PSYCHOANALISIS AND GROUP ANALYSIS
Towards a new paradigm of the human being *
Juan Tubert Oklander, MD, PhD **
Let us start from the beginning: psychoanalysis has shown, from its very
inception, a dual nature, which has been present and generated an inner tension
ever since Freud’s writings. This stemmed from a deep contradiction in his
character and work. On the one hand, he was a medical man, with a solid training
in anatomical and physiological research, with a staunch conviction that
Science —and this necessarily meant for him the positivistic and reductionist
science he had learned from his teachers— was the only valid and reliable path
to knowledge (Freud, 1933a). Consequently, he consciously intended that the new
discipline he had created be just another natural science, for “Psychology,
too, is a natural science. What else can it be?” (1940b, p. 282).
On the
other hand, he was a child of Romanticism, who loved Goethe, and had a hidden
and unacknowledged penchant for intuition and what he derogatorily called
“occultism” (Freud, 1922a, 1941d [1921]). This was largely repressed and
frequently denied, but it emerged most clearly in his clinical practice.
But it was
not only his Romantic inheritance that prevented him from becoming the stern
positive scientist he strived to be. There was also a pull from the very nature
of the mental processes he was studying. This he was quite aware of. In his
case story of Elizabeth von R., in Studies
on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1895), he writes the following caveat:
I have not always been a psychotherapist.
Like other neuropathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and
electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case
histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.
I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is
evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. [p. 160,
italics added]
So he was
afraid of losing “the serious stamp of science”. But why on earth did he feel
the need to excuse himself for doing what he did best—namely, clinical
research? Probably because he was afraid that his discoveries and ideas might be
rejected by the scientific and academic Establishment he so passionately
yearned to be a part of.
In any
case, this contradiction in Freud’s feelings and thoughts was continued in the
later development of psychoanalysis, and ever since there have been two quite
disparate ways of conceiving, thinking, and practicing our discipline. One of
them searches for impersonal causal explanations, just as in natural science,
and views psychoanalytical practice as a purposive technical intervention,
steered by a precise knowledge of well-proven facts and theories. The other
sees the psychoanalytical treatment as a personal relationship and develops a
highly personal theory of meaning and relations, in order to account for human
experience and behavior, as well as for the most unexpected events that occur
whenever two or more people meet in a closed space, during a fixed time, in
order to “do analysis”.
The former
approach is usually referred to as “metapsychological”, while the latter is
nowadays called “relational”. Although the relational point of view may well be
seen as the later development of some of Freud’s insights —as, for instance, in
“Mourning and melancholia” (1917e) and “The Ego and the Id” (1923b), and a
myriad clinical observations— this was at odds with his attempt to put forward
a strictly scientific theory. It was Sándor Ferenczi (1955, 1985; Ferenczi and
Rank, 1924) who first developed a personal psychoanalytic theory of relations
and conceived psychoanalysis in terms of a shared experience —the “analytic
experience”. But his contributions were foreclosed by the psychoanalytic
community, as a result of Freud’s utter rejection, and only reemerged in a
watered-down version fifteen years after his death, in the work of the British
Object-Relations Theorists. In the US, these ideas flowered in the
Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology traditions, which were in
sharp contrast with that of the Freudian group.
In the past
few decades, the Relational Psychoanalysis movement, which originated in the US
but has now become an international endeavor, has created a dialogic space for
the confluence of these various relational trends (and some others, derived
from Lacanian, Jungian, and interpersonal analysis, and the study of early
mother-child interaction)(Aron, 1996; Mitchell & Aron, 1999). It is interesting
to notice that the more unorthodox aspects of this approach, particularly in
matters of technique, transcend those posed by the various previous relational
schools and are more akin to Ferenczi’s adventurous expansion of the limits of
psychoanalytic technique recorded in his Clinical
Diary of 1932, which was only published in French in 1985. When the English
translation finally appeared in 1988, the initial members of the Relational
group were happy to find out this long-lost ancestor and precursor of their own
explorations (Aron, 1996).
