Guest Editors

Group-Analysis in Spanish. History and Training

S H. Foulkes developed group-analysis during the first half of the XXth Century in the United Kingdom. He started the Second Northfield experiment in the 1940s and published his first articles and books during that decade. From that time, group-analysis travelled to other European countries as well as to other continents.

Throughout the second half of the XXth Century, group-analysis was introduced in Spain through different doors. It first arrived in the North of Spain (Basque Country, Navarra and Cantabria) and Catalonia. As we will see in some of the articles in this special issue, a number of Spanish mental health professionals travelled to London to train in group analysis, taking their knowledge, once they graduated, back to their hometowns, and becoming, in that way, the trainers of new group analytic training courses around Spain. We see, for example, in José Miquel Sunyer’s article, how, Juan Campos ‘seduced by Foulkes’ during the IV International Psychotherapy Symposium which took place in Barcelona in 1958, travelled to London to train, returning to Barcelona in 1963. Or how Concha Oneca travelled in the 1970s to the United Kingdom and took part in the IGA, London, training and then returning in 1975 and becoming a member of the first group analytic societies in Spain. The 1970s, after Franco’s death and the beginning of a new democratic period in Spain, will see the growth of many trainings, not only in Spain but also in the rest of Europe.

Group analysis arrived in Latin America taking influences from other countries. Carla Penna shows how the beginnings of group analyisis in Latin America ran parallel to Foulkes’ early work. Pichon-Riviére started psychoanalytical groups in Argentina with psychotic patients in the 1930s. The first book published in Spanish on Group analysis: Psicoterapia del Grupo: su enfoque psicoanalítico (Group Psychotherapy: its psychoanalytic focus) is published in Argentina in 1957. In the 1970s, a good number of Argentinian psychoanalysts and group analysts went into exile in Spain after the military repression, giving a new perspective on group analysis to Spain, as Martínez-Taboada Kutz y Arnoso Martínez explain in their article.

Since then, group analysis in Spanish (mainly in Spain and Latin America) has continued to grow, opening its branches to other trainings and applications, as we can see in the articles by Camino Urrutia’s or Maite Pí’s, for example. New trainings have extended to other parts of Spain and Latin America and now we see how the expansion is even more international since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, through the use of the internet and online courses, as Cristina Martínez-Taboada and Ainara Arnoso, Mónica Ruiz and Luis Palacios, as well as Joan Coll and Joseph Acosta show in their articles.

This special issue of Contexts brings some of the testimonies of these historical processes which link with the present group analytic training offered in Spanish.

Martínez-Taboada and Arnoso, as well as M. Sunyer, place their work in the Basque Country, Oneca and Urrutia in Navarra, Palacios and Ruiz in Cantabria, Pí in Catalunya, Coll and. Acosta in the Balearic Islands and Penna in Argentina and other Latin American countries.

One of the most important figures in Spanish psychotherapy and mental health history and training, Dr Nicolás Caparrós, died recently and this special edition honours him with an obituary by Arturo Ezquerro.

Even though the idea of bringing a full history of group analysis and its training in Spanish, in Spain and Latin America, is impossible here, we have tried to bring a good part of that history and applications, as well as training to open other group analysts’ curiosity around the world.

We must thank those who helped us with the translations to make this bilingual issue: Carla Penna, Marcia Lopez Levy, David Glyn, Gwen MacKeith…and all those who helped the authors in their different articles. Translation work never receives its deserved recognition. We would especially like to thank the Editors of Contexts, Peter Zelaskowski and Vivienne Harte, for all the time they have given us during the preparation of this work.

Dr. Maria-José Blanco
Group -Analyst and academic. She works as a psychotherapist and group-analyst in private practice. Her academic interests lie in therapeutic writing, life-writing and autobiography. She teaches at King’s College London. She has co-edited amongst others: The Power of Death: Reflections on Death in Western Society (Berghahn, 2014 and 2017); Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up Through Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World (Peter Lang, 2017), Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders (Routledge, 2021)
mariajoseblanco.dr@gmail.com

Luis Palacios
Psychiatrist- Psychotherapist. Group analyst and Psychodramatist. He has been President of the Spanish Association of Psychodrama and of the Spanish Society of Psychotherapy and Group Techniques. Member of GASi and IAGP. Collaborator of the Spanish National Distance University (UNED) and the Aragonese Institute of Social Services (IASS).
lpalacios@rivendelsl.com