Abstract
Communication, while among the primary focuses of Foulkes’ theoretical elaborations, still remains more valued by advertisers than by group analysts. This paper is an attempt to ‘rediscover’ communication and link it to sexuality, on the basis of clinical material, extended over several years. The concept of emitted nodal points (enigmatic messages-in-a-bottle ) is proposed, within a context of actual personal and social realities.
Keywords
Introduction
Communication is defined as ‘the successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings’ (van Ruler, 2018: 368). But what concerns us– as group analysts and psychoanalysts– is something more than an empirical conceptualization of communication. What we are interested in is the subjective experience of communication: How communication is lived and felt (Rippa et al., 2013). We are also interested in responding to questions like: Is talking by default communicating? 1 Although language is our main communicating medium is it always so? While speaking, how do we know that we communicate?
Communication was established by S.H. Foulkes as a primary clinical (and theoretical) focus of the group-analytic situation (Foulkes, 1964:18, 21, 27, 28, 41). In spite of having been massively used by advertisers, marketeers and politicians 2 , the concept of communication opens up a group-analytic conceptual field way richer and deeper than expected. It suffices to say that the very concept of transference itself, the holy grail of all psychodynamic theories, is a form of transportation 3 , which, by definition, is communication.
Freud and Foulkes
Let us bring to mind the following statement: The group analyst must turn his own unconscious, like a receptive organ, towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient (or the patients and the group-as-a-whole). This Freudian dictum (Freud, 1912: 115), slightly adapted, connects the transferring, the transmitting and the communicating processes in one and the same path. Yet, Freud did not illuminate neither the quality of the media or channels needed, nor the different directions and attributes of the transmitted (or transferred) waves, as he was focusing on intrapsychic networks (Freud, [1895] 1950).
Though as early as 1893 Freud pointed to ‘the genesis of hysterical symptoms through symbolization by means of a verbal expression’ (Breuer and Freud, 1893: 179), and in spite of his dictum that ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (Breuer and Freud, 1893: 7) the communicative function of hysterical symptomatology was reluctantly recognized.
Foulkes, on his part, did not hesitate to consider ‘symptoms as mental communications’ (Freud, 1964: 28), thus directly linking his own theories to the Freudian insights of symptoms as meaningful (symbolic) entities, with their addressing quality ‘to’ somebody, who might be an important other. The intersubjective dimension (Potthoff, 2023) adds a certain synthetic and integrative quality to the endopsychic dimension. Such a shift increases way more the number of available and useful scopes of a clinical phenomenon. It contextualizes Foulkes’ approach and makes it relevant, from the point of view of the modern interdisciplinary concept of epistemic trust (Li et al, 2023). Last but not least, the communicative supplement of the psychopathology brings sexuality 4 to the foreground.
The sexual as communication
Communication has a not-so-hidden affinity with sexuality. According to the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1999), who introduced the concept of enigmatic messages, communication from-unconscious-to-unconscious is always unfathomable, deceiving, luring, seducing. This could practically mean that everything that is unconsciously communicated has a psychosexual kernel, in the sense that it contains something, which is both not fully readable as well as suggestive 5 . A politician who ‘speaks truth’, a psychoanalyst who ‘reveals the secrets of the unconscious’, a group analyst who ‘manages human group dynamics’— all these ‘experts’ exercise a degree of influence that exceeds the dialogic and analytical framework. A very powerful indoctrinating element—mainly through its seductive allure—is added. Still, the stronger the idealizing character of the situation, the more powerful the communicative element as well; and (sometimes) the learning outcome (Mercier and Sperber, 2017).
Freud introduced the concept of Oedipus complex as a central, sexual issue, representing not only (a) the parent-child relationship (inspired by Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Oedipus in Colonus); but also (b) the whole process of growth, development and social learning (Li et al, 2023; Mercier and Sperber, 2017), including the final configuration of the Oedipal superego; and (c) the civilizing (constraining and restraining) process itself, as Norbert Elias (1939) has clearly shown.
