The Portuguese School of Groupanalysis – context and concepts

Introduction

By Carla Penna

Carmen O’Leary, Rachel Abramowicz and I, Carla Penna, are very pleased to introduce to Contexts readers the theoretical contributions of the Portuguese School of Groupanalysis to the Group Analytic Dictionary Project. One of our aims is to bring into discussion core group analytic concepts and developments of our epistemology to Group Analytic Society international membership. Therefore, we are delighted to invite our colleagues to appreciate the partnership between The Group Analytic Dictionary project and the Portuguese School of Groupanalysis – written without a hyphen, as Cortesão proposes (Neto & França, 2021: 54). It is an excellent opportunity to learn and discuss how the Portuguese School absorbed Foulkesian group analytic tenets by introducing new concepts and new ways of understanding classical Foulkesian theory.

The endeavour coincides with Isaura Manso Neto and Margarida França’s publishing in 2020, in the NILGA collection, of the book The Portuguese School of Group Analysis. Towards a Unified and Integrated Approach to Theory Research and Clinical Work. The book celebrates – with the contribution of four generations of group analysts – the theoretical, technical, training, and clinical topics of the Portuguese School offering readership the possibility to explore and deepen the understanding of their framework. I also prepared a book review for the Journal of Group Analysis about the book, enhancing the interest in the Portuguese School metatheory.

One of the developments introduced by the Portuguese colleagues is the concept of personal group matrix or internal relational matrix by Maria Rita Mendes Leal, detailed by Margarida França and Ana Bivar for the GAD and this edition of Contexts. It is one of my favourite concepts discussed by the Portuguese School, perhaps because it resonates with Pichon-Rivière’s developments of the concept of ‘internal group’, ‘link’ (vínculo) and the development of the ‘CROS’ (Conceptual Relational Operative Schema) (Penna, 2022: 150). In addition, Leal’s conceptualization might have contributed to Foulkes rudimentary formulation of the idea of a personal matrix (Foulkes, 1975: 130). Today, as  Nitzgen and Hopper (2017:15) reveal through their work on tripartite matrices, Rita Leal’s concept of personal group matrix/internal relational matrix acquires new meanings. For both, the idea of a personal matrix in group analysis is the missing link in the configuration of the matrix as a multi-relational process that interweaves the mind of an individual person (personal matrix) with the context of the collective mind of a grouping (dynamic matrix) and the context of a particular society (foundation matrix) (Nitzgen & Hopper, 2017).

For now, let’s appreciate the richness of Margarida França and Ana Bivar’s contribution to GAD and Contexts. We hope the readership learns from them and bring us comments and ideas to improve the debate in theoretical and clinical group analysis.

References

Neto, I. M. & França, M. (2020). The Portuguese School of Group Analysis. Towards a Unified and Integrated Approach to Theory Research and Clinical Work. London: Routledge.

Nitzgen, D., Hopper, E. (2017). The concepts of the social unconscious and of the matrix in the work of S. H. Foulkes. In: E. Hopper & H. Weinberg (Eds.). The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups, and Societies, Vol. 3: The Foundation Matrix Extended and Re-configured (pp. 3–25). London: Karnac.

Penna, C. (2022). From Crowd Psychology to the Dynamics of Large Groups: Historical, Theoretical and Practical Considerations. London: Routledge.

The Portuguese School of Groupanalysis – context and concepts

By Margarida França e Ana Bivar

We are very pleased to have the opportunity to share with our colleagues and other Context’s readers some of the concepts and ideas that have nourished our theory, research and clinical practice, in Portugal, for the past 60 years.

Some of you are already familiar with some of the concepts. For the ones who are not, we will resume, in a very simplistic manner, some historical and theoretical aspects of the Portuguese path in group analysis, – groupanalysis, as Cortesão named it.

Eduardo Luís Cortesão (1919-1991) was Foulkes disciple. He brought some of Foulkes´ most important concepts – matrix, resonance, mirror reaction – to Portugal in the mid-fifties, immediately gathering around him a group of colleagues who, with him, created a Groupanalytic Section at the Portuguese Society of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1963, which is now called the Portuguese Society of Groupanalysis and Analytic Group Psychotherapy and counts this year its 59th anniversary (Pinto & Salgado, 2001).

