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 DOI: 10.1177/0533316410381573

2010 43: 433Group AnalysisSue Einhorn

Response to a Love Letter: May 2010  

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© The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol 43(4): 433–439; DOI: 10.1177/0533316410381573

Response

Response to a Love Letter: May 2010

Sue Einhorn

I’d like to begin by thanking Jane for a very stimulating lecture. It is a beautiful patchwork of thoughts creating a lovely quilt in which we can comfort ourselves before struggling out into the world. Am I going too far in describing it as a love letter to group analysis that reminds us why we have devoted so much of our adult lives to each other? It is also a timely love letter in a world where, as Jane describes, psychoanalytic psychotherapies, including group analysis, are under attack. We are attacked for thinking that it takes time to treat unhap-piness with respect by helping people to become themselves, and we are attacked for not being able to prove that we are cheaper than Seroxat. The reflective nature that is our method clashes in a world preoccupied with speed and cost.

I am calling it a love letter because Jane takes us back to where we began and describes us as philosophers, grappling with what mean-ing life has within the cultural contexts of our training and practice. She says that:

. . . not only was I thinking about group analysis as a cultural phenomenon, rather than as a clinical phenomenon but . . . [c]an group analysis . . . in its fundamental philosophy, in terms of the ideology that informs it, be part of the prevailing culture . . . or is it more at home within the counter-cultural ethos? Does it aspire to be part of the establishment or does it adhere to anti-establishment principles? (Campbell, 2010: 414)

Has GA become a cultural rather than a clinical phenomenon and is it subversive? I think this is at the heart of her paper and may go some way to explain why we are so anxious about our survival.

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What is this counter-cultural ethos? What are our anti-establishment principles? Jane takes us back to the Enlightenment, to the centrality of exploring the new world. Not the worlds of land or sky or gods but the world of the self, nurtured and buffeted by these old, enduring and present explorations. Onto these landscapes arrives the new self-consciousness; an exploration of the self and ourselves in society. We have, as Jane quotes from T.S. Eliot, ‘lost our innocence . . . . Emotion had become the raw material of our investigations. We could never again feel something without trying to work out what it meant’ (Campbell, 2010: 417).

The question about why we are in this world has seemed to preoc-cupy man ever since he was thrust from the Garden of Eden and has had enough time to think. The spice or condiment of death has always cre-ated a need to ask why we are here. However, once it has been accepted that there is a self that is unique to each human being then, who we are, together with an entitlement to fulfil who we could be, seems a much more modern phenomenon. Jane quotes Foulkes as saying, ‘Group analysis has not as its aim adjustment and socialization. It wishes to help human beings to find themselves and to live their own lives as well as they may be able to do so’ (Campbell, 2010: 422).

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s it was called, ‘Edu-cation for Education’s sake’. This period, after the Second World War, certainly heralded as a golden age, when the welfare state was born to meet the demands of a population who knew they had earned a fairer way of life. Foulkes was part of this of course. Education, in those days, was to teach us how to learn and even more importantly, the capacity to think for ourselves. After the 1940s no one was enti-tled to use the excuse that they did not know. It was our duty to know, to be informed and to know how to think about what we were being told. It was very different to ‘newspeak’ which is a form of informa-tion that clutters the mind with facts, figures and slogans to distract from a depth of thought and essentially that tells you what to think. If that is the modern way, perhaps group analysis is outdated. Jane says that we train group analysts, in Foulkes words,

. . . to become themselves and, from that perspective, to determine not what to think but how to think . . . . It provides not the deliberate transmission of dogma but offers the opportunity to reflect and to determine what kinds of thinking the group conductor wishes to do when sitting in the group he or she is conducting. (Campbell, 2010: 420)

Despite the constant rhetoric about the need for individual freedom, the importance of a decent standard of living for each and every person,

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Einhorn: Response to Lecture 435

the freedoms enshrined in the UN Charter, it does seem old fashioned, if not counter-cultural to be interested in people fulfilling themselves by being educated in how to think, in being listened to and learning to value listening to others.

