THE GROUP AND THE INDIVIDUAL: THE MEDIAN GROUP

O H D BLOMFIELD

WordsO words, O words, and shall you ruleThe world? What is it but the tongue That doth proclaim a man a foolSo that his best songs go unsung,So that his dreams are sent to schoolAnd all die young.

Thee pass the travelling dreams, and theseMy soul adores – my words condemn –Oh, I would fall upon my kneesTo kiss their golden garments' hem,Yet words do lie in wait to seizeAnd murder them.

Tonight the swinging stars shall plumbThe silence of the sky. And herdsOf pluméd winds like huntsmen comeTo hunt with dreams the restless birds,Tonight the moon shall strike you dumb,O words, O words …

Stella Benson

1. IntroductionThis paper grew from several lectures given to a postgraduate course for General Practitioners (Prytula, 1996). It originated in, and includes extracts from, a series of papers on group life written in the 1970s and 80s: (Bloomfield, 1972, 1982, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c).

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The focus of the paper is on the way group life affects communication; both in relation to everyday social existence and in our primary functioning and symbolization. Selective use has been made of theoretical approaches to the analysis of groups by Freud, Schindler, Turquet, Bion and de Maré. The relevance of other well known contributions, such as those by Foulkes, Ezriel, Bridger, Durkin, must be emphasized but these could not be developed in a brief paper.

The emphasis on the creative potential of Median Groups is developed especially as a tribute to Pat de Maré who founded our Median Group in Melbourne. 1

The relevance of Paul Ricoeur comes from the interactive stimulus of a Seminar Group led by my wife, Jocelyn Dunphy-Blomfield and myself, centred on Ricoeur’s philosophy. I thank both Jocelyn and the past and present members of the Median Group and the Seminar. The paper is theirs.

At the beginning of Julian Green’s novel If I were you (1950) Fabian, the lonely central figure, is attempting to write a story. His identification with the central character (Thief of the Wind) is obvious:

His father placed him (Thief of the Wind) in a college where he was made to work and so learned wisdom. No longer did he go about singing, nor did he any more cling to the belief that the contents of a book are to be mastered by pressing it to one’s heart. But secretly he regretted knowing so much, for he had a feeling that every new thing he learnt was at the expense of something he already knew … as the years passed his thirst for knowledge grew, although he did not fully realise the price that he was called upon to pay for it as his teachers deprived him little by little of all the resources which what we call a state of ignorance provides. He was now able to join words together in such

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a way as to make them express anything, almost, that he might wish; but he could no longer speak to the wind, nor to the rain, nor to the light that the sun poured out at his feet as from a bucket. A great gulf now yawned between himself and all that could not speak after the manner of humans.

(Green, pp. 21-22).

Green, through Fabian’s ‘Thief of the Wind’, expresses poignantly the price that is paid during the acquisition of language as a binding force – a glue – for the sort of shared experience that characterizes social life at an unconscious level. However before taking up this question of language, its acquisition and limitations, we should pay some attention to the natural history of group life in itself. [See also Klein (1955) where this novel is used to illustrate the concept of projective-identification].

2. Natural History of Group LifeA distinction should be drawn and observed by being a member of a group and the external behaviour of groups as a whole towards other groups, individuals or things; that is the behaviour and psychology of crowds.

A group is seen as having a developmental history and this may be the hinge point for making a further distinction with crowds. The phenomenology of the small group (say 2 to about 12) is also usually contrasted with that of the large group (say 30 to 100 or more) but temporal and spatial factors such as frequency and duration of meetings and seating arrangements also have a determining effect. The difference is not so much in the phenomena that may be experienced or observed but in their power and clarity. The detached observer from outside the group can appreciate only a limited range of the phenomena of group life in contrast to participants who are gripped by the group experience itself.

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The relationship of the individual and the group is a complex one. We are group creatures because of our origins. We are linked first of all through the shared structure and organization of the human body and the commonality of the world we create.

We perceive this commonality of selves and world. We are bound together at the most primitive levels as members of the same species. We live in a shared species-specific world. And perception itself it not just a physiological process, it forms from essential threads of memory and imagination. Our own presence is constantly reflected in each other and in the world. To some extent individuality is a necessary illusion. We internalise as models relationships and group structures in infancy and childhood and these form largely unconscious or tacit memories and anticipations in the here-and-now; memories and anticipations which enrich or hamper the very relationships they themselves have tended to bring about.

Groups have a natural history of formation and dynamic life. A group’s maturity coincides with its establishment of a (sub)culture and an associated attitude towards expression and communication. Particular aspects of language and thought become essential components of the sub-culture.

