of objects encouraging isolation and loneliness (ibidem). Boredom can disclose the paradox between two irreconcilable choices: there´s a desire, and there´s no desire, where the subject feels that he must do something but does not know what (ibidem).
In Saudade Matrix this apathic pain born from the disillusionment since the promise of a reunion was not accomplished. In Saudade Matrix this failure of reunion with the real Other is eternalized and builds an uncanny prevalent attachment to a ghost, so that the Other persists. We think that Saudade Matrix intersubjective feeling is an unpleasant pleasure, because maintains the Other, in an indestructible phantasmatic arrangement, a kind of solipsistic manic defense, that defies the hard-hitting reality.
Although the Saudade Matrix brings several difficulties to the Portuguese large-group, specially a predisposition to melancholia (Portugal is one of the countries in the world with the highest rate of depression), apathy or inaction, the feeling of Saudade can have an aesthetical dimension as particular experience of preservation of places, people, and experiences that empowers specially poetry.
“Saudade, Saudades!
Que valem as rezas
Que serve pedir
No altar continuam as velas acesas
Mas ele sem vir.”“Saudade, Saudades!
What prayers are worth
What is the use asking
Candles are still lit on the altar
But he won’t come.”
António Nobre (1892)
Conclusion
With this work we try to integrate a psychoanalytic approach to large groups, specifically the conceptions of regressed group, and group-analytic concepts as chosen trauma and transgenerational transmission of a mental representation, without missing the singularity of mixed feelings of Saudade like Garrett´s (1825) said: Saudade! Gosto amargo de infelizes. Delicioso pungir de acerbo espinho (Saudade! Taste bitter to the unhappy. Delicious hawthorn potion).
We also focus on developing an interpretation of psychopathology, at a relational level where a regressive matrix is fundamental to trigger certain anxieties, founded in historical traumatic events, creating in many circumstances the menaces that are feared, in an eternal and circular emergence of events.
In conclusion, this is a humble contribution to enlarge the investigation about the complex theme of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and history.
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Rita Sousa Lobo
Sociedade portuguesa de Grupanálise e Psicoterapia Analítica de Grupo
sousalobo.rita@gmail.com