Abstract
In my comment on Christine Vollon and Guy Gimenez’ article (Vollon and Gimenez, 2021) I will not so much focus on the most interesting comparison of the group psychic apparatus (GPA) elaborated by René Kaés and the group analytic model of matrix according to Foulkes. Instead I will offer a group analytic reading of Foulkes’ elaboration of the analytic group as a model of the mental apparatus of Freud. For this, I will make use of the vignette Vollon and Gimenez present in their article to illustrate the GPA model of Kaés.
The authors present two sessions of a supervision group located in a youth centre in southwest France. Regarding the setting they note that each supervision session was set up as follows: participants were seated in a semi-circle and asked to use free association when speaking about the problematic professional situations they had encountered. Then, in a second phase, the supervisor asked the group to pick one of the situations that had just been mentioned . . . as the basis of a role-play [which in the third phase is re-played by proxies]. (Vollon and Gimenez, 2021)
Considered as a whole, the vignette focuses on the vicissitudes of group communication, and its disruption and restoration in the group. In the first session, Muriel, the manager who coordinated the centre is missing without further notice. Without addressing this, Paul then speaks up, presenting a problem he had with Younes who recently had got very upset. ‘I thought he’d completely lost it—he was threatening to kill himself and the rest of us, as well. ( . . . ) I had to send the others away and keep Younes by himself until he calmed down’ (Vollon and Gimenez, 2021). Asked by the supervisor whether he had any ideas about why this had happened, Paul replied, ‘He’d been told that he was no longer eligible for benefits’. Upon this information free-floating group discussion collapsed with group members interrupting each other while asking for more details concerning Younes and his predicament. Confronted with this ‘chaotic interaction’ and noticing that ‘the chain of group association was especially dense and was laden with multiple comments, which saturated the mind in a continuous stream of words and provoked a slight, countertransferential sense of nausea’ (Vollon an Gimenez, 2021), the supervisor in vain intervened several times to let Paul finish explaining the situation, and eventually reminded the group that they had agreed to respect one another’s speech.
Asking how this overstimulation of communication networks can be explained, Vollon and Gimenez firstly focus on the critical moment of group formation and the group’s intense anxiety associated with it, greatly increased by Muriel’s unexplained absence which in turn gave rise to a defensive manic response. This anxiety, they argue, concerns the disappearance of a part of this group, and the disavowed feelings of loss and abandonment which are represented in Paul’s report on Younes ‘a young man abandoned by the social welfare system, estranged from his family, left in a vulnerable and precarious position’ (Vollon an Gimenez, 2021). By entering into mindless agitated interaction, the group, according to Vollon and Gimenez, firstly set up a meta-defensive unconscious psychic alliance among themselves by saturating the group chain of association by not respecting the rules of supervision (represented by the supervisor), and secondly to protect themselves against having to confront the feeling archaic loss to work through in the session but also to maintain a feeling of unity to cope with Murial’s absence.
For Kaés, this unconscious alliance is a particular form of linking that is related to the content of Paul’s comment as if his own internal psychic ‘groupality . . . had permitted the emergence of a structure of communication networks that were similarly agitated and overstimulated’ (Vollon and Gimenez, 2021). In the role-play of phase three, Younes metamorphosed into Abdel as well as Paul into Olga, a more motherly figure but able to represent the frame and the rules of the group process and thus able to hold and contain ‘Abdel’s unbearable demands that would sometimes oblige the group members to step out of their professional roles and provide assistance for a little bit of anything and everything’ (Vollon and Gimenez, 2021).
To compare this vignette to Foulkes and Foulkesean group analysis, I would like to highlight two points. Firstly, and strikingly that when speaking of the group associative chain the authors conceptually do not differentiate the concept of free associations according to Freud from group association according to Foulkes. In contrast to Freud’s view of free associations as being based on ‘memory traces in the brain’, Foulkes eventually conceptualized group associations as ‘quasi-associations to a common context’, i.e. as ‘ideas and comments expressed by different members have/ing/ the value of unconscious interpretations’ (Foulkes and Anthony, 1984: 29). Moreover, arguing as a Freudian psychoanalyst, Foulkes in the 1950s pointed out that ‘the group is like a model of the mental apparatus in which its / internal / dynamics are personified and dramatized’ (Foulkes, 1984: 114; italics mine). Therefore, the group members may represent the internal agencies of Freud’s so called ‘structural model’ of the mind (Freud, 1923), namely the ego, the superego and the id (Foulkes, 1984: 112). Moreover, for Foulkes they also represent central figures of the family (mother, father, siblings) as well as ‘parts of the self including the ‘body image’ (cf. Foulkes, 1984: 115). Generalizing this view, he concluded that (due to their personification) ‘unconscious processes can be represented by persons’ (Foulkes, 1984: 289; italics mine).
However, in the 1960s Foulkes took a further step when he claimed that apart from being determined by their body and their personal history, individuals are equally determined by the various (sub-)groups of which they are a part of. He wrote: ‘The individual considered in isolation appears to be motivated by his personal history and the resources of his body with psychoanalysis going farthest in this study’ (Foulkes, 1984: 169; italics mine). However, ‘the individual in life is equally determined by the various groups of which he is a part, some more, some less fundamental: his culture, his nation, his family, his clan, his time’ (Foulkes, 1984: 169; italics mine). Consequently, the range of representations dramatized and personified in the group was considerably extended. As a consequence of this, Foulkes posited that ‘the cultures and values of the community are inescapably transferred to the growing infant by its individual father and mother, as determined by the particular nation, class, religion and region’ (Foulkes, 1990: 155, italics mine; cf. Foulkes and Anthony, 1984: 27). However, what applies to the individual parents also applies to all individuals, namely that they are but ‘representatives’ of the ‘cultural group’ (Foulkes, 1990: 155) and its subgroups.
Putting this forward, Foulkes exploded any individualistic comprehension of the ‘mental apparatus’. Consequently, he revised his initial definition of the individual as a ‘nodal point in a network’ (Foulkes, 1983: 14) in favour or a more substantial one. Keeping this in mind, and returning to the vignette we thus say that Younes / Abdel are not just vulnerable young male individuals, ‘abandoned by the social welfare system’ (Vollon an Gimenez, 2021) who due to their needy and (seemingly) incessant demands, often unbearable for staff members. However, as such they are also, and at the same time, representatives of various vulnerable socio-cultural (sub-)groups) often failed by state authorities and desperately in need to be held and to be contained by professional care and concern (as it is represented by Olga). As Christine Vollon and Guy Gimenez rightly point out in their article, it is exactly this point where the two approaches, the group analytic model Foulkes and Kaés’ GPA model can be fruitfully compared and await further discussion.
Alors, merci à les auteurs. La séance sera continué.