Foulkes (1972 [1990]) has dealt with some regressive aspects of sexuality within the group-analytic situation. Besides, anthropologically and ontologically speaking, the sexual origins of communication are clearly evidenced by our feelings of deep satisfaction and fulfilment, when we share (verbally or not) something with other people. Group analysts could safely assume that our selves are (primarily) communication-seeking, way more than pleasure-seeking (Freud) or object-seeking (Fairbairn).
Matrices of (psychosexual) experiences
As human subjects we are all conveyors and mediators of analogous and comparable series of lived experiences. These experiences reside in our personal, dynamic and foundation matrices and often remain enigmatic and opaque to us, their bearers. These same experiences sometimes become objects of our rational realizations and understandings. But most of the time they remain silent (unconscious) nodal points, thus preserving their elusive and sexual character. Why sexual? Not only because they originate from our parents and ancestors, e.g. our genitors, whom we strive to reach in terms of comparative power (Narcissus) as well as in terms of mutual attraction (Oedipus); but also because these very nodal points (which Freud located within the core of our dreams 6 ) constitute our most valuable personal ‘resources’ and ‘assets’, which provide us with meaning and, consequently, make us attractive and sexual. These (sexual, in their core) nodal points (as well as their contextual figurations) contain vast numbers of silent, incomprehensible elements, strivings, habits, practices, predilections, tendencies, ethoses (ethe), ideals etc. The mysterious and suggestive character of these elements is linked to the basics of continuation and reproduction of human life and human species: growing, finding a mate or a partner, giving birth and raising children, enjoying life, keeping up with (some parts of) tradition, adapting to new environments, creating and transforming meanings while learning, proceeding towards dying while leaving a legacy etc.
Some of the main resistances emerging within a group-analytic group (especially a new one) are related to issues of not approaching and communicating, not ‘touching’ each other, not getting contaminated, not becoming acquainted with strangers etc. Still, the group encounter not only brings about more radical approaches of the sexual; it also conveys a radical discourse about sexuality (Nitsun, 2006). Within a group-analytic group, sexuality becomes permeating and defining all kinds of communications, given that an observing, adult eye, the group analyst’s or any member’s, is sufficiently unconstrained to notice the concomitant psychosexual processes, constituting the kernel of an analytic third (Ogden, 1994).
This ubiquitous psychosexuality becomes a motivational force, i.e. a whole set of impetuses, which are inscribed within the minds of people; are configured as complex, entangled networks of nodal points; are realized as experiences, in an unrelenting figure-ground dynamic. It is in such a way that the group matrices form and constitute themselves.
These series of lived experiences of ours are transpersonally communicable and communicated, mainly through primary identifications 7 , thus creating a base for their further, though always partial sharing, understanding, mentalizing and symbolizing. I consider these transpersonal communications of very complex series of lived experiences—arising ‘from a common matrix beginning at birth or perhaps even prenatally’ (Foulkes, 1964: 236) and necessarily mediated by the mechanism of mirroring (Pines, 1983)—as fundamental generators (and transformers) of the human being and becoming, ‘usefully abstracted as superego, ego and id’ (Foulkes, 1972: 236).
Foulkes’s concept of matrix, supported by Lewin’s concept of field (Potthoff, 2023), is indispensable in this respect. Matrix can be defined as a suprapersonal field; a topological 8 space or a topos, where some psycho-social qualities can be preserved (and, sometimes, remembered), while remaining shared and without becoming exclusively internal. Yet, this matrix-field-topos concept remains itself also conceptually vague, somehow spiritual and neighbouring to metaphysics. It connects us to Foulkes in a ‘psychosexual’ way, without acquiring all the psychological and social meanings it deserves; and without stirring all its concomitant clinical consequences 9 .
Surprisingly, Freud himself gives to his concept of the id (Freud, 1923) the same suprapersonal and matrix-field-topos qualities, when he clearly writes: in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection. (Freud, 1923: 38)
Foulkes also gave to his concept of foundation matrix similar topological qualities. Nitsun (2006) indirectly stressed the paradoxical ontological closeness of unconscious id, culture and matrix (Nitsun, 2006: 111). Ιd and Matrix are both constituent topologies of the psyche. They both fuel and hold, they embrace and feed persons; they both energize and threaten us.
