Abstract
This article examines how colonial histories and linguistic hierarchies are reproduced within the analytic matrix across five contexts: Albania, Aotearoa New Zealand, Ireland, Mexico, and South Africa. Drawing on chapters from Group Analysis Across Borders: Dialogues on History, Culture and Transformation (Harte, 2026), I argue that colonialism remains an active force shaping speech, silence, and relational life in analytic groups. Engaging Fanon’s reflections on language and decolonization, Martín-Baró’s liberation psychology, and the group-analytic traditions of Foulkes and de Maré, the article traces how trauma, repression, mistranslation, and inherited silences circulate in contemporary practice. Across these settings, analytic groups become spaces where historical injuries resurface and where speech and memory may be cautiously reclaimed. I conclude by considering the dominance of English — including in my own editorial work — as a persistent colonial inheritance that influences who may speak, how, and at what cost. The article argues for an anti-colonial group-analytic practice committed to linguistic plurality and to sustaining multiple symbolic worlds.
Introduction
This article grows out of the edited collection Group Analysis Across Borders: Dialogues on History, Culture and Transformation (Harte, 2026), which brought together colleagues from across the world to trace the development of group analysis in diverse national contexts. From that volume, I have chosen to focus on five chapters — Albania, Aotearoa New Zealand, Ireland, Mexico and South Africa — because each, in a different way, brings colonialism and oppression into sharp relief and shows how language and history shape the analytic matrix.
Taken together, these five histories provide a prism through which to reflect on the necessity of an anti-colonial group analysis — one that does not treat colonialism as a backdrop but recognizes it as part of the analytic frame itself.
I return to these histories to think about what an anti-colonial group analysis might entail. I draw on Fanon, Martín-Baró, Foulkes, and de Maré’s work on dialogue. Taken together, these perspectives show that group analysis cannot remain under the delusion of being neutral: it must address the colonial wounds inscribed in language, history, and the matrix itself.
Theoretical frame: Foulkes, Fanon, Martín-Baró, and de Maré
Foulkes’ foundational claim that the group is the ‘matrix of the individual’s mental life’ (Foulkes, 1973: 223) has often been interpreted in abstract, universalising terms. Yet if the matrix is the social ground from which subjectivity emerges, then it necessarily includes histories of colonialism, repression, and domination. The analytic group is not exempt from these histories — it is saturated by them.
Frantz Fanon recognized that colonialism works most insidiously at the level of language and subjectivity. In Black Skin, White Masks, he reminds us that ‘to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture’ (Fanon, 1952/2008: 3-10). Language is a site of psychic inscription: it offers not just vocabulary but a position in a world structured by racialized power. Thus, for the colonized subject, taking up the colonizer’s tongue becomes a form of enforced conversion, one that denies their history and renders their own linguistic inheritance suspect or shameful.
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961/2001), Fanon goes further, insisting that decolonization is not gradual reform but rupture — nothing less than the effort ‘to change the order of the world’ (Fanon, 1961/2001: 27). He situates this not only in political arenas but in the deepest layers of psychic life. Decolonization must address alienation at its roots: the internalized hierarchies, the habituated silences, the compromises that organize how people relate both to themselves and to one another. Fanon insists on the collective dimension of this process. The reshaping of subjectivity emerges through new forms of communal recognition, through shared acts of naming and resisting the conditions that have distorted identity.
In this sense, Fanon’s insights illuminate the analytic group. The matrix is never neutral; it is saturated with coloniality — its linguistic hierarchies, its expectations of who speaks and who listens, its implicit standards of coherence, authority, and emotional legitimacy. Perhaps the most hopeful implications of Fanon’s work for group analysis are recognizing that in the shared, fragile, and often dissonant space of a group, something of the new humanism he called for might begin to take shape — not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived, relational practice.
Ignacio Martín-Baró formulated liberation psychology as a response born out of urgency, repression, and death during the civil war in El Salvador. For Martín-Baró, the task of psychology was never neutrality as he believed that in violent contexts this becomes a disguised form of complicity — but liberation. He argued that psychological practice must recover the historical memory of the oppressed and align with the struggle to reclaim voice, memory, and agency from forces that have systematically silenced them (Martín-Baró, 1994: 27–30).
