The Group and the Unconscious (RLE: Group Therapy)

Didier Anzieu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317624752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1984, this is the first published account in English of the development of group psychotherapy in France.

Under the leadership of Professor Didier Anzieu, psychoanalystsactively and ingeniously brought psychoanalytical insights to bear upon group process. These methodswere widely applied in training groups for mental health professionals, as well as in many other organizations. Anzieu and his colleaguesmade many advances in understanding the psychology of large-group situations, and these advancescontributed to the growing interest in the field.

The main aim of the book is to examine the unconscious life of the human group. Professor Anzieu describes the processes of fantasy and imagination that are common to social organizations, training groups and psychotherapeutic groups, and extends the psychoanalytical theory about dreams to the group. He gives an account of the various kinds of group fantasies, such as the group illusion, the group as a mouth, breaking apart fantasies, the group-machine, and the self-destructive group. The book is illustrated by ten clinical case studies, which are vividly described by Professor Anzieu. The interaction of the imaginary processes and the social ideas of the group are also studied, and the theoretical discussion in general reflects the interest of French psychoanalysts in the earliest structures of the mind and of the psychotic level of the personality as it becomes manifest in the group process.

Chapter 1

On the psycho-analytic method and the rules of its application in group situations

General and applied psycho-analysis

The unconscious universally produces effects that men continually defend themselves against, wrongly interpret, or seek to manipulate by obscure means for a presumed gain. A scientific approach to these unconscious manifestations depends upon the establishment of a situation in which, governed by specific rules, the situation itself transfers what the unconscious produces and guarantees the accuracy of the interpretations. In this situation two beings, the psycho-analyst and the subject (analysand), made homologous by their psychical apparatus, occupy dissimilar positions. Certain rules apply to them both: that of abstinence, which prohibits any ‘real’ personal relationship inside or outside the analytic situation and dooms them to merely phantasized symbolic – as well as everyday social – relations. Other rules apply specifically to each of the two positions. The task of the subject is to express everything he thinks, imagines or feels in the situation, i.e., to ‘symbolize’ the effects it has on him. The task of the analyst is to understand – as transference or as resistance to transference – everything the subject tries to express in the situation, and to intervene (by providing interpretations) only to make him aware of what he is expressing. It is in this way the psycho-analyst affects the situation from the inside.

Complementary rules lay down the respective positions of the body in space during the sessions, the frequency and duration of the sessions, and determine the symbolic activities required of the subject (speaking, drawing, playing with certain materials, relaxing, gesturing, mimicking, assuming certain body positions or reacting to them, having bodily contact, improvising roles, producing or interpreting a certain kind of document) and the financial demands placed upon him. However, this brings us into the realm of applied psycho-analysis.

In fact, the method defined above, long confused with the individual treatment of neuroses, which constituted the original ground upon which it was discovered and to which it was first applied, belongs to the discipline we shall call ‘general psychoanalysis.’ ‘Applied psycho-analysis’, on the other hand, is defined as the corpus of open-ended, continually evolving concrete applications of this general method. The now well-advanced task of general psycho-analysis is to construct a theory of the psychical apparatus (its origins, its functioning and its changes) on the basis of observations that psycho-analysts, beginning with Freud, have made and continue to make. The task of applied psycho-analysis is to discover the specific effects of the unconscious in a given field and the necessary transpositions of the general method when applied specifically to this field. These depend, for example, on the type of analysand (‘normal’, neurotic, narcissistic, psychotic, or psychosomatic; adult, adolescent or child; individual, group or institution) or the type of goal aimed at by the analysis (diagnostic, therapeutic, training, impact on the real social situation).

For the time being, only in psycho-analysis are unconscious effects created by and treated under scientific conditions. As a general rule the psycho-analytic method may be applied to all areas in which the effects of the unconscious are discernible, even if the unconscious resistance which these effects elicit from psycho-analysts themselves still obscures their origin and treatment.

Notwithstanding such exceptional circumstances, the general conditions for the application of the psycho-analytic method to a given field are the following:

(i)	the psycho-analyst who works in the field of applied psychoanalysis can do so only within a personal practice, which is indispensable for the treatment of individual adult patients;
(ii)	the ‘interpreter’ must not only make the rules governing the psycho-analytic situation explicit from the outset, but must above all observe them himself if they are adequately to fulfil their regulatory function. If the psycho-analyst exempts himself from the rules he imposes on the subject he provokes an unanalysable sado-masochistic or perverse relationship;
(iii)	like all other elements of the psycho-analytic situation, the rules are cathected – and defensively counter-cathected – in phantasy. This cathexis needs to be interpreted.
(iv)	the psycho-analyst who upholds the rules once they have been rendered explicit must not censor their application by the subject or subjects, but rather seek to understand and to interpret those occasions upon which the rules are broken or put into practice with difficulty;
(v)	the situation comes to an end when the psycho-analyst, no longer treated as the object of transference, is recognized by the subject(s) as equally human, when the operative character of the rules has been assimilated, when the resistance to terminate the situation has been analysed and when the end has been recognized as such.