At every stage of life significant group membership is internalised as a contributory factor in the work of developing a personal identity and becoming independent.

3. Group StructureThe being-for-itself of living action is necessarily interwoven with the being-in-itself of structure (Sartre, 1957). Every potential action of an individual is both made possible and constricted by the anatomical, physiological and biochemical structural components through which it may be realized – made actual. The same interplay can be

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seen in the natural history of group life. Group structures contain and enable the process and function of a group. The structures of language and culture are interwoven with group life. For example language structure contains and continues the generalisations and ‘laws’ of a given culture and also forms a matrix for experience and thought in each individual (Langer, 1942, Lacan, 1966).

Starting from the earliest relationships in the family each family member internalises group membership(s) as part of the fabric and pattern of their personal consciousness. When people meet together group phenomena become apparent and may be shared and dealt with, but these phenomena involve the emergence of structures which have preceded the meeting; emergent structures which often mirror early family life.

However, certain structural aspects of group life do arise from the here-and-now, what W. H. Auden (1966) called the ‘vivid present’, of the group meeting itself. Every member of a group has some access through this ‘vivid present’ to their personal past and their personal future through memory and imagination. Both are more complex than the everyday view of them (Fitzgerald, 1937). Predispositions towards certain patterns of thought are transferred in time and place to the here-and-now of the group and group interactions resonate with, and shape these transference patterns in a new way.

There are two directions from which to approach the idea of group life. In everyday life, as individuals, we come together to form groups and thereby discover aspects of commonality and, painfully, also of difference. In this every-day sense, individuals approach each other to make groups. In this approach, several, or many, make one: one group entity.

In the other direction, as primarily group creatures, we drag ourselves away from each other to discover individual differences and the quality of uniqueness of

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being that we value so highly. Paradoxically, we also discover valued aspects of commonality or attachment through the breaking of bonds, through loss and mourning. We suffer to make ourselves one (one self) out of a previous merging with another, with several, or many.

This latter direction has been illuminated by Margaret Mahler’s concept of psychological birth (Mahler et al., 1975). We make ourselves, as selves, originally by the struggle involved in processes of separation and individuation out of a primary symbiotic union with Mother. Mahler’s work helps to add flesh and form to Freud’s comment that ‘the psychology of groups is the earliest human psychology’ (Freud, 1920, p. 123). We emerge from a primary unity of being (of being in and then part of Mother) to be ourselves; to be our own ‘self’. Just as physiologically the extra-cellular fluid, which makes up more than 70 per cent of our body weight, may be seen as a portable sample of the primeval sea from which life arose, so psychically we carry with us a sample of a primeval group entity from which each of our ‘selves’ formed and against which each of us defines ourselves (Blomfield, 1972). Furthermore, as each of us has had a mother, there is a common experience of ‘having-been-mothered’. The term ‘archaic object-relation’ puts, perhaps, too concrete and reductive a slant to this; it may be better described as an ‘archaic memory of loving support and containment’. It persists as the source of later transference attachments and experience in group life.

4. ‘A Dark and Doubtful Presentiment’Plato in The Symposium, writing of the fantasy of Zeus cutting men into two to form the sexes ‘like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’, goes on to a passage which reads: ‘For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.’ I have

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written before of this ‘dark and doubtful presentiment’ (Blomfield, 1982) as the existential background to Freud’s ‘earliest psychology’ (Freud, 1920, p. 123).

At the embryonic group level the primal group is of two; most primitively in the parasitic relationship of foetus to mother’s body. The pressure towards survival is shown in a biological ruthlessness, dramatically illustrated by the complex patterns and life-history of parasites in general. This two-ness is continued after physical birth in the necessary symbiotic union of baby and mother in which the ruthlessness of the drive for survival becomes gradually transformed into a mutual concern, ruth, in preparation for the practical, more active, intertwined processes of separation and individuation leading to psychological birth (Mahler, 1975). These processes involve a risky passage through a dangerous defile, between a Scylla and Charybdis. On the one side the threat is of being swallowed up by pathological desires in the mother to achieve her own completeness at the expense of her baby. The other threat is to be drawn down into a whirlpool of nothingness; for life to have neither personal meaning nor social containment because the essential symbiotic union has not formed (Blomfield, 1987b). With failures of primitive bonding, or primary attachment, the possibility of fruitful symbiosis is damaged; the possibility of the transformation of primitive (survival) ruthlessness into mutual ruth, into concern, into love is diminished. I argue that this transformation [perhaps more rightly ‘metamorphosis’ (Gtard, 1898, Blomfield, 1987) of the parasitic ruthlessness of the foetus, physiologically bent on survival, into ruth, mutual concern and love between mother and baby creates the possibility of normative group life. This is a developmental line, in Anna Freud’s sense, of central importance.