There is,
however, something missing in this reconstruction of the historical development
of the relational perspective. What has gone unnoticed in the now vast
literature on Relational Psychoanalysis is that there has been another group of
analysts who have been working on similar lines since the late 1930s: the
practitioners of Group Analysis. This omission is perhaps understandable, since
most relational psychoanalysts work within the limits of the bipersonal therapeutic
device created by Freud, and those who do work with groups, therapeutic or
otherwise, do it in in terms of other conceptions of group work, informed by psychoanalytical
theory and technique, which conceives clinical phenomena in either
intrapersonal or interpersonal terms —this being what is usually called
“analytic group psychotherapy”.
Group Analysis is a discipline that was born independently
and simultaneously in two distant places: England, in the work of S. H. Foulkes
(1948, 1964a), and Argentina, in that of Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1971a;
Tubert-Oklander & Hernández-Tubert, 2004). It is quite different from analytic
group psychotherapy, which is the application of psychoanalytical theories and
techniques, derived from the bipersonal therapeutic setting, to the treatment
of individuals in groups. Group analysis, on the other hand, recognizes the
specific nature of group processes and approaches groups, both therapeutic and
non-therapeutic, with an analytic attitude for the inquiry of whatever emerges
in them, analyzing it in intrapersonal,
interpersonal, and transpersonal terms. Although it makes
use of psychoanalytical and psychological knowledge and theories, as well as
those generated by the social sciences, it studies and analyzes its particular
form of experience —the group-analytic
experience— and constructs new theories from it, pretty much as psychoanalysis
does with the psychoanalytic experience.
I believe
that both psychoanalysis and group analysis are only aspects of the wider field
of analysis, which is a new path for
the inquiry and understanding of human affairs inaugurated by Sigmund Freud. He
invented a specific procedure to be used for therapeutic and research purposes,
which intended to focus on the study of the intrapersonal mental processes, but
later had to be amplified to include interpersonal processes. Group analysis,
which started from the study of therapeutic and institutional groups, created
its own device for inquiry and intervention in human groups: the group-analytic
group, which may be either small, median, or large.
The
specificity of group analysis derives from the fact that it studies transpersonal processes. This term
refers to mental processes that, although they share almost all the features of
personal processes, at the intrapersonal or interpersonal level, they lack the
feeling of I-ness that characterizes them. They are subjectless mental processes that surround, traverse, and largely
determine the organization and dynamics of individuals and their relations with
others. These include historical, cultural, social, political, institutional,
and group processes. Freud had approached this concept in two of his social
writings, Totem and Taboo (1912–1913)
and Moses and Monotheism (1939a)—particularly
in the latter, in which he studies what he had previously (1933a, p. 147)
called “cultural evolution” (Hernández-Tubert, 2008, 2012).
The
group-analytic perspective and theory are what we call a holistic approach. This means that their particular form of
observation, analysis, and theoretical understanding of their subject matter
—i.e., human affairs— is based on the assumption that systems should be viewed
as wholes, and not as a collection of parts, and that the properties and
behavior of the system cannot be inferred from the study of the isolated parts.
This implies a serious criticism of the research strategy of positivistic science
of tackling the study of any complex entity or situation by splitting it into
simpler parts, studying them in detail, and then reconstructing the original
whole from the summation of the now well-known properties of the parts; this we
usually call the “analytic method”. Holistic thinking claims, on the contrary,
that the so-called “parts” are really created by such analytical splitting
(whether it is a physical split or a conceptual dissection), as an artifact of
the analytic technique. In actual reality, the nature, properties and behavior
of the various elements that may be identified in a complex system, can only be
fully understood in terms of its global organization and functioning. This is
usually summarized by the aphorism “the whole is prior to, more than, and more
elementary than the sum of the parts”.
Such
holistic theory is, at one and the same time, a field theory and a process
theory (Tubert-Oklander 2016a, b). Field theories organize their
observational data as a set of simultaneously occurring interdependent
phenomena, so that, at any given time, whatever occurs in any part of the field
is determined by and has an influence on all other parts of the field. Hence,
anything that happens in the field can only be fully accounted for in terms of
the organization and dynamics of the field at that moment (Tubert-Oklander,
2007, 2013a, 2013b).
