Abstract
I present below an attempt to understand complexity theory and the dialectical relationship between theory and group analytic practice. These are often concepts difficult to make sense of as they are rarely illuminated with clinical material for the reader or the trainee group analyst to comprehend. After the introduction of the Kantian and Hegelian dialectic and its use to understand group analytic concepts, I move on to the complexity theory and attempt to illustrate its significance with a clinical example from a small group analytic group. Cavafis’s celebrated poem ‘Ithaka’, is used as a metaphor for the utmost importance of the splendid interpersonal and transpersonal journey in group analysis with all its challenges and gains that this brings to the individual and to the group as a whole as the emphasis is on the process (journey) rather the destination (Ithaka).
Ithaka When you set out for Ithaka ask that your way be long, full of adventure . . . so that when you reach the island you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way . . . Ithaka gave you the splendid journey without her you would have not set out (Cavafy, 2007: 37–38)
Introductory remarks and links between theory and practice
Disputations of thought through oppositional remarks made via logical debate and dialogue, known as dialectics, apply to the theory and practice of group analysis, through their reciprocal relatedness. The consequent dialectical relationships present challenges and conundrums to contemplate. As Blackwell noted, ‘There have been dialectical movements in the development of group analysis from its birth to date . . . antitheses have arisen in opposition to established theses, forming new syntheses which have in turn given rise to new opposition’ (Blackwell, 2002: 105).
In Kantian dialectic (Kant, 1790), thesis and antithesis leads to a synthesis searching for truth (‘both/and’ dualistic thinking). This dialectic argues a linear causation where systems exist as separate entities—for example the individual and the social, the cause and effect, enabling prediction of effect through causation.
On the contrary, in Hegelian dialectic (Stacey, 2001), ‘both/and’ replaced a paradigm of living experience, with opposites existing not as separate entities, but through an interpenetration, via iterative and non-linear interaction between them and through a social process of people recognizing each other (Stacey, 2003). In Hegel’s dialectic (1807), there is no spatial metaphor, and one is the other (external and internal world for example) forming a continuous interaction in the living present, creating something new and unpredictable in their transformation.
Group analytic theory and practice may therefore be considered as a non-linear process of continuous interaction and interdependence, with subjectivity seen as the existence of one, only through the existence of another.
Garland (2009) advocated that Bion’s theory of group process was startlingly original and predated his training in psychoanalysis, noting that he started with no obvious pre-existing framework and although familiar with Freud’s work, his account of group processes was totally his own, unconstrained by pre-existing formulations. On the contrary, Foulkes, through a synthesis of psychoanalysis, systemic theory and sociology, applied concepts from all three in order to conduct therapeutic groups. This enabled an innovative transition from psychoanalysis to group analysis with the group being more than the sum of its parts and with the emergence of an interchangeable concept of the internal and external world, advocating an integrated view (Foulkes, 1990). According to Ernst (1999), Foulkes did not develop a grand theory but a form of practice, as a pragmatic attempt to solve a theoretical problem within psychoanalysis but also as an attempt to challenge the horrors of the Second World War by developing his patients’ capacities to communicate with each other.
Foulkes (1990) saw the group as a potent instrument of psychotherapy and wrote that he understood its therapeutic effects in terms of its own theory. Stacey (2003) and Dalal (1998) both argued that Foulkes followed the Kantian dialectic of two oppositional forces regarding the relationship between the individual and the group, considering them separate entities and oscillating between the individual and the social. In certain circumstances the individual was ‘prior’ and in others the group and society were ‘prior/figural’ (concept of figure and ground). Dalal referred to orthodox Foulkes as firmly rooted in psychoanalysis, and radical Foulkes, where the individual was considered social through and through. He regarded the radical theory as unfinished. He suggested that true group analytic approach was only going to be possible with the use of the ‘radical’ Foulkesian concepts with the impact of the social unconscious in the centre of the debate and an understanding of how groups use their power to attain supremacy over other groups (Behr and Hearst, 2005). It is unclear to me though whether Dalal offers an alternative method in clinical practice.
