Dreaming revolutions — group analysis beyond words. The Elaborative Matrix

Abstract

‘We are in urgent need of ways to understand and reorganize societies so that culture-frames of mind can be steered towards more generative paths’ (Bollas, 2018, xiii).

This paper contributes to applied group analysis as a creative and progressive discourse and practice that can actively address and respond to trauma and social injustice, to liberate traumatic dissociation into free association. Both group analysis and psychoanalysis emerged as a resistance to dominant totalitarian and oppressive political structures. Following a similar trajectory, this paper builds on my response to growing up in an oppressive and totalitarian society, with an attempt in my practice and research to ‘liberate the life force in a traumatized society’ (Berman, 2011). My resistance took the form of the provision of sustainable free access to analytic group-based mental health training, services, and communities of care¹, using an extensive free associative vocabulary. Free association is a method of understanding and transforming traumatic states of mind and counteracts restrictive forms of knowing that enable generative paths. I offer continued investigation with a group analytic focus on adaptive methods of responding to trauma and social change. I introduce the term ‘Elaborative Matrix’, cojoining group analysis and social dreaming, drawing on case material from temporary groups in Chile during the social revolution of 2019. I stretch the group analytic frame to include an extended aesthetic tool kit to facilitate collective acts of creativity, enabling mourning, reparation, and elaboration. In this context, there is a pre-existing generative function of a society already dreaming of new futures. This paper offers the reader an experience and invitation to consider the value of an elaborated methodology to promote group analysis as a form of activism.

Introduction

I was invited to Santiago in Chile, serendipitously at the time of the revolution, to present a conference keynote and conduct group processes with staff and students at a university (west), and members of the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association (APCH) (east). This paper focuses on material from a singular, three hour, median group configuration of 24 staff and students within a university context (including a translator and myself as conductor). We met ‘underground’ in a post graduate room, accommodating a large circle of chairs, with space for image making. Most public spaces in Santiago, including the University, had been forcibly shut down. Group members represented those protesting and advocating for social justice from different faculties. They aged between 23 and 75, with a significant majority of women. The horizontal leaderless revolution mirrored the horizontal shared holding of the group matrix. Hopper’s (2003: 127) term ‘the dynamic non-conscious’ is helpful to describe the capacity for this process to generate movement and potential transformation.

I draw from a larger inquiry within the context of my qualifying dissertation at the Institute of Group Analysis. This ‘elaborative matrix’ uses a group analytic framework within an adapted social dreaming matrix of sharing night-time dreams, free association, and image making. The group configurations, including the large group on the streets, amplify, and replicate core group analytic concepts. The protests took place at the epicentre of Santiago in Dignity Square, which alludes to one of the emblematic phrases of the revolt ‘Until Dignity Becomes Customary’. This was the nerve centre of the social matrix, dividing the city into east and west, wealthy, and disenfranchised.

Within this context of social and political upheaval, my hosts invited me to co-convene a series of group processes, only one of which is focused on in this paper. I responded in the spirit of reflective citizens (Mojovic, 2016) to provide spaces for reflection, creation, and digestion. We created parallel opportunities of taking the revolution off the streets into safe enough spaces to digest, think, and feel.

My work over the past 20 years using an elaborative social dreaming matrix in response to political and social injustice, alongside my training as a group analyst, precipitated the provision of a group analytic space to track and make meaning of ‘the psychodynamics of culture’ (Bollas, 2018: x). Both the revolution and the group analytic process potentially disrupt the repetition of dominant and oppressive thinking and enactments. A participant said, ‘I [was] biased by the recurrence of vertical learning instances, but I found myself with a very different experience’.

To foster an intersubjective milieu that both recognizes and honours the inherent sociality of human beings is no simple feat, especially in violent societies where projection and withdrawal are the common psychological responses to perceptions of threat. (Long, 2021: 165)

The collective responses to social injustice differed. Some responded with projection (enactments of violence and aggression) in the form of extreme police brutality and repression. Some responded with withdrawal (complacency and turning a blind eye), represented by the APCH. Others responded with generative responses, including transformative creative expressions of love and hate, dancing and songs of revolution and powerful images on the streets and in the university group.