Following these general considerations we can investigate concrete applications of psycho-analysis to group situations, particularly to training groups. I shall try to define three sorts of rules: those that constitute the basis of the psycho-analytic method applied to group phenomena, those that establish the psychoanalytic process in a group situation, and those that govern the psycho-analytic interpretation in this situation.

The psycho-analytic method applied to groups

The psycho-analytic method is first of all a method of scientific reasoning. Whatever the area to which the psycho-analyst applies this method, his hypotheses concerning the unconscious processes specific to this area are assessed in terms of three criteria:

(i)	for each type of clinical fact there must be a corresponding hypothesis that accounts for it, and each hypothesis must be grounded in specific and significant clinical material; for example, the obstinate silence of certain participants in non-directive discussion groups can be explained with reference to the phantasized representation of the group as devouring mouth and breast. The existence of this representation has been confirmed by subsequent individual interviews with group members; timely interpretation may modify their attitude (see p. 171);
(ii)	each hypothesis must be congruent with those hypotheses specific to its field, and must also be able to be related to or deduced from already-established hypotheses in general psycho-analysis; for instance, Kaës’s hypothesis, that ideas in group situations are produced by the defensive negation of a primal phantasy, is an application to the group of observations concerning primary processes and infantile sexual theories brought to light by individual psycho-analysis (Kaës, 1971b, 1973b, 1974b; Gori, 1973b);
(iii)	the validity of each hypothesis must be confirmed by the fruit it bears in an area other than the one for which it was originally conceived; for example, the hypothesis that the non-directive large group situation (30 to 60 persons) causes split transference and intensified negative transference helps us to understand from an economic point of view why large, ‘real’ social groups composed of several thousands of persons frequently resort to violent, archaic expressions of aggressiveness (e.g. war).

The psycho-analytic method applied to group phenomena depends equally on certain more specifically psycho-analytic criteria. The first of these concerns vocabulary. The psycho-analyst carrying out research on groups is limited to psychoanalytic jargon when he writes about them (in interpretative practice, on the other hand, he expresses himself as much as possible in everyday language). Indeed, although description of facts is rich, diversified and polyphasic, scientific explanation is monophasic. By psycho-analytic jargon is meant not only Freud’s own concepts, but also the conceptual contributions of his successors, the validity of which has been established in particular areas of psycho-analysis.

The analogy between the group and the dream, which I developed in an article of 1966 (infra) (the group, like the dream, is the imaginary fulfilment of a repressed wish), refers back to early Freudian theory, i.e. to the first topography. Since then psycho-analytic group theory has progressed by systematic recourse to the second topography. This, moreover, is an appropriate turn of events, for Freud discovered the latter by associating hypnosis and crowds, on the one hand, and ambivalence towards paternal imagos and group psychology, on the other. The second topography draws on an analogy between inter- and intra-systemic conflicts and inter-individual tensions within a group, where the individual psychical apparatus is to be explained with reference to the internalization of a group model. But the analogy is reversible; there is a group psychical apparatus resembling that of the individual, but differing in function, homologous but not isomorphic. Missenard (1971, 1972, 1976) has shown that the principal effect of training group methods on subjects is the destruction of certain imaginary (phantasized) identifications, on the one hand, and the progressive establishment of stabilizing narcissistic identifications, followed by innovating symbolic identifications, on the other.

The contribution of Freud’s successors has proved every bit as rich. In 1950 the British Kleinian school recognized that the anxiety level in groups was psychotic, and has since observed that persecutory and depressive anxiety are intensified by a group’s non-directive character. In France, Angélo Béjarano, also influenced by Melanie Klein, discovered in 1968 that the seminar situation, in which participants work alternately in small groups and as a body, triggers off split transference: positive transference directed generally to the small group and negative transference directed to the group as a whole (Béjarano, 1971, 1976).