Nitsun (1996) highlighted a theoretical imbalance in Foulkes’ approach, considering him over-optimistic whilst emphasizing the group’s therapeutic potential, yet he failed to address destructive phenomena in groups. Nitsun developed the concept of the anti-group via a dialectical journey theory and practice through utilizing a Kantian dialectic which integrated Bion’s and Foulkes’ thinking. He suggested that the conductor held both models in mind (‘both/and’) for therapy to be successful. He advocated that without the conductor’s awareness of the anti-group and working towards its resolution, there is a danger of idealization of the group, a failure to achieve change and a threat to the group’s survival. Nitsun noted that the overall aim was not to destroy what existed in terms of theory and practice, but to regenerate and strengthen it.
Brown (2003) advocated the integration of Foulkes’ and Bion’s contributions towards a new dialectical model incorporating the concepts of Nitsun, Dalal, Agazarian, Turquet, Lawrence and Hopper, as well as transcultural phenomena, complexity theory and attachment theory. Perhaps Brown suggested this ‘hodgepodge mixture of constructs’ (Schermer and Pines, 1994) as Foulkesian theory may have challenges to face in terms of future sustainability.
Bollas (1987) noted that the mother is experienced by the infant as a process of transformation. Similarly, the group as the ‘environment mother’ serves as a transformational object through symbiotic relating and a recurrent experience of being for the group members. It is through this medium that there is a continuous interplay between theory and practice and it is this dialectic that takes place in the conductor’s mind during the group experience. Schermer and Pines (1994) viewed theory not as a cognitive schema but a transitional object (Winnicott, 1971) used to bridge the conductor’s inner world with the life of the group and vice versa helping to contain powerful and chaotic affects by facilitating interpretation, symbols, myths and stories about inchoate emotionalities.
Stacey (2003) argued that a clear divide between theory and practice is problematic, noting that when one participates in a therapy group, then one thinks, acts, theorises and practises at the same time. The boundary between theory and practice is, therefore, highly permeable and the contemporary group conductor is constantly faced with the dialectical challenge of holding the tension between divergent theories and integrating them into practice. This is a particular challenge for the trainee group analyst who discovers the complexity of the group process very early on (Papanastassiou, 2019). Stacey introduced the complexity theory in group analytic thinking which I attempt to explain below:
Complexity theory
Complexity theory is a group analytic concept developed by Stacey (2003) arising from Hegelian dialectical process thinking. It is a theory of human interaction based on the natural complexity sciences: mathematical chaos theory and Elias’s and Mead’s process theories. Elias (1939) argued that the division between internal and external world was an abstraction from our direct experience of interacting with each other and an illusion produced by social evolution. Mead (1934) explained that human minds and society emerged simultaneously and therefore one could not exist without the other. Stacey argued that the individual and the social are two aspects of the same process forming an ever-changing pattern of communicative interaction and that interaction produces further interaction (iterative interaction of human bodies where mind and self, arise between people rather than being located in an individual). There is only process, according to Stacey, neither system, internal world nor social system, neither inside nor outside, theory or practice. All are considered as part of the same process and not differentiated for the sake of differentiation. Transformation therefore occurred in the interaction in the living. Therefore, the concept of the internal world becomes obsolete and the living present becomes a circular notion of time in which each moment, people construct their pasts as the basis of their expectation of their future. There is no distinction between ‘here and now’ and ‘there and then’ in the notion of the living present. Reconstructions of the past are therefore not a simple retrieval from long term memory but rather ever-changing narratives. Stacey noted that in the living present, the group conductor must pay continuous attention to the communicative interaction and power relating in the group which is about ‘being, doing and becoming together’.
When members join a group, through communication and relating, they soon discover their interdependence-mutual dependence as in a ‘game of chess’ (Elias in Burkitt, 1991) in negotiating their actions with each other simultaneously (Stacey 2003). As a result of this interdependence, each individual is both enabled and constrained by the expectations and demands of both others and themselves. Communicative interaction is thus the dialectical patterning of enabling and conflicting constraints, a feature of any complex process. Central to this process is the figuration of power relations which Elias (1970) considered a structural characteristic of all relationships and which Liveras beautifully describes in a recent paper (Liveras, 2020).