Although tempting to present these vignettes as splits between conservative universalisms and progressive activisms, the restless ambiguity of groups made this impossible. Within the group matrix described, ‘the aesthetics of neoliberalism are revealed to be tawdry and unimaginative in the light of the aesthetics of creative radicalism’ (Rooney, 2020: 10).

Aims

The aim of this article is to share the possibilities and applications of group analysis within various group configurations as explored in my dissertation. I propose an active inclusion of objects and images to group analytic practice, to promote a democracy of practice and language, as aligned with Bollas’ (1992: 36) ‘objects like words, are there for us to express our self. We have before us an infinite number of things, which we may use in our own unique way to meet and to express the self [and others] that we are’. Furthermore, a core aim aligns with Arendt’s (1959: 13) reclamation of the term ‘vita activa’, attributed to Aristotle, a life devoted to public-political matters, challenging hierarchies of contemplation versus action, mobilizing the life force, through creativity and action.

‘Group analysis, since its inception, has provided survival skills for disrupted matrices, but does not use them enough’ (Mojovic, 2015: 540). While Mojovic calls to group analysis for survival skills, I argue for the need to transcend notions of survival. I offered spaces that unsettle and elaborate the disruption, creating something new. Foulkes’ notion of unsettlement emphasizes the disturbances as a fundamental function of the group and the conductor. The structure of the groups elucidates disruption and simultaneous integrative processes that offer a containing function (Foulkes, 1964b: 55).

I interpret the group configuration functioning in the following ways:

• - A space to cultivate group-specific therapeutic factors enabling elaboration, creativity, reflection, digestion, mourning, meaning and disruption.

• - A space to research current and anticipated human anxieties and resilience.

• - A space to promote activism and generative qualities of the life force comprising the ‘elaborative group matrix’.

The Elaborative Matrix

This paper disrupts the language of group analysis and social dreaming. While adopting some core philosophical and methodological contributions of social dreaming, the ‘elaborative matrix’ differs, in that, the convenor (group analyst) conducts the group, rather than acts as ‘host’ as Lawrence originally coined. The term matrix rather than group is used drawing on Foulkes’ (1990) description of unconscious communications within the network of inter-relationships within group analysis where the nodal point is not a place, but a function with infinite possibilities.

Contribution of social dreaming

Social dreaming gathers data of the social and/or organizational unconscious (Lawrence, 2005, 2007). Group analysis is primarily considered to be a ‘therapeutic technique and not a research tool’ (Weinberg, 2006). This paper provides a case for an adapted social dreaming matrix as a group analytic process, dissolving the splits between research methods and therapeutic engagement (Berman and Manley, 2018). It adds to research developments including the ‘visual matrix’ (Froggett, Manley and Roy, 2015)) and Nitsun’s ‘Artist’s Matrix’ (2022), contributing to the disruption of this paradigm, inviting free association and collective knowledge.

Social dreaming evolved out of the group analysis tradition, pioneered by Gordon Lawrence in 1982 (Lawrence, 2005, 2007). This method was inspired by Charlotte Beradt, a Jewish-German journalist, at the time of the Third Reich, of who gathered more than 300 dreams of Nazis, Jewish people, and Roma communities. Beradt (1943) discovered a common social unconscious of the imminent horrors of the war. The collection of dream fragments and associations reveals the social unconscious of the group, organization, and society. The social unconscious is a shared unconscious field where members internalize the same or similar social objects (Hopper, 2012; Weinberg, 2006). Dalal (1998, 2013, 2022) offers a more expansive view emphasizing the socio-cultural power figurations as determinants of the structure of the social unconscious. His contribution continues to be an active critique and elaboration on the racialization of the social unconscious. The unfolding of the group process, during the Chilean uprising, offers unique insights into fostering ‘democratic states of mind’ (Bollas, 2018).

Anticipated futures

The elaborative matrix contributes to new futures, revealing the predictive and imaginative realm of what is still to come. This is echoed in The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘[A] a dream has its origin in the past. The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us to the future’ (Freud, 1938: 549).