His formulation of psychosocial trauma gives language to encounters in groups across different cultural and political terrains within communities. He suggests that violence infiltrates identity, distorts social trust, and reshaped the possibilities of speech (1994: 122). This can be seen in the hesitations, the ruptured narratives, the sudden eruptions of silence or shame that appear in groups shaped by histories of dictatorship, militarization, apartheid, or colonization. Trauma speaks through what cannot yet be said.
Foulkes’ vision of the group as a communicational matrix sits alongside Martín-Baró in generative tension. Foulkes invites us to consider the group as the primary medium through which psychic life unfolds — a place where meaning is co-created, where resonance and dialogue give form to experience. This aligns with Martín-Baró’s insistence on the communal dimensions of healing, his belief that liberation requires the recovery of shared memory and collective speech. Yet Martín-Baró also reminds us that the group’s communicational field is not automatically open; it can be constricted by domination, fear, and long histories of censorship. Speech may need to be reclaimed, not simply facilitated. It becomes a practice of resistance, a way of reasserting dignity in the face of silencing forces.
Patrick de Maré introduced yet another dimension, one that is essential when thinking about the sociopolitical conditions that shape group life. His notion of the large group as a cultural task suggests that dialogue is not merely interpersonal but civilizational; it is an attempt to build the conditions for coexistence. Koinonia — a deep communion or shared understanding — is both profoundly hopeful and painfully fragile. De Maré understood that groups can be overwhelmed by violence, hatred, and the intensification of projective processes that mirror the wider world’s fractures.
In contexts marked by colonial histories, these difficulties become even more acute. Dialogue must contend with silences that are not simply personal but historical, where mistranslations echo the asymmetries of empire, with wounds carried in language itself. In such spaces, the work of the group involves not only dialogue but also the slow, tentative reconstitution of a shared symbolic field — one capable of holding multiple forms of knowledge, memories and truths. The interplay of Foulkes, Fanon, Martín-Baró, and de Maré highlight that this work is simultaneously psychological, political, and ethical: a labour of speech, of listening, and of collective re-humanization.
With these ideas in mind, I turn to the group analytic histories of five countries from Group Analysis Across Borders.
Albania: Speech emerging from authoritarian silence
Anxhela Gramo and Sonila Meçaj (2026) describe the recent emergence of group analysis in Albania as shaped by the country’s authoritarian past. Under Enver Hoxha’s communist regime, Albania was sealed off from the outside world and relentlessly monitored by the Sigurimi, the state security and intelligence service. Public speech was dangerous: people risked surveillance, denunciation, imprisonment, or the quiet destruction of a family’s prospects for even a hint of deviance. As the authors show, language itself became hardened, instrumentalized, and stripped of emotional resonance. Speech was required to conform to an ideological script — formulaic, declarative, triumphant — while the range of permissible affect narrowed to slogans. It was a linguistic world emptied of surprise, intimacy, or ambiguity.
When group analysis was first introduced after the regime’s collapse, the psycho-linguistic backdrop was one of silence, fear, and profound suspicion. The ‘masculine language’ — proud, sharp-edged, emotionally constricted — had been further calcified by decades of authoritarian control (Gramo and Meçaj, 2026). The more expansive, associative, exploratory register required in analytic groups did not simply feel unfamiliar; it appeared almost alien, even dangerous. For many, the idea of speaking freely in front of others defied decades of embodied caution. It carried a subversive charge.
Although Fanon wrote of the colonized subject internalizing the voice of the colonizer, his analysis of how domination infiltrates the psyche extends readily to authoritarian regimes. He describes how the oppressive system enters the texture of subjectivity: the internal censor, the split between public and private selves, the contraction of imaginative life. In Albania the oppressor was not foreign but domestic, yet it colonized speech itself — imposing its vocabulary, constricting its rhythm, dictating its acceptable emotional tones. People learned to speak in ways that protected them from the state, but at the cost of severing parts of themselves.
In Albania the analytic group offered a rare space where speech could begin to be reclaimed as one’s own — no longer controlled by ideology, no longer shaped by the fear of surveillance. Fanon emphasizes that liberation requires the reconstitution of voice and the restoration of agency; in Albanian groups, this meant learning to speak in a language that was no longer policed internally or externally. Ironically, English was the first language of these groups.