The scope
of the observation of a field is necessarily limited by the nature of the
observational device applied. Therefore, the bipersonal device of psychoanalysis
is especially suited for the study of intrapersonal and interpersonal
processes. The group-analytic small group, on the other hand, focuses on
interpersonal and group process, while large groups are especially suited for
observing and analyzing intergroup and social processes in cultural, political,
and organizational terms. We presently lack an observational device for the
study of national and international processes, although we can use
group-analytic theory to analyze them, this being applied group analysis
(Tubert-Oklander & Hernández-Tubert, 2014b).
Such
approach is clearly akin to what relational psychoanalysts have been trying to
do in their inquiry and understanding of what happens in the analytic
situation. Michael Balint pointed out, in his 1968 book The Basic Fault, the inadequacy of a one-person theory for
accounting for observations made in a two-person setting (Balint, 1968–1979). John
Rickman (1950, 1951) had already clearly differentiated, more than fifteen
years before, the one-person, two-person, three-person, and multi-person
psychologies, the latter being for him the only necessary backbone
of theory for group practice (1950, p. 168).
This required the introduction of new
concepts for the better understanding of bipersonal psychoanalysis, such as
Madeleine and Willy Baranger’s (1961-1962, 2008, 2009) conception of the
analytic field and Stephen A. Mitchell’s (1988) concept of the relational matrix. But the Barangers
conceived the field as derived from the interaction between the two parties and
implicitly restricted it to the confines of the analytic space and time —i.e.,
the office and the sessions— thus excluding the whole social dimension.
Mitchell’s matrix, on the other hand, included the social and cultural
dimensions, but viewed them in terms of their impact on the individual and the
dyad, thus leaving out the study of transpersonal processes as such.
The analytic field —both psychoanalytic and group-analytic—
cannot be fairly conceived as a product of the interaction of the participating
parties, nor can it be restricted to the spatial limits of the office or the
temporal limits of the sessions, or even of the whole treatment. The field
extends in all directions, both spatial and temporal, until it fades into the
dim horizon of our perception and awareness. Hence, what is presently happening
in a session may be better understood in terms of things that are happening
beyond the room and include many other people or groups —such as the various
groups and institutions analyst and patient belong to, the cultures in which
either or both of them were reared, or the social and political context in
which both are embedded. The same applies to events that have happened long
before the beginning of the treatment, or even before either party was born, or
possible, anticipated, wished-for, or feared events in the near or distant
future. Hence, the field cannot be thought in terms of our common-sense
conception of things, nor even in its formalized version in scientific
thinking, which only considers the material as “real”, but rather as an experiential field, a mental phenomenon
that obeys the laws of Mind, and not those of Matter.
Therefore, the analytic field is not actually
created when analyst and patient meet for the first time. In a very concrete
sense, it may be said that it was already there, waiting for them to come and
inhabit it. This statement is obviously related to Bion’s (1970, 1980) metaphor
of “thoughts in search of a thinker”.
These ideas are implicit in the theory of the
Matrix that S. H. Foulkes introduced
as a basic concept of group-analytic theory. He defined the matrix as “the hypothetical web of
communication and relationship in a given group. It is the common shared ground
which ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events and upon
which all communications and interpretations, verbal and nonverbal, rest”
(Foulkes, 1964b, p. 292).
As you can
well see, this is a particular type of field theory. There is a gossamer web of
connections that surrounds individuals, goes through them, and determines their
inner organization, behavior, and relations. Just as his neurologist teacher
and Gestalt theorist Kurt Goldstein had conceived the nervous system as a
network of connections, and neurons as the focal points in that web, Foulkes
viewed the group as a network of communications and relations, and the
individuals as its focal points, that is, the places in which the connections intercross
and coalesce. And anything that happens within that matrix is determined by its
organization and dynamics.
But how is
it that the matrix determines the individual? This is because the individual
also has a matricial organization, but such organization is not a closed
system, since it is always open and connected to both higher and lower level
matrixes. So the individual matrix is embedded in and connected with the group
matrix, just the latter is in the institutional and social matrix, and the
field extends in all directions, even though our conscious mind cannot
encompass such overwhelming complexity.