This differs from Hopper’s reference to ‘if and when’, linked to past and present experiences (Hopper, 2003: 207). The groups I discuss hold elements more aligned to the ‘prophetic group’ and ‘seismic prediction’ (Brown and Zinkin, 2000; Solms, 2022) and Foulkes’ (1990: 227) reference to the primordial level and the ‘supra personal mental matrix’. Attention to this ‘infinite question’ (Bollas, 2009) and ‘O’, Bion’s symbol for the unknowable and unreachable ultimate truth (Bion, 1970) offers a contribution to preventative and proactive social, psychic, and planetary health.

Inter-objectivity

The old juxtaposition of an inside and outside world, constitution and environment, individual and society, phantasy and reality, body and mind and so on (my emphasis), are untenable. (Foulkes, 1948: 10)

The ‘so on’ in Foulkes’ exposition seems to offer a segue to include the primordial (what is to come) and challenge worded forms of knowledge privileged in group analysis. Anthropologist and cultural theorist Appadurai (2013, 2017) speaks of futurity as part of his democracy of thinking, saying that ‘objects are mobile, animate, and agentive subjects [that express] purpose, desire and telos’ (2017: 401). Within the elaborative matrices, ‘all phenomena in an analytic therapeutic group are considered as potential communications’ (Foulkes, 1990: 226).

Group analysis traditionally uses the spoken word as the primary language of communication—I argue for the visual image having role in containing the narrative and providing meaning. ‘The art in psychotherapy must be made to serve the science and not vice versa’ (Foulkes, 1948: 141). I contend that psychic objects (in the traditional object relations paradigm), are not hierarchically superior in fulfilling a transformative therapeutic function: actual objects, I believe, through their associative and aesthetic potential, bear the same (or different) weight in facilitating internal and external change.

Group analysts and psychoanalysts have contributed significantly to broadening the metaphoric and analogic landscape of the group, encouraging active engagement with mental objects. Free association is a key proponent and investment in the method that extends objects to being the ‘furniture of the unconscious matrix’ (Bollas, 1992: 23). This furniture includes dreams, found materials, objects, and image-making materials, as well as a group of people with a host/conductor familiar with group analytic thinking.

I suggest a ‘reconciliation and synthesis between subject and object’ (Said,1994: 270). The way I understand this, is a more active interface between ‘subject to subject’ relationships (inter-subjectivity) and ‘subject to object’ relationships where actual objects have affective potential (a term I refer to as inter-objectivity). This reconciliation offers an elaborative vocabulary for use as group analysts. Within the elaborative group analytic matrix, ‘treasures which lie buried in crypts will become the delight of their owner and can be made to work to the benefit of us all’ (Abraham and Torok, 1994: 156).

The context and dream material from the group described, allows the integration of the ‘here and now’ (therapeutic engagement), the ‘there and then’ (reflective, memory-based, gathering) and the ‘what’s to come’ within an elaborative matrix (activism to innovate and predict social change).

Political context

A few days before arriving in Santiago ‘the rise in subway fares detonated a social revolt. It brought together [ . . . ] indignant people tired of a neoliberal system’ (Reyes-Herrera, 2021 written correspondence). President Piñera decreed a State of Emergency, entrusting the control of the cities to the military and evoking the collective memory of Chile’s dictatorial past, a ‘time collapse’ (Volkan, 2011) and a wound still present in Chilean history.

While in Chile, a conservative government was elected in the United Kingdom, coinciding with Brexit. There was passive acceptance and despair of disenfranchised groups with limited political agency, protest is not a dominant discourse in British culture. This was in stark contrast to the dynamism of the Chilean Social Revolution that was ‘a beautiful social explosion’ (Reyes-Herrera in conversation, 2019) that politicized an active struggle for liberation.

The Chilean police, controlled protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas, wounding, and blinding. The force of this totalitarianism and systemic violence seemed to be equally or even more forcefully counteracted with creativity and democracy of spirit. In ‘Working through Collective Wounds’ about the Brazilian uprising, Soreanu’s (2018) theoretical formulations resonate. She articulates through her rich use of symbol, analogy, philosophy, and creativity of language, the split in social and individual psyches.