Stacey observed that inclusion (qua attachment) and exclusion (qua separation) are processes at the heart of power relations. He was influenced by Foulkes on the notion of communication as well as Foulkes’ location of disturbance in between persons. Foulkes’ communication was a tribute to the living present where the conductor is predominantly concerned with the present situation, seeing meaning in action. He spoke about communication and also disturbance of communication occurring between people similarly to Stacey’s process of interaction between people. The departure from Foulkes was that Stacey saw only process whereas Foulkes oscillated between process and internal world. Stacey argued that concepts such as projection and introjection, matrix and group as a whole were problematic as they are all based on the mistaken metaphor of inside-outside.
Clinical example presented below attempted to be understood from the Kantian dialectic 1
Prior to the Christmas break, as all the group members had experienced some form of abuse, they identified one common denominator: trauma. Members related through similarities in an attempt to make a connection. This is in line with Foulkes’ (1948) notion of belonging when ‘the ego becomes strengthened in identification with the rest of the group’. This was prior to the group’s first break, hence the group felt close to suffering trauma, experiencing me as the perpetrator. Simultaneously, via a counter-transference feeling of exhaustion, I became aware of the group as the perpetrator of trauma, with me as the victim. A dialectical position of perpetrator and victim was held in mind, experienced in the group’s living present. Conversely, a question lingered: who might be the perpetrator and who the victim? Did an early dynamic emerge in this group, referring to power relations, namely exclusion and inclusion? The material below gives some clues to my questions:
Some patients came via the lift, with an anxiety it might jam. Caroline mentioned she had been in group therapy previously where the group ended prematurely, due to the therapist’s illness. Andrew described an incident when his son recently threw himself down the stairs, in a suicidal bid. Christopher described nightmares of buildings collapsing on him. Kimberley announced with little affect that she was intending to miss a significant number of sessions, giving a seemingly ‘logical work explanation’ for this mandatory absence. Group members were ‘very understanding’ almost colluding with Kimberley, giving her ‘permission’ to miss the sessions. I felt excluded from this process, having images of the group rapidly disintegrating and crashing down the stairs. Rana, an unemployed female, struggling to find a job, also announced an intended lengthy absence due to a temporary job opportunity. I wondered who had the ‘power’ to allow some to absent and others not (was it me the group conductor or the group as a whole?) or was this a group process that needed to be understood as such? Later, it was made clear to me by most members that ‘they’ could choose when to attend the sessions and when not, especially when an anxiety was voiced about the threat to the group’s survival through any illness of mine which would render the group untenable. All members agreed that I was required to be on time, and never miss a session. Christopher added: ‘I would leave right now if I knew that this therapy will end prematurely or if I knew you were to fall ill’.
I regarded this material as an authoritarian challenge via a direct attack on the therapeutic process to avoid the work task through Bion’s (1961) basic assumption of fight-flight as well as an early development of an anti-group (Nitsun, 1996). There was fear of rapid disintegration expressed through the members’ destructive and suicidal images linked to the individual’s overwhelming anxiety when one encounters the group (Bion, 1961; Papanastassiou, 2019).
The panic voiced by Christopher reminded me of Agazarian’s (1994) nameless terror present in the initial moments of a group. I experienced images of the group getting ‘stuck’ in the lift. There was identification with a failed, stagnated object that had collapsed, just like members’ lives, ready to give up plus an awareness of a failed, fragile and dying parental figure. Thus the need to attack me and the therapy I was offering them, but it was already clear to them that my task was not to abandon them.
As absences materialized, members’ histories proved a source of insight:
Kimberley was the older of many siblings in her family and she perceived her younger sister to be the favourite in her parents’ eyes, whereas she continuously felt to be placed in the position of the unwanted child who made her parents angry. This was being repeated not only on a personal level but also in her working and social life. Rana described a very controlling parental figure, who prevented her from doing what she wanted, still seeing this as one of the main reasons for her subsequent social isolation and unemployment.