Albania illustrates how group analysis encounters societies where language itself has been traumatized. Fanon helps us see that the trauma lies not only in what was done but in what could no longer be said. Anti-colonial — or, in this case, anti-authoritarian — group analysis means recognizing how repression colonizes language, how silence becomes both armour and scar, and how analytic dialogue can contribute to the slow decolonization of speech. In such contexts, the group does not merely facilitate communication; it participates in the rebuilding of subjectivity after decades in which the state attempted to occupy the very space of the mind.
Aotearoa New Zealand: Biculturalism, treaty and the struggle for voice
Margot Solomon and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard (2026) trace the development of group analysis in Aotearoa New Zealand through the lens of biculturalism. Here, British colonization, formalised through the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), resulted in catastrophic land loss, cultural suppression, and the near eradication of te reo Māori. The treaty itself — rendered in two languages with divergent meanings — exemplifies what Fanon would recognize as the colonial manipulation of the symbolic order. In English, sovereignty was ceded to the Crown; in the Māori text, tino rangatiratanga affirmed chiefly authority and collective self-determination. The betrayal that followed is not simply political or legal but linguistic: mistranslation weaponised as domination, a calculated rupture designed to undermine Māori governance, and relational life.
The introduction of group analysis in Aotearoa New Zealand emerged through sustained and uneasy dialogue between Māori colleagues and Pākehā practitioners (a Māori term for New Zealanders of European descent, often extended to non-Māori settlers more broadly). As Solomon and von Sommaruga Howard (2026) emphasize, biculturalism was not a matter of acknowledging diversity but of re-founding the matrix of group analysis. Māori frameworks of whanaungatanga (kinship and relational belonging), manaakitanga (care, hospitality, ethical responsibility), and tikanga (custom, right practice) were not cultural ornaments but foundations that reshaped the group analytic field. The group could no longer be conceptualized without recognizing that its communicational matrix was already saturated with Māori concepts of relationality.
Fanon (1961/2001) insisted that decolonization is not an adjustment but a profound reordering of the world. In the group-analytic space, this reordering takes the form of restructuring dialogue itself: English can no longer remain the unmarked, seemingly neutral norm, and te reo Māori must not be relegated to the status of cultural decoration or translated supplement. Language is never innocent; it carries the weight of recognition and misrecognition, of who counts as human and who is marginal to the symbolic order. Bicultural group analysis in Aotearoa New Zealand confronts this directly: the matrix must be rebuilt so that Māori speech and concepts are not required to justify their presence within a field long shaped by European categories.
This history demonstrates the challenges — and volatility — of the work. Large groups convened at psychotherapy conferences became crucibles where colonial tensions erupted with force: Pākehā impatience with Māori protocols, discomfort with rituals of welcome, tokenistic performances of respect, or guilt-laden submission that masked unresolved fear and resentment (Solomon and von Sommaruga Howard, 2026). The surface politeness of the colonizer’s world breaks down, revealing residual affect — ambivalence, defensiveness, shame, and the anxiety of relinquishing privilege.
De Maré’s conception of dialogue as cultural work seems in fragile tension here because it touches the live wire of historical injustice. But it is also necessary: without working through these tensions, the group risks reproducing the very silences and hierarchies that colonization established. Fanon’s insistence that liberation emerges through confrontation — through the difficult labour of naming, dismantling, and rebuilding — helps us understand why such groups are both uncomfortable and indispensable. Decolonial dialogue is not harmonious; it is transformative because it destabilises the inherited structures of recognition.
Group analysis in Aotearoa New Zealand thus highlights the necessity of anti-colonial practice: one that honours te Tiriti, centres Māori concepts of relationality, and allows bicultural dialogue to reshape the matrix of group life. It is reconstituting the conditions for speech, belonging, and recognition. In Fanon’s sense, it is the beginning of another world — one in which the analytic group becomes a site where Māori and Pākehā can encounter each other beyond the colonial script, and where the possibility of a renewed, bicultural humanism may slowly take form.