This aesthetic of participating in the protests in Dignity Square was resonant with my involvement in the struggle for democracy in apartheid South Africa. This included the anticipation of police brutality, seeing and hearing large, armoured vans, police with guns and shields and the smells and disorientation of tear gas and rubber bullets. The songs of revolution were different yet elicited similar somatic responses as when we sang ‘Nkosi sikeleli Afrika’ on marches through Johannesburg in the 1980s and early 1990s.

There was an extraordinary care of inter-dependence and collaboration in the square. Massage chairs and food were available to people on the frontline. People were dancing and singing with instruments comprising pots and pans. Graffiti covered every wall and building representing the dominant ideology. These creative and courageous acts of protest are group-specific factors responsible for the journey towards transformation of a disenfranchised population and social injustice. These group configurations on the streets and in the room fostered a place for social exchange, uniting individuals out of isolation and alienation to a place of belonging. In Creative Radicalism in the Middle East (2020) Caroline Rooney calls this place of belonging ‘poetic realism’. She states, ‘the poetic is also non-dualist in that it makes use of a figurative language to signal the underlying unity of being’ (Rooney, 2020: 204).

In contrast to this active and open response at the university was a more constrained and ambivalent engagement with the group from the east, invested in maintaining the status quo. This became evident in the dreams and associations of this group. These ‘fascist’ and ‘democratic states of mind’ (Bollas, 1992, 2018), were played out side by side, within parts of ourselves and within the microcosm of the dynamic matrix of the small, median, and large groups.

Vignette

Elaborative Matrix: ‘estallido social’ (social outburst) University of Santiago, December 2019

When offering responsive group analytic spaces, the frame and the nature of the dynamic administration is transformational. This resembles Bollas’ (1987) understanding of the ‘transformational mother’. The conductor/caregiver continually changes and adapts to and is changed and adapted by the infant/group needs.

The Chilean groups’ ‘artificially created’ (Foulkes, 1975: 132) matrices were provided to facilitate free flow of communication that could be received, shared, and metabolized. We met in response to what Foulkes named ‘disturbance’, a disturbance in the primordial and foundational matrix. The context of the revolution (in the square) was a group already responding to a social disturbance in communication. The violence in the streets was evidence of ‘resistances or defences which prevent a free flow of communications or their reception and thus the sharing of them’ (Foulkes, 1975: 131). A facilitating environment (Winnicott, 1974) offered, ‘containment [ . . . that] corresponds to the transformation of affect, not to its suppression. An affect contained provides the motive power for thought’ (Hoggett, 2002: 15). This motive power contains the capacity for symbolization and creativity to transform trauma into something that can heal, a scar, or an ‘aesthetic that is congruent’ (Soreanu, 2018).

The group agreed that communication would take place in Spanish, as I was the only English-speaking participant. ‘The good conductor, the good therapist, talks back in the language in which things reach [them], in the language current amongst the members of the group’ (Foulkes, 1975: 131). I was dependent on translators and my art therapy colleague, diffusing my authority as the conductor.

The group process began with an introduction, where we discussed the structure and established the boundaries the group required to feel safe enough to bring our conscious and unconscious selves. We agreed to meet for three hours, and time frames for each element of the matrix were agreed upon, including ethical considerations about confidentiality, collaborative research, and permission to use transcripts and photographs for publication and possible dissemination.

This adaptive framework differs from a clinical group where Foulkes (1948: 70) recommends minimum instructions. This intersectional framework (Crenshaw, 1989; Berman, 2022; Stevenson, 2020; Talwar, 2019; Nayak, 2021) holds multiple functions of therapeutic, educational (Freire, 1972), research-based, and future-seeking activism.