The following vignettes are an attempt to represent some instances of these processes, so as to further conceptualize, in a group-analytic way, the concept of communication and the concept of matrix.
Clinical vignettes
More than 15 years prior to the clinical situation designated as present-day, I undertook for group-analytic treatment 25-year-old Mina, while she was fighting to take back her own life from her mother’s hands. As a child Mina believed that her mother was a spy, provisionally implanted in this country, working for her real homeland, the Soviet Union.
Because of her two older half siblings Mina knew, unquestionably, that this was the second marriage of her father. Later, she learned that her father had divorced his first wife because of her being involved in an extramarital affair. This same first wife, Mina learned, died subsequently, under dramatic circumstances. After several years of group-analytic work Mina felt that for the first time in her life she regained the agency of her life. She left the group as a married mother of a child.
Mina lived through a series of experiences: terror in view of the bottomless implications of sexuality, safety as well as awe in the vicinity of a strong and ‘ideological’ mother, pride and bewilderment in relation to a mythic and grandiose past, ambivalence towards a supposedly weak father, envy towards siblings she regarded as offsprings of another, super-sexual mother, while unprotected orphans at the same time, jealousy and antagonism in relation to this ultra-sexual mother etc.
These experiences were communicated, embodied, introjected, projected, internalized, built in; these same experiences’ derivatives also contributed to the shaping of personal selves and personal matrices. Additionally, these experiences, in tandem with so many others, were pooled in the foundation matrix of our human species. But they somehow kept some of their discriminate memory traces and inscriptions, which made them personally unique, individually memorable and, what matters here, retrievable, under certain contextual circumstances. Mina brought about and inserted a large part of these series of experiences in the dynamic matrix of her group-analytic group. Still, when she finally left the group, she also took some of the inscriptions and representations of these experiences with her, as part of her personal matrix and, thus, the dynamic matrix of her family and her own life.
Some years later another woman, Rania, a 35-year-old, came to see me. She told me that she knew Mina because of some kinship with Mina’s family. She had (discretely) followed Mina’s transformation during her group-analytic psychotherapy, and felt that she would like this kind of treatment for herself. She also told me that she had waited all these years, hoping that I would not object to treating her, as she understood that there were some boundary restrictions. Later, she admitted that she delayed her request to enter group-analytic treatment because she was enviously expecting some negative signs in Mina’s life, after terminating her own treatment. And these signs finally came, in the form of marital problems, after Mina’s second child. Rania’s final decision to come for treatment was precipitated by her own occasional sexual relationships, through dating apps and social media. She joined another group-analytic group, not Mina’s previous one.
According to my initial clinical impression and assessment, Rania’s personal matrix also contained a series of experiences very much connected to, and intermingled with Mina’s life, treatment and personal matrix. Envy for Mina’s successes, sexual curiosity for Mina’s links and ties to her own group-analytic group, rage for being left outside, jealousy for the transferential father, or mother, that Mina seemed to have found, etc. I was also aware of Rania’s parasitic object relations that made her feel attracted and fed by situations where she was an outsider, something directly linked to how she experienced her own parents and the unconscious primal scene (Lamnidis, 2025).
Rania, a beautiful, seductive and (now) obese woman, was once romantically involved to Jim. They married. Some years later she gave birth to a son. From her pregnancy onwards Jim lost his direct sexual interest in her and began to compulsively masturbate and then, progressively, to ask from her to follow unusual sexual practices, involving third persons.
Rania’s treatment would, supposedly, offer a facilitating environment, so that this series of experiences would surface and thus become objects of a series of extensive and assiduous elaborations and transformations. Rania’s series of experiences also implied feeling ambivalent towards her son, disillusioned by her actual family, enraged for not repairing her own family-of-origin failures, following sexual practices that gave her some pleasure and relief, still, also devastated her, etc.