The idea of
the individual as a matrix is obviously at odds with the Jacksonian hierarchical
organization of the psychic apparatus posed by Freudian metapsychology. Then,
why should we embark on such a radical revision of our theory? The only valid
reason is that it paves the way for the inclusion a great deal of phenomena
that could not be easily included in a theory that took as an axiom and
starting point the existence of the isolated individual. The intrapsychic point
of view, which should really be called “intrapersonal”, could manage to explain
subjective experience, but was at a loss when trying to account for collective
living, or even for what happens when two or more individuals meet,
communicate, and interact. So, we need another approach in order to explain how
people understand and influence each other, what happens when they join in
groups of more than three members, and the very nature and functioning of
collective entities such as groups, communities, institutions, societies,
regions, nations, or the international system. And each and every one of these
neglected areas has an impact on a person’s experience, motives, beliefs,
values, thoughts, feelings, behavior, and relations, so that psychoanalysis can
ill afford the cost of ignoring them.
Foulkes
conceived the group’s dynamic matrix
as something that is set in motion as a result of the members’ interaction that
ensues when they meet. But this is only possible because it is based on and
embedded in a deeper foundation matrix,
which antedates the inception of the group. It is the field that is already
there before the group members first meet.
The
foundation matrix is what the analyst and the patient, or the members of a
group and its conductor or conductors have in common, and which allows them to
interact, communicate, and understand each other. It encompasses language,
culture, nationality, and social, historical, and ethnic background. This is
what we refer to as the Social
Unconscious (Hopper, 2003a, b; Hopper & Weinberg, 2011, 2016, in press)
but it also includes the even deeper and universal features that stem from the
fact that we all belong to the same species, this being the ground covered by
Freud´s drive theory and his concept of primordial fantasies, as well as Jung´s
theory of the Collective Unconscious.
Now, this
deep layer of experience is related to the concept of a primeval fusional
experience of being at one with everything that is, which I have called the Syncretic Paradigm (Tubert-Oklander,
2014a). This idea, which derives from Romain Rolland’s “feeling of Eternity”,
which Freud (1930a) called the “oceanic feeling”, has been developed in the
work of Sándor Ferenczi (1924), Hans Loewald (1980), Margaret Mahler (1968),
José Bleger (1967), Blanca Montevechio (1999, 2002), and myself
(Tubert-Oklander, 2014a). It is not just a primitive stage of mental
development, which may or may not survive in adult living, as Freud (1930a) thought,
but rather a permanent phase of minding, which coexists and interacts
dialectically with other, more discriminate, phases during the whole life span.
The syncretic
phase of mainly unconscious experience —which I have called, following
Montevechio’s use of myths, “Dionysian”— is characterized by syncretism and ambiguity. Ambiguity, a
term introduced by Bleger (1967) refers to a state of complete originary
non-discrimination between subject and object, inner and outer, love and hate,
masculine and feminine, mind and body, self and environment; hence, it presents
a confluence of opposing passions. This is the most primitive and vital stratum
of mental functioning, from which all social life derives, since in it there is
a primal continuity and fusion between individuals and everything that
surrounds them. It is the basis of all social feelings and relations, such as
empathy, solidarity, cooperation, and compassion (Bleger, 1971; Montevechio,
2002). This is a non-representational form of experience and relationship, one
that is based on the emotional and bodily experiences that, unlike the
subjectivity of iconic though and verbal thought, may be readily shared.
Just as the
syncretic phase is represented by Dionysus, the specular and iconic phase of
minding corresponds to Narcissus, and the verbal, discriminate, and rational
one, to Oedipus. The three of them are in a constant dialectic interaction,
which is the very essence of human existence.
All these
concepts stemmed from the study of intra-personal mental processes, but they
can and should be readily applied to those collective mental processes that
group analysis inquires. I believe that this is the only way in which concepts
such as “field” and “matrix” can be sorted out and be integrated with those
that emerged from bipersonal psychoanalysis. I have recently tackled this task
in a chapter for a collective book, which is presently in press, on the Social
Unconscious, edited by Earl Hopper and Haim Weinberg (Tubert-Oklander, in
press). There I show how the Syncretic Paradigm can be articulated with
Foulkes’s (1957) descriptions of the various levels to be found in group
processes, which I prefer to call “phases”, in order to avoid the verticality of
a multi-level scheme, which implies that some levels are somehow superior to
others. The term “phases”, on the contrary, suggests a cyclic sequence of
states, like the phases of the moon, in which there cannot be any hierarchy.