Cortesão and his followers impersonate a rather psychoanalytical approach to group analysis. Cortesão discussed with Foulkes the matrix concept (Cortesão, 1977), calling it groupanalytic matrix, considering that the concept of pattern (Cortesão, 1967) is essential to structure the group matrix. Unlike Foulkes, he did not believe the therapist was an administrator or conductor, but “someone who moulds in the group a certain attitude of analytical listening that helps the development in it of an identical position allowing the working-through of the group transference neurosis of the different elements that compose it and the consequent individualization of the selves” (Ferreira, 2020: 23).

Others, such as Guilherme Ferreira, Maria Rita Leal, Azevedo e Silva, César Dinis, Isaura Neto, have enriched Cortesão’s legacy and insist to bring to many international forums the importance of the Portuguese perspective of Group Analysis (Ferreira, 1988, 2015; Dinis, 2006; Leal, 1968, 1981 and Neto, 2010, 2015). We believe that their view is prone to build a bridge between psychoanalysis and group analysis.  Groupanalysis is not different from psychoanalysis in its aims, just in its proceedings. But, because it is performed in a group and through the group, it cannot escape – nor is it its desire – the relational framework in which it operates and obviously shapes it.

The psychoanalytical relational paradigm that sustains modern conceptions of psychoanalysis has many resemblances with Foulkes ideas on the importance of the interpersonal nature of mental suffering and of its solution through the psychotherapeutic group setting he created, as many of our colleagues have stated in recent literature. However, we believe that Foulkesian group analysis shouldn’t have driven so far away from psychoanalysis, especially in its aims and regarding the importance of unconscious phenomena. The Portuguese model defends for years that we may understand and deeply transform human suffering – i.e. personality structure – through a group psychoanalytical relational setting.

Maria Rita Mendes Leal (1921-2019) one of Cortesão’s colleagues and disciples, first Foulkes Prize Award in 1981, presented internationally, the concept of Personal Group Matrix or Internal Relational Matrix, as she also calls it. The article – published in 1968 in the “Group-analytic Digest” – received an editorial note from Foulkes. We are very honoured to bring this concept to you in the context of this splendid partnership between the Group Analytic Dictionary Project and Contexts.

We would like to thank Carla Penna, Carmen O’Leary and Rachel C. Abramowicz for this opportunity and also Viv Harte as Editor. We also would like to add that we enjoyed very much reading Carla Penna’s and Carmen O´Leary’s reflection on Foulkes’s article “Access to Unconscious Processes in the Group-Analytic Group” and we think that we are joining them, with this small contribution, in their questioning about the unconscious processes going on in groups and how they can be worked-through.

About Maria Rita Mendes Leal

Maria Rita Mendes Leal (1921-2019) was born in Rome and lived her childhood travelling with her family through several parts of the world, due to her father’s diplomatic career. The family returned to Portugal in the mid-30s and Maria Rita studied in a German School in Lisbon and then pursued her degree in Historic and Philosophical Sciences at the Classical University of Lisbon, working at the same time as a kindergarten teacher in a Montessorian school. After working pro bono on a project that intended to help children from very poor background with their learning difficulties, she was invited to be a professor at the Social Service Institute. From 1941 to 1957 she dedicated her work and research to unadapted children and adolescents.

In 1960, after her dissertation was finished and distinguished by the university, she became a full professor at the College of Letters and Philosophy of Lisbon, teaching philosophical anthropology and history of education. It was also in 1960 that she initiated her personal groupanalysis with Eduardo Luís Cortesão. In 1963 she introduces a model of intervention called “dialogical relational intervention” with children in the Cerebral Paralysis Centre in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 1964 she becomes a full member of the Portuguese Society of Groupanalysis and visits the Tavistock Institute, invited by John Bowlby, president at the time.

In 1973, after seeing her proposal for a doctoral thesis refused by the College´s Scientific Committee in Lisbon, she is accepted for a doctoral course at the Education Institute of the University of London. She maintains her work in Lisbon and teaches at the Institute of Applied Psychology from 1973 to 1975. Her doctoral thesis will be about the “mutually contingent response pattern”, akin to Malcolm Pines’s mirroring concept.

She emigrates to Brazil in 1975, where she stays until 1980, teaching Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at the Universities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Returns to Lisbon in 1980 to assume the scientific coordination of the Clinical Psychology branch of the newly created Psychology College of the Classical University of Lisbon. She teaches at the university until she jubilees in 1991, keeping this link through investigation and various collaborations in her doctoral thesis after that.