Ireland: Colonial wounds and the weight of silence
Christine Christie and Noel Keane (2026) recount how group analysis in Ireland unfolded against a backdrop of colonial domination, sectarian fracture, and cultural reawakening. Ireland’s long subjection to British rule left wounds that were not only political but deeply psychosocial: the suppression of the Irish language, the catastrophic violence of the Great Hunger in the 1840s, and generations of enforced cultural diminishment. These were not simply historical events but processes that shaped the conditions of subjectivity. Added to this was the protracted terror of the Troubles, when an accent, name, religion, or neighbourhood could determine safety, and when speaking risked exposure or retaliation.
Silence became both shield and symptom. Christie and Keane (2026) describe how the earliest group-analytic workshops in the 1980s carried the unspoken weight of what they call ‘the British/Irish issue’. It surfaced obliquely — through fantasy, displacement, or a defensive politeness that masked deep discomfort. Silence surrounding the Great Hunger still felt too hot to touch, as did the reluctance of southern trainees to cross the border to Northern Ireland at the height of the conflict. Speech was shaped not only by personal fear but by inherited patterns of caution, vigilance, and historical pain.
Fanon’s formulation of the colonized subject as ‘overdetermined from the outside’ (1952/2008: 95) seems to aptly describe the Irish situation. Fanon says the colonized person is compelled to inhabit an identity mediated through the eyes, language, and categories of the colonizer. Ireland’s experience mirrors this: language, class, religious identity, and even emotional expressiveness had been shaped by a long history of British dominance. These external determinations entered the group room, sometimes as conflict, sometimes as guilt, sometimes as a kind of uneasiness around what could not yet be spoken. In Fanon’s sense, the Irish psyche had been forced to develop in a field saturated by imposed meanings — meanings that group analysis could help make visible, but only if the group had the courage to stay with what was painful, shame-laden, or occluded.
Fanon also reminds us that colonial violence lingers in the body and the voice — in hesitation, in hypervigilance, in the subtle anticipation of judgement. I think of this when reading Christie and Keane’s descriptions of early groups, where a British accent might evoke both curiosity and threat, or where Irish participants carried ambivalence about expressing anger, lest it reignite old sectarian patterns. In these moments, the analytic group becomes a site where the afterlives of colonization — its silences, projections, and distortions — reappear in condensed form, offering the possibility of reworking but also the risk of reenactment.
The Irish experience reveals how the matrix becomes a living archive of colonization and resistance. The group does not simply contain history; it replays and reworks it in real time. Foulkes’ emphasis on the group as a communicational network acquires a different texture in Ireland, where communications were historically policed, monitored, or muted. In the group, inherited silences circulate, authority is tested or feared, humour may function both as intimacy and deflection, and transference toward British or Irish figures can be activated through the smallest inflections of language. The Irish group-analytic field often becomes a site where displaced affect returns — anger long suppressed, grief unacknowledged, desire for autonomy masked by accommodation. What is striking is how the group, when held with anti-colonial sensitivity, can transform these inherited dynamics: silence becomes contemplative rather than defensive, conflict becomes a form of contact rather than rupture, and the group gradually builds a capacity to speak across lines of injury. Group analysis in Ireland demonstrates how the analytic group can function not only as a therapeutic space but as a cultural workshop — a place where national narratives are re-examined, where internalized colonial determinations loosen, and where there is more space for a sense of Irish identity to take shape.
Mexico: Group analysis and the work of liberation
Verónica Flores Treviño (2026) situates the development of group analysis in Mexico within a landscape shaped by colonial conquest, indigenous endurance, political repression, and chronic inequality. Language itself becomes a kind of historical archive. Spanish — imported, imposed, and laid down through centuries of domination — sits alongside dozens of indigenous languages that persisted despite systematic suppression. These languages were pushed to the margins in the construction of a mestizo national identity (mixed European and indigenous ancestry), an identity that promised unity yet relied on the erasure of indigenous difference.
Flores Treviño draws on Martín-Baró, whose writings from El Salvador remind us that psychology in Latin America cannot float above political struggle. Martín-Baró believed psychological work must take sides — must acknowledge that violence, inequality, and state repression enter the psyche not as abstractions but as lived conditions that shape memory, identity, and speech. In Mexico, group analysis has been taken up by practitioners who understand that the analytic group is not neutral ground: it is entangled with the realities of femicide, organized crime, the forced disappearance of students and activists, and the ongoing dispossession of indigenous communities. The group becomes a space where these histories surface — not only through narrative but through silence, fragmentation, and the tentative effort to name what has long been dangerous to say.
