Beyond psychoanalysis and group analysis (2019)

Abstract

In 2018, I received an invitation from the Management Committee of the Group Analytic Society International to deliver the 2019 Annual Foulkes Lecture. I immediately accepted, not only because this is a great honour, this lecture being the society’s most important annual academic event, but also because it offered me a privileged opportunity to share with a sympathetic group of colleagues the ideas Reyna and I had been working on since our very first conversation, in November 1992, about the dire need for a new paradigm of the human being. We both believed that Freud’s thought leaned on a series of assumptions about reality, knowledge, and human nature that were at odds with the radically new perspective his discoveries had brought about. Having both had a training and practice with groups, before going through a psychoanalytic training, it soon became apparent that we had incorporated psychoanalytic thought, theory, and practice in terms of an understanding that differed from that of those teachers, fellow students and colleagues who lacked the group experience. The first of these differences was a staunch conviction on the essentially social nature of human beings. This led us to reject, or at least qualify, those views that focused exclusively on intrapersonal processes. For us, the minimal field of observation required in order to understand any human event consisted of two people, not one, and it also demanded to take into account the wider social, cultural, historical, political, and ecological contexts. This made us sympathetic towards the interpersonal, relational, culturalist, and intersubjective versions of psychoanalysis, and also, of course, to group analysis. Group analysis implied a major overhaul of psychoanalytic theory and practice and, in this, Foulkes’s and Pichon-Rivière’s contributions were as revolutionary as Freud’s had been in his time. But, just as he had been hobbled by his previous assumptions, these pioneers were still burdened by part of their psychoanalytic inheritance. In Foulkes, this was particularly noticeable since, as Dalal (1998) has pointed out, in his work there is a juxtaposition of an adherence to his classic Freudian upbringing, with a wholly novel interpersonal and transpersonal theory of Mind. In Pichon-Rivière, his rejection of the theory of instinctual drives, plus his adoption of a socio-political perspective, led him to distance himself from orthodox psychoanalysis and to call his own approach ‘social psychology’. This 178we deem to be a mistake. What we need now is to develop a new paradigm of the human being that integrates the discoveries, insights, and views of analysis – both psychoanalysis and group-analysis – with those of the Humanities and the other sciences – biological and social – that study the human being. This is bound to be a holistic theory that transcends the traditional boundaries that separate and isolate the various disciplines. 1 It should therefore be a collective interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary enterprise, based on an open and fruitful dialogue among all students of human nature. And here the group-analytic tool can be a major asset for attaining mutual understanding. The lecture was well received and had two excellent official commentaries by Regine Scholz (2019) and Earl Hopper (2019). It was later published in Group Analysis (Tubert-Oklander, 2019d), as well as my response to both commentaries (Tubert-Oklander, 2020b).