The first 20 minutes included an introduction to social dreaming and its origins. A brief theoretical overview included dreams as ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ (Freud, 1938), extrapolating key ideas analytic ideas, ‘by the group, of the group, including its conductor’ (Foulkes, 1975: 3), making the social unconscious visible in a group (Hopper, 1997, 2003, 2012; Weinberg, 2006, 2019; Dalal, 1998, 2013, 2022), contributions of ‘unthought known’, and the world as an evocative object available for use (Bollas, 1987, 2009).

We contextualized the session, inviting participants to share and associate to dreams within a social space, responding to pervasive social, political, and personal resonances, offering a sense of coherence even if not consciously understood (Foulkes, 1975: 228). We encouraged ‘thoughts [to] travel from one to another, with no set destination’ (Manley, 2020: 2). We explained that the dreaming process facilitates transitions between conscious and unconscious communications allowing the emergence of new feelings, thinking, and understandings to arise.

The physical transitions of space that would occur were articulated, moving from a circle into an organic variation of a snowflake formation, into an individual or group space of creation, and then reconfiguring into the group. Participants placed their chairs avoiding eye contact, approximating analysis on a couch, free to free associate and allowing dreams and metaphors to float freely within the matrix, without the distraction of the gaze of the other. The frame for the matrix of sharing dreams was 45 minutes.

Following the tradition of my teachers, I added empty chairs to the matrix (Hahn, 2008), representing ancestors, those who died or are absent (in this context, losses incurred in the protests and/or inter and trans-generational presences). The first dream was welcomed, with an emphasis on the dream and not the dreamer, as ‘my dream is your dream is our dream’ (Manley, 2020). Associations that came to mind were encouraged with other dreams, poems, songs, images, or metaphors. This matrix lasted approximately 45 minutes. The conductor may offer reflections, weaving emergent themes as a containing function. However, in these groups we decided to maintain the integrity of the group and not interrupt the flow.

Fragments of dreams and associations from this matrix are shared below, with minimal editing, translated from Spanish to English. The translator was a human rights lawyer working with the team taking Pinera to trial. He was closely attuned, talking me through translations, as dreams were shared. I read through the transcribed translation at the end of the matrix. I heard the dreams and associations with a visceral sense of the feelings without always understanding the content. One participant called this process a ‘social sleep group workshop’. I offered some initial thoughts after each element of these matrices and further integrative overarching reflections of theoretical content in the discussion.

The first dream arrived:

I walk through a landscape where there is a very long river and in the background a tree with a very large and round crown, with many branches and I stand in front of the tree.

Followed by association:

The tree opens in a landscape with green grass, with people moving, there is activity and organized groups.

Deep, deep roots were the roots of the oppressed, the right to exist, all together in the square around the same idea.

Lightning bolts falling from the sky, creating a hole in the earth and blood leaking out of the hole across the earth.

Memories of rain, welcoming rain.

Even in the desert there is life although it is arid—there is always life.

Cacti bleed through the holes of their own spines.

How do we listen to the conversations of birds when we are destroying the places where they make their nests, need to leave water in pots for the birds, for hummingbirds, sugar for bees and water with bicarbonate of soda for the frontline workers (young people in the street)?

Cracked earth and animals that die of thirst weave into roots and a starry night.

The earth is broken in two be able to give birth.

The pain of childbirth, necessary to know happiness.

This dynamic matrix had begun, and the scene was set for ‘a theatre of operation of ongoing change’ (Foulkes, 1975: 132). Natural phenomena became anthropomorphised in an unheimlich (uncanny) way. Themes of the earth and environmental concerns held threats and realities of global climate change of slow violence.

I reach the highest point and I fly, fly away’, this is not my house, everything is destroyed, I look for things to protect myself, I look in the rubble.

Dispossession, a movie about missing detainees and family members looking for their bones.

My granddaughter is running in that desert I don’t see a horizon and it gives me the chills.

Breathing and pushing to create new life, a right to live in peace.

Death is the great swallow.

I am not afraid of the dark or walking at night as a woman, but I am afraid of walking at night now—of the police.

You have to turn them into toads and cook them in the cauldron.

We have to make them human again and reconnect them with their essence.

Paint the police.

We need to feel again (A return to human dignity).

Associations followed about seeing and not seeing—blindness:

In the field you always look with your eyes open but here you only look with your eyes closed.

