Matrix and Intersubjectivity: Phenomenological Aspects of Group Analysis

Abstract

In the course of this century there has been a shit from a view of man as a self-contained structured entity, open to outside influences but clearly set off against the rest of the world, to a perspective from which man is seen as being-in-the-world-with-others, a world to which man is inseparably linked. This change of perspective shows itself in philosophy in a move from an extreme subjectivism (which in 1943 still pervaded Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness) to a complete dismissal of the subject (as proposed, for instance, by Michel Foucault). Similarly in psychotherapy, the move has been from the self-centred individualistic approaches of various forms of psychoanalysis to certain types of family therapy where the subject seems completely absorbed by the `system'. In this development, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and S.H. Foulkes hold a half-way position. They do not abandon the notion of a subject but open it up and decentre it. `Meaning and significance', to use Foulkes's words, rest o longer within the subject but between subjects. Matrix and intersubjectivity are the relevant fields of experience.