Disastrous failures in attachment/separation are shown most painfully in symbiotic psychoses, where the infant’s greed for life can end up destroying a mother who is vulnerable because of her own incompleteness. Structural

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failures, primary or regressive, of individuation may be expressed in overt schizophrenic illness by a sort of inward collapse or actual disintegration. Most commonly the catastrophe is not so extreme and involves both dimensions, both separation and individuation. The nature of the illnesses is often seen most clearly in children and adolescents. More obscurely the patterns appear in a sort of forme fruste in many adults where very early disturbances have been ‘papered-over’ by later adaptation and accommodation and a semblance of normality reached. But regressive, or even atavistic, ruthlessness may surface in certain circumstances. For example, the ruthlessness associated with horrific murders, whether made much of by the press or anonymously, during overt war or supposed peace.

5. How Does Group Life Manifest Itself?An unorganized crowd has, at first, little or no group entity or presence. Raoul Schindler (1967) remarks that such a crowd left to itself is likely to begin to show some restlessness and manifestations of anxiety. Schindler links this with the embryonic emergence of group structure such as shown primitively in many species in variations of the phenomenon of ‘pecking-order’.

First of all those present will unite against those who are absent or those who are late. However inner structure is lacking and this can be recognized by the lack of co-ordination and co-operation. Under these conditions children will be over-loud or try to impose triumphantly on each other. Grown-ups more often keep quiet and cut each other off by remarks that do not encourage thinking or conversation.

Everybody seems to be concerned with keeping up his prestige by gestures towards some act of participation and by the over-careful avoidance of the disclosure of embarrassing weaknesses.

(Schindler, 1967, p. 2)

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For Schindler, the primitive uncertainty and free anxiety tends to become partly directed towards the outside with eye and ear turned towards the possibility of an external enemy. This has a binding-force in embryonic group formation. The residual free anxiety leads to a certain mutual wariness with each having a fear of being overwhelmed by the others. Any sense of a common enemy will immediately start to bind the individuals together. He refers to this as G(Gegner)-function. If the embryonic group stays together, there is a tendency for certain structural patterns to emerge. These are usually flexible enough to begin with but as the group ages they become less so. In Schindler’s description, the Alpha position is occupied by an individual who is more or less idealized. Beta positions, for there may be several, are held by individuals valued by the group but not subject to the same idealisation as Alpha. Omega is an individual in polar opposition to Alpha – often a scapegoat or a representative in some way of what threatens the group from the outside. Gamma individuals make up the rest of the group and they may show some tendency to regard themselves as having some kind of pecking-order. Their attitude is swayed by the pressure of G-function or identification reactions with Alpha or Omega.

Leadership in the group is a dynamic function and may be exercised by any of the members. Frequently Omega may be a leader exercising a negative influence and generating entangling polarities in the group.

As the group ages the structure hardens and the positions tend to remain occupied by the same persons. In Schindler’s account of the natural history of a group, the group dies by remaining ossified in this way, or it explodes and disintegrates or just simply peters out.

Ricoeur (1965) writes

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This tendency of life to harden into set systems and imitate the thing bids us to look for the new mode of finitude in a primordial inertia that is intermingled with the spontaneity of life and will; it is as though, because of our body, we were subjected to a law of materiality present on all levels of reality.

(p. 57)

The interplay between spontaneity and inertia also becomes manifest in Bion’s (1961) contrast between consciously directed Work-group activity and the emergence of unconscious Basic-Assumptions. This contrast describes dramatically the emergence of instinctual pressures at a group level. Basic Assumptions of dependence may be seen as a manifestation of primitive attachment need while pairing relates naturally to sexual drive. Fight-Flight is profitably expanded to Fight-Flight-Freeze, representing more fully the other instinctual drives aimed at the survival of the individual, and only indirectly and more confusingly, of the species.

6. Elementary and Social NumbersFrom the first the integrative transformational task of the would-be human being involves dealing with two sorts of ‘twoness’; one the foetus, as placental-parasite with the mother’s body as willing or unwilling host, defined by a ruthless dedication to survival; the other, as baby, by a developing ruth and dedication to ‘becoming’ – becoming an entity in the field of the mother’s desire – a loved and loving baby. Primary ‘twoness’ thus has already an in-built tension between ‘survival’ and ‘becoming’, manifest as ruthlessness and developing ruth or concern. Phase differences in the rhythms of these closely interacting lines of development are naturally a source of anguish. How can I survive my mother? Survive her need for me to love her? Survive without her? Survive my love for her or her love for me?