Now, when I
spoke of holistic theories, I said that any such theory should be, at one and
the same time, a field theory and a process theory. I have dealt, quite
extensively, with the field concept, but what about the process? Just as the
field represents a way of organizing our data as if they were all operating
simultaneously, the process view organizes its data as a sequence in time. So,
we may say that field theories use a spatial model of events, and process
theories recur to temporal models. A
process is a sequence of changes over time, though not just any such sequence,
but an organized one —i.e., an evolution with a direction and a course,
and this implies an aim and determines a meaning. And the
organization is not static, but dynamic, since the process steers itself
towards its aim.
This view was developed by Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1971a, b;
Tubert-Oklander, 2014b; Tubert-Oklander & Hernández-Tubert, 2004), the
pioneer of psychoanalysis and group analysis in Argentina. He conceived
psychoanalysis, both in its bipersonal and its collective forms, as a dialectical
spiral process. The image of the spiral has traditionally been used to
represent dialectics, since it implies a three-fold progressive movement: it
has a circular displacement, since it goes back, over and over, to the
same themes; then there is an expansion, since each turn does not come
back exactly to the same point, but is ever widening its scope, and finally, there
is a progressive evolution, which advances in space, determining a
three-dimensional cone-shaped spiral.
Nonetheless, in Pichon-Riviere’s thought, the spiral is not only a
dialogue, framed in verbal terms, but also an evolution of the emotional
aspects of the relations between the parties, and of their mutual interaction.
Thus he approaches the Golden Braid of thought, emotion, and action
(Tubert-Oklander, 2013a).
As I have already pointed out, field and process are two ways of
organizing our thinking about our experiences. They are, consequently,
complementary, since each of them clearly depicts some aspect of the whole,
while leaving out or deficiently portraying others. Field theories are good at
representing the mutual influences of the various components of a given
situation but, being atemporal, they are at a loss when having to account for
movement and change. On the other hand, process theories clearly depict changes
in time but, being focused on their evolution, lose sight of the various
components involved (Tubert-Oklander, 2016b.
Of course, I do not wish to imply that field theorists are oblivious of
the temporal perspective, or that process theorists ignore the structural
aspect of the persons or other elements implied in the process. Indeed they all
strive to include those dimensions that are left out or poorly represented in
their theory, as a result of their theory-building strategy. For instance,
field theorists emphasize that the field is a dynamic one —i.e., that it changes
and evolves over time— and Foulkes’s conception of the matrix is not of a
permanent structure, but of a living network of connections. What I am emphasizing
is that the very construction of a field view does not allow us to represent
motion and change, and that this must be added as an afterthought. The same
applies to a process view, which clearly shows changes in time, but is much
more limited in representing the various elements and their interaction, thus
forcing the process theorist to engage in minute dissections of the
interactions among the parties or elements.
We may then say that a field view is like a snapshot, while a process
view is like a film. Snapshots can only represent movement by means of a series
of still images, as in Zeno’s arrow paradox, which reduces movement to an
infinite series of still states. Films allow us to have a direct perception of
movement and evolution, but they lose sight of the details in the image, and if
we try to study them photogram by photogram, we will most probably find out
that each individual image is much less detailed than a true still photograph.
Hence, the experience of a process may be compared to Heraclitus’s river, which
is never the same, and to his paradox that we can never bathe twice in the same
river. Gregory Bateson (Bateson & Goleman, 1978) once paraphrased this,
with his typical English humor, as “You can never go to bed twice with the same
girl for the first time.”
Consequently, what we need, in order to attain a fuller description of
our analytic experiences, is to oscillate between the field view and the
process view, in order to attain a binocular vision, which, as we all know,
adds the dimension of depth to the bidimensional monocular vision (Bateson,
1979). Much in the same way, we have to oscillate between an individual and an
interpersonal perception, and between them both and a collective one, which is
transpersonal —i.e., group, inter-group, institutional, communitarian, social,
or political.