Martin-Baro described trauma as a rupture in the very fabric of social life, a trauma that reverberates across families, generations, and collective symbols. In the Mexican context, this is palpable: the violence is not an external event but an organizing condition shaping how people trust, how they speak, and whether they feel entitled to speak at all. The analytic group becomes a site of counter-history, a place where speech is slowly reclaimed and recovered memory becomes a form of resistance against the machinery of forgetting.
Fanon’s call for a new humanism (1952/2008) resonates strongly here too. His insistence that liberation requires not only political transformation but the re-making of subjectivity feels particularly relevant in a country where colonization never truly ended — where its afterlives can be heard in language, in racial hierarchies, in the distribution of grief and uncertainty. Mexican group analysis does not simply adapt a European model; it attempts to re-found group analysis through dialogue with indigenous knowledges, local healing traditions, and the liberationist ethos that runs through much of Latin American thought. This is not an act of incorporation but of mutual transformation.
The Mexican contribution to group analysis reveals that the analytic group can become a space where conquest is named, where memory is returned to those from whom it was stolen, and where new solidarities can be forged across profound differences. It shows that group analysis, when shaped by Martín-Baró’s commitments, can participate in liberation — not as a metaphor, but as a lived, collective practice of re-humanisation.
South Africa: Apartheid, violence and the struggle for analytic relevance
South Africa represents the most explicit and sustained attempt to decolonize group analysis. When training began in Johannesburg in 2005, 11 years after the formal end of apartheid, it was deliberately named Working with Groups to resist the Eurocentric connotations embedded in group analysis. This naming was an intervention: a refusal to allow the practice to arrive draped in the authority of the colonizer, unmarked by the violence of its own lineage.
Yahya Mayet, Patricia Johnson-Peterson and Safiya Bobat (2026) situate the development of South African group work within the shadows of apartheid and its enduring psychic, spatial, and linguistic legacies. Apartheid was not simply a political and economic order; it was a racialized engineering of space, language, mobility, and belonging. Afrikaans and English were elevated as the languages of legitimacy, while African languages were relegated to the peripheries, tolerated only within tightly policed boundaries. The project of segregation penetrated deeply into the psyche, producing internal fractures that mirrored forced removal, and constraining the very possibility of dialogue across racial lines.
The founders of Working with Groups understood this intimately. Their effort to make language accessible — supplementing European texts with South African writings, drawing from oral traditions as repositories of knowledge — was more than adaptation. It was an ethical stance, a refusal to reproduce colonial hierarchies of expertise. In a country where memory itself is contested terrain, shaped by censorship, fear, resistance, and state orchestration, the analytic encounter could never be neutral. To practise group analysis in South Africa is to confront the racialized unconscious: to sit with voices whose very meeting had been criminalized, to bear witness to speech that apartheid attempted to extinguish.
Ubuntu — I am because we are — was not a cultural ornament, nor a gesture toward inclusivity. It was a reorientation of the matrix. It reinstated relational connection where apartheid had installed radical separateness. It foregrounded interdependence precisely where the colonial and apartheid projects had cultivated atomization and fear. Fanon’s thought becomes most alive here as he speaks about attempts to rebuild the conditions for shared humanity in the aftermath of a system designed to annihilate it.
Analytic groups in South Africa carry the weight of racial mistrust, economic disparity, and the violence embedded in historical memory. Fanon’s assertion that colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking but one of naked violence (Fanon, 1961/2001) feels painfully apposite here. In many groups, this violence did not disappear with the transition to democracy; it re-emerged in the room — in silences that bore the mark of fear, in defensive idealizations, in eruptive conflicts where historical injuries pressed insistently against present relational limits.
Group analysis could not be imported as a neutral European model. It needed recalibration, re-grounding, and fundamental rethinking to address the South African reality with its layered traumas and enduring inequalities. Martín-Baró’s concept of psychosocial trauma (1994: 122) illuminates this terrain: trauma here is not solely personal but collective, woven into communities, languages, and everyday relationships. The apartheid system left behind not only individual scars but a traumatized social fabric, where mistrust, internalised oppression, and entitlement continue to circulate in subtle but powerful ways.