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This two-layered two-ness of mother-child is echoed later in the sexual pairings of lovers as Plato reminds us. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, may be read in terms of a prototypical tragic struggle between survival and becoming, between ruthlessness and ruth.

Primary two-ness is further complicated by the development of the three-ness of the Oedipal triangle, usually when the baby’s awareness begins to include the physical and emotional presence of father. With the arrival of a sibling, four-ness then complicates and increases the intensity of rivalry, jealousy and envy. We have moved from primary narcissism to two-ness followed by three-ness, then four-ness.

Thereafter imagining a stack of shifting overlaid and/or interlocked triangles and squares gives a caricatured three-dimensional picture of family life in relation to primary numbers, but, despite these complications, every member of a family has a variant of the special formula of mummy – me inscribed somewhere in their heart.

The social world of the family foreshadows the social field of the outside world. In this social field, a group is several, or many, made one. A creative group is a ‘one’ in which various selves may find a possibility of discovering ‘themselves’; discovering their one and only (‘own’-ly) self by a kind of retracing or replaying individuating and separating processes in a group matrix which, sufficiently, has some of the properties of primary symbiosis. Creatively, ‘becoming’ is dominant and ‘ruth’ its benign partner. Where ‘survival’ is dominant ‘ruthlessness’ is its malign twin.

Socially, another watershed becomes manifest. In a small group, it is possible for all the members to be perceived in a single glance. The comfortable upper-limit for a small group is about eight members, extended with some loss of comfort to ten or twelve. A large group, say thirty or more, cannot be visually contained. It induces, or is capable of

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inducing, a level of primitivity and projected threat that is the starting point of paranoia. One is seen and can be watched, but cannot see or guard oneself by the exercise of vigilance. The sense of persecutory vulnerability may sometimes be counter-balanced by an impulse towards cruel revenge toward the others in general, or towards a scape-goat in particular. For an unformed crowd can quite suddenly close into a mob and then, activated by the impulse to pursue, into a pack with lynching or plain murder as its aim. Thus eruption, discharge, persecution and destructiveness lurk as shadows just below the surface of a restless crowd, and these shadows carry a diffuse threat of action (Canetti, 1962, pp. 16-26).

7. Words, Signs and LanguageReturning to the question of language: an aspect of the complexity of communicating has been emphasised by Auden (1968) when he adds a further dimension to the classic distinction between the spoken word and the pre-existing structures of a given language. Auden distinguishes between firstly, the use of words as a code of communication between individuals, where sound or gesture is used to convey basic information about survival issues such as territorial boundaries, sexual assertion, common enemies, availability of food and so on and secondarily, language as reflective discourse with other persons.

He writes

(o)ur use of words as a code is best illustrated by a phrase book for tourists, giving the equivalent in other languages for such remarks as ‘Can you tell me the way to the station?’ The individual of whom I ask it has no personal interest for me, nor I for him. Once I have asked and he has answered we cease to exist for each other. So far as both of us are concerned, we might be two other people … In speaking in my own linguistic

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code, I know in advance exactly what I am going to say: the words are in no sense ‘mine’…

Auden distinguishes this gestural or coded level from speech proper.

In speech one unique person addresses another unique person and does so voluntarily: he could keep silent if he chose. We speak as persons because we desire to disclose ourselves to each other and to share our experiences, not because we need to share them, but because we enjoy sharing them. When we genuinely speak, we do not have the words ready to do our bidding; we have to find them and we do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it, and we say and hear something new that has never been said or heard before …

He goes on to emphasise that equivalent codes, or gestures, may be found in all languages.

Failure in communication may occur through simple ignorance and misunderstanding … it is possible that the individual I ask gives me wrong directions … (but) … I exclude the possibility of a deliberate lie because I cannot imagine his having a motive for deceiving me.

That is, the only shared belief is that the same gestures or codes are being used in the same way.

But speech is quite different.

Even when two persons share the same mother-tongue, they do not speak it in exactly the same way; what the speaker says in the light of his experience, the listener has to interpret in the light of his, and these are not the same. Every dialogue is a feat of translation.