Jane also suggests that today may be a golden age for group anal-ysis and I have been pondering the need to give us hope by positing a golden age. Why do we have a need for ‘Islands of the Blest’ or for Nirvana or the Garden of Eden? Does a concept of paradise help us to see what we are striving towards or does it simply cast a shadow of despair over us? Perhaps it is at the root of the current obsession with who to blame for things that go wrong because the gods are elsewhere. Our journey through life may be overshadowed by Nirvana but perhaps group analysis is subversive in inculcating a different perspective. We suggest that our personal journey through life is interdependent on learning who to trust and from whom we can learn. Is it subversive to feel entitled to try and understand how our personal emotions are also political because they are socially constructed as well?

I would like to suggest that the debate Jane offers us may be a Golden Age if we can somehow bring together different forms of thinking. It seems to me that a capacity to be philosophers implies a space to stand back, to think and reflect. However, that capacity to think is very different to the panicked need to bring thoughts together when a person or the society in which we live is traumatized. Thoughts in such a state fall over each other to fight off humiliation, shame, feeling that we are bad, that it is all our fault, that we are damaging and damaged. Earlier this year there was a wonderful play running at the Almeida in London called Ruined which struggled with this. Jane suggests that our subversion may reside in the crucible of post-war Europe—I would add in the crucible of current wars as well. Is it catastrophizing to suggest that group analysis is traumatized and responds at the moment as though our very existence is threatened? Is it too over the top to suggest that we live in a post-traumatic soci-ety, or in a society that continues to traumatize much of a population that seems to be getting more and more depressed, bi-polar or just mad with loneliness and anxiety?

If our interest in the past is to strengthen our foundations so that we can evolve and grow without losing the essence of what are, then we can be philosophers exploring the developments in group analysis with confidence and courage. If however, we keep returning to the past and to our history because there is an ongoing trauma or because

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the current climate has triggered a past trauma, then we cannot move on. As I have written elsewhere, traumatic experiences, however awful are also compelling (Einhorn, 2006). We cannot let the wound heal because the traumas have become so deeply part of who we are that it feels as though we would be denying or abandoning an essence of ourselves that has not been properly born and has never been suf-ficiently understood. Traumatic memories are recurrent in night-mares and relationships and essentially make it very difficult to move on and change. In Ruined, the women have been raped and ‘ruined’ but cannot embrace a new and loving relationship with a man until their ‘ruin’ has been spoken and they have felt heard, loved and accepted.

Of course, as Jane points out, we need to evolve and change with the times. She welcomes learning from neuroscience, which seems to scientifically confirm our practice. I don’t have space to discuss the particular concept of ‘scientific’ this implies. However struggling to be ‘modern’ in this sense is difficult. Because our method of group analysis is a way of thinking, it becomes very difficult to produce that magic handbook by which our competencies can be measured, our outcomes counted and our quality assured. No, for us, each Island of the Blest, each group of wounded heroes, is charged with producing its own language and culture imbued with the individuality of each member that shall then make it the norm from which each may deviate.

Each of our groups for heroes, however troubled or traumatized these heroes may be, have us, their conductors to provide what Bion described as containment. Our philosophy, our training to think, our capacity to know why we have become and are practising as conduc-tors, provides a context in which each person’s trauma can be thought about. In Jane’s golden age, there were fathers at home in Montague Mansions providing such containment, but who contains us now?

Psychoanalysis and group analysis are in danger of being home-less, uncertain where we belong because we must account for our-selves through numbers and money. As clinicians I agree that we should be publicly accountable but the criteria that measures our qual-ity is in danger of becoming ‘newspeak’ if we forget our heritage—Orwell’s message. We seem to spend a lot of time fighting with other gangs on the block and do seem in danger of fragmenting. We con-tinue to fragment—certainly a cultural heritage from Freud onwards—but Jane’s challenge is whether we can use a capacity to think and develop through our philosophy that embraces the changing cultural climate in which we live. I would like to add to that challenge

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Einhorn: Response to Lecture 437

by asking whether we, that is group analysis, behave as though it is traumatized and is fragmenting with panicked thoughts and responses, or can we hold on to our philosophy and use it as a container which helps us not to fear the changes, but to think creatively within this changing world. Each fragment may threaten with destruction but, like each group member, may also have something to contribute and enrich. Is being so inclusive subversive? This was what Foulkes did and what many group analysts are doing in the current welfare state.