In 1992 she starts her collaboration with the editorial board of the “Revista da Sociedade Portuguesa de Grupanálise”. She becomes President of the Portuguese Society of Groupanalysis from 1995 until 1997. Rita Leal was a member of the international consulting panel of Group Analysis and published a few articles. She has written several books and articles in Portuguese that have profoundly influenced the education of teachers and social workers and have been a great influence on child psychology and psychotherapy in Portugal.

In 2015 she became an honorary member of the SPGPAG, attending events until the year before her death, at the age of 97.

Personal Group Matrix or Internal Relational Matrix

According to Maria Rita Mendes Leal (1968) in the cycle that goes from early childhood to old age, the individual experience is located inside a complex network of relationships – an internal interpersonal network or personal group matrix or individual relationship matrix.

During a person’s development an internal matrix is constantly being structured: starting with the primary relationship with the mother, the nuclear family, school and significant others, colleagues at work, romantic partners, etc – to every group in which one is a participant. These dynamics of the group matrices transform each one’s individual matrix.

This internal structure is originated through mirroring in the dyadic mother-infant interaction and influenced afterwards by the others in the family and successively by other group members, interacting with this matrix, throughout life.

According to Rita Leal (1968:103):

“Using the concept of S. H. Foulkes, we conceive of ‘mirror reaction’ as the fundamental mechanism in personality formation which we see as a process of experiencing and internally defining self-boundaries in a multiple emotional confrontation with ‘others’ immersed in a total ‘group matrix’.”

To explain why this concept is useful to understand what happens in the group matrix – or, as Cortesão would say, in the groupanalytic matrix – Rita Leal resorts to the clarification of concepts of regression and fixation. Such concepts, embedded in psychoanalytical classical theory, are reflected in the supposition that “any disturbance in the process of living satisfactorily is rooted in a ‘history’ and has a meaning (…) which can be understood in the context of all relations experienced by the individual taken as a whole” (1968, p. 101) and may, according to her, be expressed and described in terms of libido evolution and fixation, since regression is conceived as the “expression of a need (urge for gratification) which would be meaningful at a former life stage but which seems incompatible with the present age situation.” (1968:102)

The same disturbance that may be described in terms of fixation, may be described in terms of location in a group relation and expressed as disturbed group communication of the situation lived in the here-and-now. Within a groupanalytic group, this disturbance ‘s’ location’ would rest in the individual’s personal group matrix.

The role of the groupanalyst is essential to determine whether this disturbance will be addressed – in a contingent manner as Rita Leal could say. “When the therapist does not fear ‘regression’ (when he allows it without suggesting it), the participants may allow themselves to go back in the course of their communication (or ‘transaction’) and re-live former emotions in a here-and-now of primal inter-relations”. (1968:102)

In another article (Leal, 1981) the author explains, resorting to Bion’s, Berne’s and Winnicott’s contributions, her idea which puts playfulness (in the transitional sense) in the centre of adulthood and non-regressed/fixated positions and defends that the groupanalytic group is the best setting to re-enact the possibility to unblock the differentiation of the selves. Ego-training-in-action appears as “the developmental path through which the very young child is shown to generate a self. (1981:107)” This self, conditioned by the contingency responses encountered through this relational path, should have a ‘second chance’ when meeting the “attentive behaviour of group members in the group analytic situation (…)” as they provide the “confirmation of self as an originator and co-actor of shared emotional meanings. Thus, personality becomes defined in its boundaries as a system of ongoing relationships” (Leal, 1981:107)

And Rita Leal clarifies (1981:108):

“If the curative factor in group-analytic treatment is ego-training-in-action (Foulkes, 1957; Leal, 1981) and free-floating communication (the equivalent of free association) is its instrument, analysing the resistance, to open the curative process (i.e. analysing the transference neurosis), in the group becomes: a dealing with group communication, so that the experience of multiple resonance or mirroring of the response of the other becomes possible. If this happens, present and past may merge in the process and the individual will become differentiated through the resonance of others.”

Consequently, the concept of internal relational matrix appears to be considerably relevant to explain why groupanalysis work – which is, coincidently, the title of the article Rita Leal published in Malcolm Pines´ book “The evolution of group analysis” (1983).