As we, while members of her group-analytic group, learned later, in another series of clinical (transferential) experiences, she was continuously seduced by both, a narcissistic, yet, creative father and a submissive, yet resourceful and inventive mother. Rania found a husband who adored her but who repeatedly recreated in their marriage the same series of ‘repetitive experiences’ as the ones Rania ascribed to her father and mother.
Rania’s reported sexual saga would become a shibboleth for her group. When a newcomer joined, this saga would first remain a secret among the older members. Then, at a certain moment, Rania, feeling sufficient trust as well as control over the situation, would share her super-story with the newcomer. This ritual would transform the newcomer into a ‘real’ member of the group.
Rania, unconsciously, introduced, and would implant in her group’s dynamic matrix a series of experiences, which remained unrepresented (Levine, 2023) or poorly represented in her personal matrix. Experiences of being seduced or experiences of seducing, experiences of feeling outcasted or scapegoated, experiences of controlling others, her son included. Most of all, she implanted a series of experiences in the group matrix which, in the course of her group analysis, became either directly felt as traumatic (and consequently dissociated; Bromberg, 1996) or nachträglich (après coup) felt as such (Freud, [1895]1950: 356; House, 2017).
Let us now turn to the present situation: Sonia, a 40-year-old, recently entered this same group, two years after giving birth to a girl through assisted reproduction. Though a successful professional, Sonia had a poor emotional and sexual life. Unsurprisingly, she had not yet been submittted to Rania’s ritualized reception of becoming another privileged shareholder of her sexual saga. In other words, Sonia had not yet become a ‘full’ member of the group.
In a session Rania reported that her son, 15-year-old, while at a party, as she was indirectly informed, French-kissed several people, not only girls but also boys. Sonia expressed, emotionally and verbally, her disgust with regard to both the adolescent’s excessive eroticism and his mother’s libertarian attitude. Rania defended herself by immediately counter-attacking: ‘I cannot accept such an attitude from a woman whom I would never imagine giving a French kiss’. Sonia, who habitually defended herself by remaining enraged and isolated, did not react as usual. She became infuriated: ‘How can you know the kind of sexual experiences I have had?’ Both Rania and Sonia became extremely angry.
Sonia told us later that she would be very interested in understanding why people, not only in the group, treated her as a recluse, an infantile loner.
Rania, through her personal matrix, did, unconsciously, implant increasing amounts of (personal) experiences, formulated as nodal points, into the dynamic group matrix, as the group-analytic process proceeded. The more these implanted nodal points became located within higher levels of the group matrix, the more they would turn out to be eligible for verbal communication and further symbolization. We, the group members (Rania included), would then become enabled to access Rania’s disturbances. Her personal experiences could then be dealt with—not only as verbal communications—but also as objects of discussion and elaboration. The same, now further symbolized, nodal points would eventually contribute to transformations of the rest of the group and its individual members.
Rania spoke to the group, full of rage for this kind of ‘irrelevant talk originating from new and inexperienced members’. She was angry with the group and the group analyst for not having her sufficiently equipped so as to successfully deal with such ‘nonsense’. ‘This is my worst moment in this useless group; I haven’t had the least progress all these years; I am just wasting my time’, she uttered.
We, the other members, neither pampered Rania, nor confronted her counter-attacks. We told her clearly that her attitude was unfair towards all of us, as well as towards Sonia, the new member. So, as group members we remained open to Sonia’s renewed implantations of experiential parts of her own personal unconscious matrix, formulated as newly symbolized nodal points, into the group’s dynamic matrix.
However, these recent group developments enabled further unexpected changes 10 . Specific group figurations—according to Norbert Elias’ conceptualization (Gfaeller, 1993), unaltered all these years, resulted in immobilizing some dimensions of the group’s sense of time; ‘I haven’t had the least progress all these years; I am just wasting my time’, were Rania’s mentioned utterances. Synchronic dimensions of time would, within the dynamic group matrix, overwhelm diachronic ones (Ogden, 2024), resulting in a kind of Sisyphean repetitiveness. Following Sonia’s recent implantations into the matrix, deep transformations were initiated. A more secure and less repetitive sense of time did prevail, with a before and an after, in a less malicious and more soothing way 11 .