What would it be like to live life with only one eye?

Or without any?

Or with both, but yet blind.

We have lost the ancestral, to think like family, to think as us, we think in me, in ‘I’ (eye).

The splits in the system have robbed me of looking.

Look with the heart, see people in the square sharing music and food just to share -not for interest.

Associations were relational and creative, revealing an elaborative space to imagine, transform, and project into the space of possibility. Aggression, rage, and violence, turning the police into toads and cooking them in a cauldron, were alongside the transformative desire to make the police more human. Perhaps painting the police allowed them to become less dangerous. The tragedy and trauma of blindness connected the group in metaphorical ways of seeing and not-seeing, as well as relying on other sensory ways of receiving experience. A woman sang a Spanish revolutionary song, a visceral amplification of unconscious and conscious preoccupations as we transitioned into the next part of this elaborative matrix.

Beyond words

After reflecting briefly on the matrix, participants were invited to create an image, installation, write, and perform (use any form of creative expression) to elaborate and reflect on the process before returning to the large group (Berman and Manley, 2018: 4). They had 45 minutes to create. The dreams/associations/free-floating attention were available for use as objects, as ‘enigmatic signifiers’ (Bollas, 2009a: 147) to which to further free associate and with which to engage and play. The scene was set with ‘the props for the dreaming of lived experience’ (Bollas, 1992: 23).

Sometimes, we need to converse with ourselves to help digest some of what needs to be understood by others. This mirrors the important function of ‘developing the capacity to be alone’ (Winnicott, 1976) in the presence of others. Winnicott (1976) refers to this as ‘ego-relatedness’ referring to a state of being after intercourse where individuals are alone alongside one another. Perhaps the merging of thoughts, dreams, and creative exchange within the matrix is akin to a shared psychic intercourse. One then withdraws to be alone in a creative reverie (Winnicott, 1976). The matrix embodies the dynamics of individual, group, society, and discourse, dialogue, and monologue (Schlapobersky, 2016), which are necessary configurations of separateness and connectedness as ways of coming to know.

I usually provide materials; however, these participants were asked to contribute, adding to the shared psychic and physical objects available for use representing the individual, collective, and social unconscious. An extended ‘aesthetic toolkit’ (Phillips in Scalia, 2002) of rich dream imagery, fabrics, paints, scraps of paper, glue, found materials, and one another were available to further disseminate their personal and collective idiom. Psychoanalysis can enrich ‘what forms we choose for the psychic texture of the self’ (Bollas, 1992).

The power was shared, modelling a democratic leadership congruent with the wished-for outcome of the revolution/social explosion. Shared power echoes Foulkes’ (1964a) revolutionary contribution to democratizing the way we work with groups. He challenged the notion of a leader as the one who knows, provides, determines, and directs the way people think, feel, and engage. He offered clear guidelines for disruption that empower the group with the capacity to lead.

Group members were invited back into the large group in a circle rather than a snowflake formation, making eye contact with one another and in view of their imagery, a median group analytic configuration. This followed a similar rhythm to the social dreaming matrix, where an initial image was shared, creating a visual matrix. Images/performances were invited to follow a free-associative process, focusing on the image not the image-maker, within this inter-subjective and inter-objective space. Group members spoke, silently witnessed, danced, and sang their dreams. They co-created links and threads, revealing re-presentations of their dreams. This part of the elaborative matrix took 45 minutes, co-creating the group image, with an additional 15 minutes consolidating our work together.

These were some associations to the images made:

Darkness and light, I know that what we are living in is a process for the better, but my emotionality still does not allow me to see the light.

I value the importance of listening to different stories, because sometimes we don’t see each other and that helps us to balance again, I see good things, horrible, amazing, wonderful. It is hard to be in this situation, we are adrift, this contradiction is more real than anything else.