And this brings us to my subtitle for today’s presentation: “Towards a new paradigm of the human
being”. To speak of a new paradigm is a very serious matter. Nowadays, ever
since Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) introduced the concept in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, every major theorist or
would-be theorist in psychoanalysis has claimed or suggested that his theory
represents a new paradigm. Unfortunately for them, this has not been the case:
the Freudian paradigm is still very much alive. What can be argued, as I did at
the beginning of this presentation, is that Freud’s work is torn between two
contrasting paradigms, and that this has been the source of many contradictions
and the origin of separate and conflicting schools of psychoanalytic thought
and practice. Actually, I do not claim to have introduced a new paradigm, but
shown the urgent need for us to develop a new one (Hernández-Tubert, 2011b).
Freud’s
purposive construction of theory started from the unexamined assumption, which
became one of its axioms, that only the isolated individual is “real”, and that
collective entities are just a collection of such individuals. This derives
from the idea of an autonomous subject of thought, introduced by Descartes,
which, even if it was undermined by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, still
lurks in everyday thinking and in our concept of the ego. It is also based on
the materialistic metaphysics of ordinary scientific thought, which only
accepts matter and energy as “real”, as it can clearly be seen in his early
attempt to put forward a general theory of mind, in his 1895 Project (Freud, 1950a).
If one is
convinced that the real stuff of the human being is to be found in the material
basis provided by the body, then the mind becomes only an epiphenomenon of
brain function and psychoanalysis should perforce be submitted to the authority
of neurosciences, as Freud actually believed, albeit he never acted
accordingly. This also implies that collective entities, such as groups,
families, communities, institutions, societies, countries, regions, or supranational
organizations are “nothing but” aggregates of individuals and that any attempt
to view them as real entities is nothing but the figment of a wishful fantasy.
Sociology is then reduced to psychology, just as psychology is reduced to
biology, and this reduced to physics, according to the reductionist view of
science Freud received from his teachers.
On the
other hand, if we are convinced that the human being is primarily social and
relational, and that relations, organization, and mind are as real as material
objects, then we may study such entities in themselves, in terms of an enlarged
ontology that is not reduced to a materialistic metaphysics. Consequently we
will be studying collective structures and processes in their own terms.
But here we
are faced with a new problem. If we take as a starting point the assumption of the
existence of the isolated individual, we shall be able to explore the inner
workings of a person, but not to account for the obvious fact that human beings
communicate and relate to each other. In other words, having installed a chasm
between human beings, we will be at odds when attempting to build bridges over
the void that separates them. On the other hand, if we start from the
assumption that human beings are primarily and essentially social and
relational, and that in our heart of hearts we are in communion, not only with
other people, but also with all of Humanity, Nature, and everything that is,
then we will find it really difficult to account for the equally obvious fact
that we human beings have a most private area of experience that cannot be
fully shared with others and conceive and perceive themselves as a locus of
feeling, thought, and action. In other words, how on earth does individual
subjectivity emerge from communality? For a strict relational conception, the
human subject is the real enigma.
Just as
field and process, the individual and the group are mental constructions of the
secondary process, which, unlike the primary process, is bound to abide by the
rule of the excluded middle (Hernández-Tubert, 2000, 2015). S. H. Foulkes dealt
with this problem in the following terms:
To us intra-psychic does not convey … “intradermic”, and we look
upon the dynamic processes in the group not from the outside, but from inside,
as intra-psychic dynamics in their interaction (Foulkes & Anthony, 1957–1965,
p. 21).
Both aspects, the individual and the social
one, are not only integrated in our approach, but their artificial isolation —never
found in actual reality— does not arise (Foulkes, 1961, p. 148).
Each individual —itself an artificial,
though plausible, abstraction— is basically and centrally determined,
inevitably, by the world in which he lives, by the community, the group, of
which he forms a part (1948, p. 10).
In the same
vein, Enrique Pichon-Rivière wrote:
The bond, which is originally external, then becomes internal, and then
external again, and afterwards it becomes internal again, and so on, thus
permanently taking the shape of this dialectic spiral, this passage of what is
inside to the outside, and what is outside to the inside, which contributes to
establish the notion of the limits between the inside and the outside
(Pichon-Rivière, 1979, p. 55, my translation, italics added).