Some sessions later, Rania reported her feelings of being much more set and, at last, her being able to confront Jim, and dare to face the idea of a divorce; an idea totally unbearable for her, for too many years. It is important to note that Rania did not speak about wanting to divorce. She just reported feeling that the idea of a divorce was not so unbearable in her mind.
Rania referred to her parents’ divorce, something also unbearable. As she spoke about her father and her mother, according to a member’s saying, ‘we could feel her resemblance to her father as well as to her mother, but in a totally new way: We could sense her being like both of them: like her father, in terms of sophistication and refinement, and like her mother in terms of warmness and attractiveness’. Rania also felt different in the group. Her masculine and feminine aspects had felt clearly discernible. Yet, these aspects (and she, as a person) now appeared more connected and integrated and less disjoined and dissociated. She seemed ‘not as arrogant as she once used to appear’, another member added.
It is also important to note that Sonia’s reaction to Rania’s reported son’s French-kissing, also personified Rania’s disowned and unacceptable experience of her own parents’ sexuality, with their sexual contact continuing even after their divorce (and sporadically comprehended by pre-adolescent Rania; Lamnidis, 2025).
Concluding, everybody in the group felt that Rania’s new and helpful attitude was not as masochistically subversive as it previously appeared. While being the same person, she was different.
Back to communication
Not-failed communication results in a rising sense of some kind of meaning. This meaning can be felt either as constructed, or as excavated.
Freud thought that his initial ambition to retrieve excavated (archaeological) meanings from his patients’ stories failed (Freud, 1897: 259). Consequently, he compromised with constructed meanings (Freud, 1937), which led to a kind of ‘defeat’ of his ‘scientific neurotica’ (Freud, 1897: 259; Grünbaum, 1984). Freud declared the traumatic roots of psychic life as (almost) impossible to retrieve. This axiom had serious consequences, which defined many lines of growth of psychoanalytic theorizing. The theoretical conceptualizations, as well as the clinical understandings of communication were seriously affected by this ‘turn’, in that communication became a less royal road to the unconscious.
I believe that the Foulkesian concept of location was a way out, as well as a part of the solution of this problem. By ‘locating’ the disturbance within the group context (Hopper, 1982) Foulkes responded to the question of where are incoming messages/meanings addressed to. Viewed as such, meanings can be felt as welcomed, comfortable, heimlich (Freud, 1919), even if still furtive ones. But they can also be felt as outer or inserted meanings, as alien ones, as unheimlich (Freud, 1919), frightening, and uncanny ones. Thus, meanings can represent a certain quality, indicating otherness (Laplanche, 1999); unwelcomed, strange, even traumatizing otherness.
Laplanche (1999), following Ferenczi (1949), underlined the asymmetrical relationship between a sender/adult and a receiver/child/baby. He thus discriminated between two communicational routes: one defined as implantation (non-traumatic) and another defined as intromission (traumatic) (Laplanche, 1999: 139). In both, the resulting meaning is preceded by the transmission of an enigmatic message.
An incoming message can be felt as unheimlich, uncanny, even if it is true, and it could take years (if this moment ever comes) for a person, in our case a patient, to take it in, to understand, mentalize and symbolize it.
What happened in the presented clinical material? What happens in a group-analytic group?
I suggest that we can assume emitted nodal points, without preoccupation about specific, subjective, intentional senders and we can also assume received nodal points without actual, designated receivers. We can also assume an incoming-message-in-a-bottle, which is looking for an eventual receiver.
These emitted nodal points are kinds of signs (indexes; Peirce, 1885: 225) in the form of affects, performative or constative utterances, memory cues, verses, rhythms, senses etc. that entail communicational value. These signs concern series of experiences; they appear as series of nodal points, denoted and conveyed within a free-floating discussion, e.g., within a group-analytic group; they usually point towards a certain direction; and originate from a certain perspective (vertex; Bion, 1965).