Jane is particularly interested in the language of group analysis and how it both translates emotions into words but also teaches us what and how we feel. I know from our discussions that she asked me to respond because of my work in Russia where we train group analysts through translation. In their therapy groups they have to translate themselves into English because we cannot speak Russian. Here, as in Russia, the contradictions between the god of greed and individuality in capitalism and the ideas of fairness embedded in democracy clash and puzzle our Russian trainees. This does make the training in St. Petersburg very interesting, but much as I would love to share my experiences with you and relevant as I think they are to this article, it would just add too many pieces to an already well-balanced quilt. I would like instead to return to Jane’s juxtapo-sition of Orwell and Foulkes and the need for some containment to be able to think creatively.

Foulkes own thinking took time to develop. By the time he arrived in Exeter in 1940, where he worked with shell-shocked patients, as Jane has pointed out, he was no longer Sigmund Fuchs but Michael Foulkes and it was as Michael Foulkes he called his waiting room group together and began conducting groups and writing about his understanding of his work. He wrote in English, not in German. He wrote in translation (apparently his first book was in German and was well written as opposed to his books in English). I know his ideas were developed in dialogue with other colleagues but my point is that for Sigmund Fuchs there was trauma and that working in translation may well have created enough of a space inside himself, away from his German experiences, to allow what he knew from there to evolve with what he learnt here (see Gerhard Wilkes’ 2007 Foulkes lecture).

Jane asks you to think about why you have become group analysts. I can never know how Foulkes would have answered although others here may know, but I am suggesting his work arose from his own

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traumas, inculcated from his experiences in Germany and I am sure, re-awoken by his work with soldiers. Working and writing in transla-tion, in England, where the social context permeates to the core, gave him enough distance and containment to become the philosopher Jane describes. He was not clinging to the past but using his past to colour how he understood what was needed in the present. In other words it is in the Foulkesian tradition to adapt our method to the cur-rent social context.

While Foulkes extrapolates by learning from his experience, Orwell uses his experiences to write his traumas into novels. What interests me, in the light of this lecture, is language, his interest in language and his use of the pen name George Orwell. His novels predict a nightmare world and resonate, as Jane has shown, all too well with developments today but he writes his traumas in sheep’s clothing, under the created persona of George Orwell. It was George Orwell who could bear to write about what he could see in the future. I wonder where Eric Blair was?

Can we be more ourselves as group analysts and does the role give us the space to think? After all, we become group analysts because its philosophy speaks to our own meanings or to deal with our own internal traumas. As group analysts however, what we do know is that once we have enough to eat, the need for acceptance and recogni-tion seems to be a universal human need. Jane’s group of wounded heroes cuts across centuries and cultures. It is a group where and I quote, ‘there is freedom of thought and spontaneity and acceptance and inclusivity’ (Campbell, 2010: 430). And I would like to continue that here, in her group, as in my own groups, members from different cultures offer new ways to see entrenched problems. They know that understanding themselves may take time, that understanding each other is part of that process but also that there is relief in not feeling alone and in having a place. Being inclusive is subversive, taking time is clearly subversive but are we finding a place in today’s world? Jane’s lecture shows why we should but our home is in 2010 and we are in a new century.

Our philosophy emerged through clinical practice and we know it works clinically. With our philosophy to back us up perhaps we need not be so afraid of the modifications or changes that we need to make.

After all, we are worth it!Thank you, Jane.

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Einhorn: Response to Lecture 439

ReferencesCampbell, J. (2010) ‘The Islands of the Blest’ [34th S.H. Foulkes Annual Lecture],

Group Analysis 43(4): 413–32.Einhorn, S. (2006) ‘Group Analysis and Society’, unpublished lecture, Introductory

Course, Institute of Group Analysis, London.Nottage, L. (2009) Ruined. New York: Theatre Communications Group.Wilkes, G. (2007) ‘Second Generation Perpetrator Symptoms in Groups [31st

S.H. Foulkes Lecture]’, Group Analysis 40(4): 429–47.

Sue Einhorn is a training group analyst at the IGA London, UK, and a member of the Group-Analytic Network, London, UK. She is a practising group analyst who teaches and supervises on the London Qualifying Course and is convenor for the IGA Training in St. Petersburg, Russia. Address: 18 Mount Pleasant Villas, London N4 4HD, UK. Email: sue.einhorn@talk21.com.

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