Psycho-analysts interested in training group methods have so far failed to take into account the criticism that Lewin, Rogers and their followers have directed at the psycho-sociological jargon, nor have they stated with sufficient clarity and conviction the fact that monitors of training groups resort to this jargon essentially as counter-transference. Psycho-sociological concepts used in group dynamics reflect a defensive attitude towards unconscious group processes. Psycho-sociology, for instance, has stressed leadership, making it a key process in the functioning and progress of the group. A psycho-analytic understanding of groups leads one to a rather different conclusion, as Béjarano (1972) has noted: the phenomena of leadership and splitting into groups constitute the specific form that resistance in non-directive training group situations usually takes; the spontaneous leader is the spokesman of the unconscious resistance of the group at a given time and if the group is not provided with a relevant interpretation (or if the group itself doesn’t come up with one) its underlying phantasies remain repressed and its progress impaired.

In 1971, taking as our point of departure Winnicott’s concept of ‘illusion’, we gave a more precise meaning to the hypothesis of the group illusion (see Chapter 3). In the course of staff discussions Schilder’s notion of the body image enabled my colleagues and myself to realize that the ‘large’ group situation induces both a phantasized wish to explore the inside of the mother’s body and its correlative anxiety (see section 3 of Chapter 4).

A second type of more specifically psycho-analytic criteria concerns the concept of determination rather than vocabulary. Psycho-analytic explanation is, in fact, multi-dimensional. All unconscious processes discovered to operate in a given field need to be explained from a number of perspectives: dynamic, economic, topographical, genetic, phantasmic. Take, for instance, one of the phenomena we have just mentioned, the group illusion, which designates certain moments of symbiotic euphoria during which all group members feel at ease together and happily consider themselves a good group. Dynamically, the group illusion is an attempt to resolve the conflict between a desire for security, on the one hand, and the anxiety of body fragmentation and the threat of loss of personal identity in the group situation, on the other. Economically, it constitutes a particular instance of split transference: the positive transference is concentrated on the group as libidinal object. Topographically, it demonstrates the existence of a group ideal ego. From the point of view of phantasy, it requires the introjection of – and narcissistic identification with – the good breast as part-object to compensate for the damage wrought by the destructive phantasy (induced specifically by the small group situation) of children who tear one another apart in the womb of the bad mother. Genetically, the illusion is, as we know from Winnicott (1953), a necessary stage in the child’s conception of the external world, which the child represents as an extension of maternal omnipotence: the group illusion enables the group itself to function as transitional object.

A third psycho-analytic rule concerns the interaction of the subjects’ unconscious and the unconscious of the interpreter(s) (where the seminar situations require a number of psycho-analysts acting as a team of interpreters). One of the formulations of this rule is the following: for every unconscious effect, in whatever field, there is a corresponding and opposed resistance. A psychoanalytic explanation of a group phenomenon necessarily takes into account the unconscious epistemological resistance to this phenomenon.

Thus the team of psycho-analysts with whom I have worked for the past fifteen years on training seminars did not readily admit that the rules of the ‘small group’ (diagnostic group, T group) were transposable in their entirety to the seminar as a whole. We went on trying to ‘organize’ these meetings – by assigning a theme in advance and by using directive and semi-directive methods (report followed by discussion, statement at the beginning and at the end, collective practical exercises, panel, Phillips 66), by instituting a day of review, by distributing notes of previous meetings to participants – until an internal process of collective working-through led us to recognize the defensive nature of these attempts at organization. What dangerous drive was this defensive mechanism directed against? The danger, resulting from split transference, of finding oneself exposed to the particular intensity of the death drive induced by the ‘large’ group. The removal of the defence (the ‘organization’ of the meetings) and a recognition of the form and strength of the repressed drive (split negative transference) went hand in hand. Knowledge of a specific interaction between a defence and a drive opens up the possibility of practical and scientifically grounded applications. For example, if one wants to allow a group to control the destructive drive within its own ranks, one must help it organize itself; if one wants to free this drive, for instance with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orignal Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 On the psycho-analytic method and the rules of its application in group situations
• 2 The system of rules in diagnostic groups: structure, internal dynamics and groundwork
• 3 Analytic psychodrama and physical exercises
• 4 Psycho-analytic work in large groups
• 5 Group phantasies
• 6 The analogy of group and dream: wish-fulfilment in groups
• 7 The group illusion
• 8 The group is a mouth: oral phantasies in the group
• 9 The fragmentation phantasy: anxieties aroused by the group situation
• 10 The phantasy of the group as machine: persecutive-seductive groups
• 11 Paradoxical resistance
• 12 The group and the superego
• 13 Psycho-analytic group theory
• 14 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index