Emitted nodal points, as it would be expected, are of more or less traumatic origin. They are usually remnants or inscriptions of vulnerabilities (Butler, 2012), failed dependencies (Hopper, 2003), spillovers out of destructive experiences (Fonagy and Target, 2007), etc. Thus, being orphans, these nodal points remain unlinked, unrepresented (Levine, 2023), poorly symbolized; and most importantly for group analysts, these orphan nodal points are not able to enter the process of scenification (Rousillon, 2016). They probably reside encapsulated (Hopper, 1991) within our personal matrices or within unmentalized group matrices (Karterud, 2011).
Orphan nodal points are continuously emitted around, in search of a dynamic matrix, an alma mater that would help them to acquire a meaning, to give them back a sense of developmental impetus, to locate them back where they would properly belong, to symbolize them.
Foulkes was probably the first psychoanalytic theoretician who defined that the experiential shift within the realm of the actual analytic situation (group or individual) clearly precedes any hermeneutical psychogenetic assignment, and its concomitant theoretical insight, understanding and theorization (Foulkes, 1964: 35). In Bion’s terminology transformations in O precede transformations in K (Bion, 1965: 272). In still more recent Ogden’s conceptualization, epistemological and ontological vertices in clinical work (Ogden, 2019) need both to remain co-existing, co-active; a continuous work-in-progress.
Accordingly, while these emitted, orphan nodal points are ‘blowing in the wind’: as soon as they are held in by the ‘dreamcatcher’ (net) of a dynamic group matrix, they have an opportunity. By using the open windows offered within this same group matrix, they can submit themselves to; ultimately, they can bring about the necessary transformations so that those series of experiences to become somehow intelligible, at least some parts of them.
Following Mina’s, Rania’s and Sonia’s stories we can discern many fields or dynamic group matrices. Mina’s extended family which was also Rania’s, Mina’s group-analytic group, Rania’s nuclear family, Rania’s group-analytic group which was also Sonia’s, Sonia’s nuclear family etc. Each of these persons stand for ‘characters in search of an author’, according to Pirandello’s famous play, which was among Foulkes’ preferences. But they are more than that. As they live their lives, dissociated experiences of their own (but also of their peers, parents and genitors) contingently become part and parcel of their individual or social unconscious. These experiences, in the forms of signs/nodal points, constitute parts of personal and group matrices.
Through communication these nodal points are continuously emitted, as if they look for a window or opportunity to speak out. Their ‘sexuality’ consists thus in their urge to make themselves visible in the open, implanted and creatively taken up.
Consequently, I assume the following:
Whole series of experiences are transmitted, not only from generation to generation, but also horizontally, among peers. They appear as orphan nodal points, looking for concomitant horizontality (Berger, 2023).
These emitted, implanted or intromitted nodal points, while orphans, desperately look for concomitant mentalizing receivers. They transmit themselves whenever and wherever they are attracted by an eventual alma mater, a living, dynamic matrix, so as to speak out about what they bear, to decodify themselves.
Analytic spaces and fields, and, more specifically, dynamic group matrices are such emotionally meaningful environments, where implantations, elaborations, decodifications and recodifications proceed; intromitted messages have contingent opportunities to transform themselves into implanted ones. In Ferenczian language: Introjected nodal points desperately look for occasions to get internalized, e.g. to get metabolized into the digestive tract of the group matrix and, then, the personal matrix. In such a way they get more eligible for being properly understood and translated by the group members and the group-as-a-whole. Thus, the needed or craved for developmental impetus could be re-initiated and enlivened.
These developments are neither secured nor given. Freud’s reality principle, our surrounding social reality, the reality of each one of us, all these factors could confluence, for things to have a positive, wished-for outcome. I think that this was the meaning of the Foulkesian motto ‘trust the group’.
Catastrophes leading to negative outcomes have led to theories of the death drive (Freud) or the anti-group (Nitsun)—which should be considered as metaphysical, messianically-inspired solutions, essaying to control, theoretically and clinically—the problem of failure of communication.