The group therefore co-created an early family dynamic of Kimberley being the unloved child, unwanted by the group conductor. The initial negative counter-transference experienced fitted in with this explanation but I was also curious that this was not the case with most group members who had colluded with her request for mandatory absence over the coming weeks. A multiplicity of transferences was already emerging and I could see the importance in groups to recognize transference as a total situation (Foulkes, 1990). However, I wondered why everyone was not challenging the absences? Were they waiting to see what kind of conductor I would be? Would I become challenging, rejecting, punitive and persecutory, or conversely, firm and accepting? In addition, I wondered whether another reason for this ‘pseudo-compliance’ with absences was to unconsciously avoid conflict between them in a desperate attempt to keep diversity and differences at bay. Foulkes and Anthony (1984) said that conflicts over conformity and authority may become burning questions for the group and present different aspects of an overall conflict over dominance in the basic sense of the parents’ dominance over the child. They named this primary conflict of man as a group animal, not dissimilar to Bion’s ideas.
The dynamics changed over the coming months and some members became concerned about the impact of Kimberley’s and Rana’s absences. They also began to recognize familiar aggressive aspects in themselves through mirroring and projective processes (Foulkes, 1948; Foulkes and Anthony, 1984). The group saw that Rana found boundaries unbearable and resisted the group rules at all costs. This became apparent as she continuously challenged the boundaries by arriving very early or very late and on several occasions by bringing a hot drink to consume during the group’s session. The group slowly developed a curious and reflective stance about resistance and ambivalence with regard to group rules and helped members to recognize this as a familiar behaviour for some, being repeated since childhood, but also to open up a discussion about what it was that unconsciously needed to be challenged and attacked.
Stacey suggested that the notions of transference and counter-transference remain useful in thinking about patterning of complex responsive processes as ‘we will always be iterating themes from our past’ but argued that this repetitive theme of relating serves the purpose of communication blockage rather than the emergence of new patterns of relating that produce change. In my view, as long as transference and countertransference do not become forever repetitive themes, they enhance communication instead of blocking it. For those themes not to become repetitive and obstruct progress, the conductor will not only have to be aware of the emerging patterns of interaction but also bring them to the group’s attention to be explored and understood in their totality as part of wider group processes. Only then the themes can slowly begin to change and the narratives told can take a new form with emerging new interactions full of transformational potential.
My analysis of the group material suggests a dualistic/Kantian dialectical perspective of ‘both/and’ thinking between the individual and group. This is because it suggests that patients’ internal worlds and past experiences in the ‘there and then’ are taken into account and subsequently these are projected powerfully into the ‘here and now’ (‘there and then’ and ‘here and now’ as being two separate entities) to the rest of the group and their internal worlds. This suggests a duality and a spatial metaphor between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘there and then’, between the individual and the group, the inside and the outside, between psychoanalysis and group analysis. It suggests a duality that, as per complexity theory, is arbitrary and perhaps unnecessary for change to take place in groups.
Analysis of group material presented above from a Hegelian/complexity theory perspective
I now explore the same clinical material from the complexity theory perspective, where attention to process takes place: . . . as a therapist, I am thinking about the group in process terms. (Stacey, 2003: 144)
The challenge for me was to understand what was happening in the group in terms of social process. Inclusion and exclusion and power figurations were a repetitive theme as described earlier: the included ‘absent’ subgroup and the excluded subgroup of which I was very much part of. This was also the other way around: myself and the other members were there every week and seen as the ‘in’ members and the others mainly Kimberley, Rana and slowly Christopher joining them, became the excluded members who were mostly physically absent. It is interesting that as those subgroups became more apparent, the feeling of rage, rivalry and competitiveness and hence conflict also intensified and rather worryingly two of them confessed that they also met outside the sessions once. I saw this through Stacey’s description of an experience of separation while witnessing the attachment of others so the dynamics of attachment and separation were becoming very much present.