“When we describe group analysis as a process, we have found useful this concept of regression to a stage of mirror reaction which would be possible through emotional reactivation of the primitive experience of internal differentiation of the total Ego in a concrete therapeutic situation here-and-now. Group transference would thus be a requirement for authentic intrapsychic restructuration through the classical ‘ego-training-in-action’ of which Foulkes has written.” (Leal, 1968:104)

According to Ferro and França (2020, p. 61) in Rita Leal’s perspective, it is possible to approach primitive relational features of patients through the transferential phenomena they project in the groupanalytic matrix and through the analyst’s answers emerging as a proto conversational dialogue, as happens in early childhood.

Ferro and França, referring to Rita Leal’s conceptualization, state that “(…) the transference-countertransference dynamic is what introduces each one’s personal internal matrix into the dynamic matrix and the processes of mirroring, resonance and ego-training-in-action are responsible for new introjections which will alter the original personal group matrix of each member.” (2020: 62)

Nevertheless, it is Rita Leal herself who adverts to the need to increase the number of sessions per week to engage in a regressive opportunity, that will allow the primitive internal relational matrix to express and be ‘contingently’ responded to, unblocking the need for resistance and regression.

Marques and Melo in a book chapter entitled “The groupanalytic matrix and personal relational matrix” (Neto & França, 2020) suggest that the concept of personal group matrix was influenced by Pichon-Rivière’s work on concept of the internal group, that “configures the perspective and importance of bond [link] in psychoanalysis and of the relation between the intra-psychic and the interpersonal” (Marques & Melo, 2020: 82). These authors, reflecting on the influences and the pertinence of this concept, state that “it is important to emphasize that this concept of personal group matrix emerges as a reference in the clinical thought and practice of most Portuguese groupanalysts. Amongst other things, this probably has to do with the importance of (…) authors such as Kohut and Fairbairn” (2002, p.82).

References

Cortesão, E. L. (1967) Based on the practice and theory of group-analytic psychotherapy: some further thoughts on the concept of group matrix, Group Analysis, 1: 29-36.

Cortesão, E.L. (1977/2004) Uma tarde em Golders Green. Grupanálise, 1.

David, Mário & Neto, I. M. (2019) Maria Rita Sá Mendes Leal – Obituary (1921-2019). Group Analysis, 52(3): 403-406 https://doi.org/10.1177/0533316419856145

Dinis, C. V. (2006) Le temps et le changement. In L. Michel and J. N. Despland (eds) Temps et Psychothérapie. Paris: Edition In Press, pp 27-37

Ferreira, A. G. (1988) Transference and transference neuroses in group-analysis. Group analysis, 2: 93-99.

Ferreira, A. G. (2015) Group analysis and the different approaches: the Portuguese contribution. A tribute to E.L. Cortesão. Group analysis, 48(4): 465-486.

Ferreira, A.G. (2020) History of group psychotherapy, group analysis and the contributions of the Portuguese school of group analysis. In I. Neto and M. França (eds.) The Portuguese School of Group Analysis – towards a unified and integrated approach to theory, research and clinical work. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 9-27.

Ferro, S. & França, M. (2020) The Portuguese school of groupanalysi. The integration of psychoanalytic concepts in groupanalysis. In I. Neto and M. França (eds.) The Portuguese School of Group Analysis – towards a unified and integrated approach to theory, research and clinical work. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 53-72.

Leal, Maria Rita Mendes (1968) Transference Neurosis in Group-Analytic Treatment. Group Analysis, 1(2): 99-109

Leal, Maria Rita Mendes (1981) Resistances and the group-analytic process. Group Analysis, 15(2): 97-110

Marques, P. M. & Melo, J. C. (2020) The concepts of groupanalytic matrix and personal group matrix. In I. Neto and M. França (eds.) The Portuguese School of Group Analysis – towards a unified and integrated approach to theory, research and clinical work. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 73-89.

Neto, I. M. (2010) Moving groupwork into the day hospital setting. In J. Radcliffe et al (eds.) Psychological groupwork with acute Psychiatric inpacients. London: Whiting & Birch: pp 325-342

Neto, M. I. (2015) Multi Family Group Analysis (MFGA). Current Psychiatric Reviews, 13(3): 165-170

Pinto, T. S. & Salgado, F. (2001) História da Grupanálise em Portugal. Revista Portuguesa de Grupanálise, 3: 52-57.

MARIA RITA MENDES LEAL WORK IN PROGRESS | Maria Rita Mendes Leal – Academia.edu