An anti-colonial group analytic practice must therefore attend to how apartheid continues to speak within the group — sometimes in the accents of privilege and exclusion, sometimes in the registers of shame, grief, or rage. It must make space for the emotional residues of living in a society built on racialised domination. It must hold open the possibility of what Fanon saw as a humanity forged not through erasure or premature reconciliation, but through sustained collective struggle, recognition, and the slow rebuilding of relational life.
South Africa shows us not only that decolonized group analysis is possible, but that it emerges precisely where the wounds of history are allowed to be spoken — not to be resolved quickly, but to be held, metabolised, and transformed together.
Conclusion: English and the weight of colonial language
The threads of history, language, and power converge most starkly in the question of English itself. Today, group analysis is taught, practised, and written largely in English. This dominance is rarely named, yet it remains one of the most enduring colonial inheritances. Colonial regimes may have fallen, but the clinical encounter is still often conducted through the colonizer’s tongue, with English functioning as the medium of training, theory, and accreditation. To work in English is to privilege a particular conceptual vocabulary, to translate local idioms into terms recognizable at the centre, and to risk alienating participants from their own cultural rhythms of speech and thought. Too often the analytic group assumes English as a neutral medium. It is not as it carries the weight of imperial history.
It is in this light that I reflect on the irony of my own role as editor of a book on the history of group analysis. Most contributors did not have English as their first language, and their chapters carried the meaning and imagery of their cultural worlds. The requirement that all be standardized into British English made me aware of what might be lost. I came to understand that editing is never neutral; it is bound up with questions of power, belonging, and erasure.
What has become unavoidable in my own thinking is the extent to which I am implicated in this dynamic. I do not stand outside the colonial matrix I critique. My ability to edit, to coordinate an international volume, to set linguistic norms, and even to articulate these concerns is dependent on the very structures of privilege that English affords me. I benefit from its global reach; I possess an ease of expression that is itself the product of histories of domination. When I ask others to write in ‘good English’, I am also — however unintentionally — reinscribing the hierarchy that places my language, and therefore my standpoint, at the centre.
Acknowledging this does not absolve me; it exposes my limitations. I cannot fully perceive what slips away in translation, nor can I entirely grasp the affective labour required of authors who must write in a language not their own, especially one so entangled with colonial violence. My sensitivities are shaped by my position: I can sense the injustice, I can name the dynamics, but I cannot speak from the experience of linguistic dispossession. This gap surfaces in the editorial process itself. Moments when I hesitated to correct a turn of phrase; when I felt the discomfort of smoothing a sentence whose unevenness held cultural texture; when I recognized that my editorial judgement was shaped by norms I had long internalised as universal.
These experiences forced me to confront the fact that my contributions to decolonizing group analysis will always be ambivalent. I can work to resist erasure, but I also inevitably participate in it. I can strive to honour each author’s voice, yet I remain situated within a linguistic and epistemic order that privileges some ways of knowing over others. Part of my role, then, is to interrogate how my own linguistic inheritance shapes the field, and to remain open to being unsettled, corrected, and reoriented by those whose relationships to English — and to colonial history — differ from my own.
Perhaps this is the challenge of decolonizing group analysis itself: not to seek one language or framework, but to keep space open for many. Editing, then, became not only a work of translation but also of resistance, an attempt to let other voices resonate through English while acknowledging the colonial shadow of the language in which I write.
As Fanon (1952/2008) observed, speaking a language is to take on a world and a culture. Conducting group analysis in English means that participants and clinicians alike are drawn into inhabiting the world of Anglo-European modernity, often at the cost of local symbolic worlds. Yet English has never gone uncontested. Group analytic trainings have now developed in many other languages — efforts to indigenize the practice and allow it to resonate locally. These developments matter. They show that group analysis can evolve, that it can find a home in other idioms, that it need not remain bound to English as colonialism.
To acknowledge the dominance of English is not to call for its abandonment, but to reckon with its colonial weight and to create analytic spaces where other languages can speak, resonate, and reshape the field. Without such work, English risks remaining the most subtle and pervasive colonial element of group analysis, silently governing the very medium through which we listen, interpret, and relate. To resist this is to take up decolonization not only at the level of history and theory, but at the level of speech itself.