The drifting boat, the Aymara culture has a diversity which goes back to the future, facing the past’. This referred to a member’s image that held a condensed collective articulation of i) the ‘here and now’, represented by the bottom of the sea, horizon with mountains and a huge yellow circle [sun] offering light amid darkness and uncertainty); ii) the ‘there and then’ (black paint stamped with white circles [coins, money] aligned in a row [police order and economic order], as well as crossed with wire [surveillance, border] and interwoven with a thread of red wool [spilled blood]); and iii) and ‘the what is to come (he leaves a blank space, representing the future, where a copihue falls into the void [flower symbol of Chile, rain, pollination, regeneration, and hope]).

This group member recounted a Mapuche legend about the copihue: ‘During the Arauco War (1536 to 1818), the women warriors climbed the highest trees to see the survivors of the battles [but] their companions lay dead, they went down shedding tears that turned into flowers of blood; thus, the red copihue reminds us of the spirits of the dead’. The copihue was a thread in both matrices in the east and west as a shared social symbol.

Discussion

Typically, within traditional social dreaming matrices, the group transitions out of the realm of the affect of the dream matrix towards cognition. However, ‘neither cognition nor affect can be properly understood separately from the other—reason must always be understood in terms of its relation to both cognition and affect’ (Hoggett and Thompson, 2002). We stayed with the affective domain of resonance. In my role as conductor I tentatively responded to the translated dreams and associations, the ‘implicit and explicit’ collection of ‘objects of knowledge’ (Riviere, 1979 in Rippa and Rippa, 1989). I was deeply moved and communicated my impressions in ‘the first place on the group as a whole’ (Foulkes (1975: 154).

‘I walk through a landscape where there is a long river, a tree with a crown and many branches—I stand in front of the tree. Witches and fires of transformation. This process holds a sense of helplessness, action and agency, care, and fury.

‘Let it rain. Just as the pain of childbirth, this is a struggle of agony and beauty’.

A participant shared, ‘The experience of the social dreaming strengthened my belief that art is a transformative tool that builds new dialogues, new collaborative and reflective spaces, facilitating instances that make us aware that knowledge is within us, within our experience, and that the only thing missing is to promote and strengthen practices like these so that it becomes active, takes shape and we can share it, and thus build a new social and at the same time personal fabric’.

The ‘textures of experience’ (Bollas, 1997) were culturally familiar, revealing identities connected to group members social and environmental fabric. The material elicited a visceral and felt sense of the groups’ internal and external experiences, quietly subverting hierarchies of ideological and gendered ways of relating.

Findings and conclusion

This paper demonstrates the impact of once off, inter-objective, group analytic practice to mobilise and metabolise trauma through theoretical, visual, and practice-based research. The process described allows the integration of the ‘here and now’ (therapeutic engagement), the ‘there and then’ (reflective, memory-based, gathering) and the ‘what’s to come’ within an elaborative matrix (activism to innovate and predict social change). This systemic approach offers a preventative function of social diagnosis, making visible cryptic symbols of fears, concerns, and wishes of a social group within a ‘psychological democracy’ (Bollas, 2018: 81).

An important area for development is attention to loosening the confines of education through group analysis (Berman, 2022). Preventative politics depends on redressing educational curricula as therapists, educators, and artists, offering skills in the capacity to research, observe, be curious, act, and engage as practitioners with collective responsibility.

The visual image has a role in containing the narrative and providing meaning. This practice is a replicable model, promoting dissemination beyond contexts of mental health, yet intrinsic to providing sustainable societal and global mental health goals. This approach to trauma disrupts established norms of creating safe-enough spaces to contain and encourages individuals and groups to unmute, find a voice, and step up in creative resistance.

‘Removed from the turmoil of life’ (Foulkes, 1948: 25), off the couch, away from the streets of revolution, the co- created psychosocial elaborative matrix, embodied an enlivened empty and impoverished world, beyond ‘mourning and melancholia’ to ‘meaning and melancholia’ (Bollas, 2018).

In summary, a Chilean group member responded to the implicit activism of the elaborative matrix. ‘Emotions and pain that are not confronted can trigger violence. We confronted emotions and pain through social dreaming and art making, an action to contrast the fascist trend’ (Villar, 2019 – personal correspondence).

Democratic states of mind beget democracy.