Later on, the stable members described themselves as the ‘core of this group’ and although I wanted to see this as the group developing a capacity to have a stable and stronger core, I could not stop thinking about this as another way of expressing the inclusion and exclusion dynamic: ‘the core and the periphery’.
The ‘I-We’ Identity was emerging through an immediate figuration of power social relations: I had set up the group, chosen its members, time, venue and duration of the group. I represented the white professional and the privileged ‘sane’ female psychiatrist. In their minds, I was not the deprived, anxious, depressed, unemployed, traumatised member in colour that a lot of them identified themselves as. I was included in the ‘healthy’ group whilst the rest of the members were excluded and seen as the ‘unhealthy group’ that ‘needed’ to be ‘normalised’ in the social unconscious. Members expressed shame and a sense of failure for coming to therapy: ‘in a society in which dependency is often judged as weakness. . . it is shaming to be seen as needy and trying to receive attention’ (Stacey, 2003: 151).
As the group sessions evolved and progressed, members began to speak of the value of the group and the wish for it to last longer than initially agreed. Images of a ‘We’ indentity but with differences and divisions much acknowledged and meaningfully processed came to mind. A deep enrichment of the process and a gradual transformation of the group’s journey (Ithaka) ensued, much accompanied with hope and trust for the Hegelian dialectical process and the group’s powerful but resourceful complexity.
The power of the transformation that can occur in a group is through joining the group and becoming a regular member of it, patients slowly acquire a ‘We’ identity, perhaps one of the very few identities available to them at that point in their lives Stacey. (2003: 154)
The conductor’s role is to enable the development of a powerful ‘We’ identity. Transformation can occur through the experience of belonging to the group. For example, the meeting of the subgroup outside the sessions might not be helpful only to be seen as an anti- group phenomenon or a fight–flight which suggest an aggressive and persecutory response and defence against anxiety. It is much more helpful to be understood as a wish from the members’ social selves to maintain their ‘We’ identity even when the group is not meeting. The therapist becomes the active participant in the group because this is what he/she is. Stacey by no means suggested that the group rules are not adhered to or the analytic stance abandoned, but adopted a social approach, where the conductor is part of this social process of interdependent people where curiosity and interest is generated in search for a new meaning in the living present. In that way, I do not think he is very far away from Foulkes’ ideals, but the departure comes in avoiding thinking about the group as a whole or in terms of a system as this suggests that there is a boundary between the outside and the inside and that the whole is outside the direct experience of interaction. Stacey avoided all spatial notions including the ones of container and contained as well as those of boundaries for the same reasons as above.
Still in its early days, but already group members began to speak of the value of the group for them and the wish for it to last longer than initially agreed. Images of a ‘We’ identity, slowly strengthening through this process comes to mind and a sense of hope and trust for the group process prevails.
Conclusion
The study of dialectics in theory and practice is a process not a fait accompli; it is a journey and not the destination. What is critical is the complexity of the process, the challenges it presents, and the emerging communicative interdependent interactive patterns that take place in a group. Complexity in the group is about the convolutions of the dialogue that takes place, the struggle with the presence of boundaries and the absence of direction, with continuous tension between the individual and the group. Bion advocated that what is going on in the room is unknowable and one is thrown into a jumble when one enters a group and a need arises to make sense of the jumble because the group is all we have in common. The challenge in group analysis is to hold successfully the above tensions and to have insight into the dialectics between theory and practice, and to learn from the experience of the group. What emerges is not a solution but new vistas, a new narrative of relationships (Garland, 1982).
In conducting a group one might have an idea based on theory of how change should look like, but as the group develops and progresses, one is faced with the reality of the living present where non-linear complex interactions take place not previously thought of, nor predicted, and change becomes a rather illusory, vague, amorphous and faceless concept. In a small group the reality is that no one alone has the power to decide how change is going to look like but the hope is that the group conductor can shed light on the processes of interaction through an ever-changing, dialectical relationship between theory and practice in the living present of the group. A member in my group said very early on: ‘I can already see the end in the beginning’. It is important in a group that living and being in the present is encouraged and that individuals through the therapeutic process of the group are taught to learn to love and appreciate their journey through life.