So, there
is no opposition, for either of them, between the individual and society, since
they form an indissoluble unit, a dynamic field. To quote Pichon Rivière again,
he says:
One cannot think in terms of a distinction
between the individual and society. It is an abstraction, a reductionism that
we cannot accept, because we carry society within us (p. 57). [And also] The
psychological field is the field of the interactions between the individual and
the environment. This is why we may say that the very object of psychology is the interaction field. … This is
precisely where we are working, in the place in which there used to be a
dichotomy between the individual and society (p. 61, italics added).
It could be
said that both the individual and the group are illusions, but I would rather
say that they are alternative constructions of human experience, and that, in
order to attain a fuller grasp of our conscious and unconscious experience of
life, we need to oscillate between them. Apparently, binocular vision is the name
of the game, when dealing with such dire complexity.
But
transcending these dilemmatic oppositions is not just an academic matter, since
they bring about most distressing consequences for human life. Our Western
culture has espoused, since the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the later
development of Capitalism, a view of human existence based on the individual,
and a conception of life as an endless competition, in which, in order to be a
winner, there have to be many losers. These has been distilled and refined by
our present-day Neoliberalism, also known as Late Capitalism, which magnified
to the utmost degree the idea that life is a ruthless battle, and decried and
demeaned the traditional virtues of cooperation, empathy, compassion,
solidarity, and charity, all of them based on a communitarian paradigm. This
seems to be a blind alley for Humankind, so that transcending it may well be of
the utmost urgency for our very survival (Hernández Hernández, 2010; Hernández-Tubert, 2011a, b).
Nonetheless,
the answer is not to be found in Collectivism. Marxism was born, just as
psychoanalysis, in the same cradle of the Industrial Revolution, which had only
two idols: Profit and the Machine. It was only natural for Marx and Freud to
adhere to a mechanistic theory of determination, which conceived everything,
from the individual, through society, to the Universe itself, as a highly
complex piece of machinery. This generated another false opposition, between
scientific determinism and free will. Freud’s metapsychology was deterministic
and mechanistic, but the therapeutic practice he created could only make sense
if a person could somehow transcend his determinations and attain a certain
degree of freedom of thought and choice. This was just another of his
contradictions.
In the same
vein, Marx had a humanistic thought and values, but developed a rigidly
deterministic theory that conceived individuals as mere pawns of the so-called
“social forces”. Consequently, the social collectivistic practice that was
based on his theory forcibly sacrificed the individual to collective interests
and considered the human subject to be a bourgeois fallacy. It is true that, on
many occasions, individuals can sacrifice themselves for the welfare of many,
but this has to be their choice, and
not the result of coercion, manipulation, conditioning, or deceit. Collectivism
is not the same as Communitarianism.
Hence, we sorely
need a new paradigm of human existence that transcends these rigid oppositions
between contrasting world views. Even though the world is pretty despairing
sight nowadays, in terms of the increase of hate, discrimination, greed, ruthlessness,
and contempt, there are signs that something is brewing in the mental pot of
human thought. Many voices, from Aristotle and Jesus of Nazareth, all the way
to some of our leading thinkers, such as Umberto Eco, Leonardo Boff, Hans Küng,
Martin Buber, José Saramago, and others, have called for a communitarian view
of existence. Many of them are the fruit of that living humanistic practice
inaugurated by Freud. It is our task to join our special contribution to many
others, coming from the social sciences, the humanities, education, religion,
spirituality, politics, the helping professions, philosophy, the arts, and even
natural science, in order to fulfil the construction of this new paradigm of
the human being, one that gives their due to the various opposing faces of
human existence: the individual and the community, internal and external,
determinism and free will, reason and passion, imagination and rigor,
reflection and action, efficiency and understanding, identity and difference.
This quest for finding a fair and balanced third position is what we call analogy, which in Greek meant
“proportion”, and attaining it requires a good provision of the Aristotelean
virtue of Phronesis, which is usually
translated as “prudence” (Beuchot, 1997, 2003; Tubert-Oklander y Beuchot
Puente, 2008).
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* Read
at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, San Francisco, January
3, 2017.
** Psychoanalyst
and Group Analyst. Full Member of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association and
Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, Honorary Member of the Group-Analytic
Society International, Founding Member of the International Field Theory
Association, and Member of the International Association of Relational
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.
Email: jtubertoklander@gmail.com