(Auden, 1968, pp. 104-109)

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It has been said, wisely, that learning a language does not just mean acquiring a knowledge of new words and grammar but is ‘a question of finding oneself in a new culture’. In meaningful discourse each works somehow to find him/herself in the explicit or implicit culture of the other. Translation must thus also be creative interpretation. If this work is not done, or cannot be done, then shared meaning slips away and the discourse becomes if not meaningless then at least banal. Professional telegraphists whose ears are attuned to subtle variations in the rhythm of keying Morse Code can not only recognise colleagues on the other side of the world, whom they have never met, but know well what sort of mood they are in. In this they do not differ from the blind in adding creative interpretation to translation. More negatively, in the dead of night, the depressed telegraphist may be maddened by obsessively reading meaningless messages in the tapping of a twig on the window-pane.

In exploring the question of meaning, Ricoeur (1970) has enriched Kant’s view that ‘the symbol gives rise to thought’ with the notion of ‘prospective symbols’ which are ‘the dawn of meaning’, the harbingers and vehicles of creative thinking. ‘(T)he work of the imagination … gives image to an emerging meaning. Before it is a faded perception, the image is an emerging meaning’ (pp. 503-5). Ricoeur (1967) asks: … how can thought be bound and free at the same time? How can the immediacy of the symbol and the mediation of thought be held together?’ He goes on to say that ‘… there exists nowhere a symbolic language without hermeneutics; wherever a man dreams or raves, another man arises to give an interpretation … The dissolution of the myth as explanation is the necessary way to the restoration of the myth as symbol.’

Thus demythologization allows an irreversible gain of truthfulness, intellectual honesty, objectivity. ‘… In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again’ (pp. 350-1).

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8. Group MeaningSchindler (1967) comments that any group whatever at some time will find itself struggling with two questions:

1. What is the purpose of our being together?2. Who are we anyway?

1Notes

1. Special thanks are due to Christine Hill for her dedication to the convening and organization of this group on behalf of the AAGP.

References

Abercrombie, M. L. J. 1960, The Anatomy of Judgement: An investigation into the processes of perception and reasoning, Hutchinson (ed.) 1960, Pelican Books 1969, London.

Auden, W. H. 1966, ‘Mundus et Infans’ in Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957, Faber & Faber, London.

----- 1968, ‘Words and the Word’ in Secondary Worlds, Faber & Faber, London.

Bateson G., Jackson D., Haley J. and Weakland J. 1956, ‘Toward a theory of schizophrenia’, Behavioural Science, 1, pp. 251-64.

Baudouin, C. 1920, Suggestion and Autosuggestion, trans. E. & C. Paul, Allen & Unwin, London.

Benson, S. 1942, Words , in Modern British Poetry, 5th edition, revised. Harcourt Brace, New York, p. 382.

Bion, W. 1961, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, Tavistock, London.

Blomfield, O. 1972, ‘Group: the more primitive psychology? A review of some paradigms in group dynamics’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 6, pp. 238-46.

----- 1982, ‘”I am given to myself – from a dark and doubtful presentiment”, The symbiotic phase of development and group process’, Australian Journal of Psychotherapy, 1, 1, pp. 9-35.

----- 1987a, ‘The influence of group membership on organisation of thought’, Scientific Proceedings of The Australian Psychoanalytical Society, No. 12, October 1987, pp. 33-34.

----- 1987b, ‘Reflections on group life and thinking’, Scientific Proceedings of The Australian Psychoanalytical Society, No. 12, October 1987, pp. 35-64.

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These questions are expressions of instinctive needs to that they have a repetitive and insistent nature.

Schindler goes on to say that these two cardinal questions in the existence of every group are antithetical. The first implies an external setting and possibility of aim which already assumes (and makes possible) the ‘togetherness’ of the group. The second appears to ask that this self-determination take place within the closed system of the

----- 1987c, ‘Psychoanalysis: Belief: Complementarity’, Scientific Proceedings of The Australian Psychoanalytical Society, No. 11, March 1987, pp. 53-91.

----- 1995, ‘Interpretation: Suggestion: Narrative’, Australian Journal of Psychotherapy, 14, pp. 81-96.

Canetti, E. 1973, Crowds and Power, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

Critchley, M. 1939, The Language of Gesture, Edward Arnold, London.

De Maré, P., Piper, R. and Thompson, S. 1991, Koinonia, From Hate through Dialogue to Culture in the Large Group, Karnac, London.

Fitzgerald, R. 1937, ‘Essay on Memory’ in Forty Years Poems, Angus & Robertson, 1965, Sydney.

Fleck, L. 1979, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn, foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Freud, S. 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E.18.

----- 1921, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, S.E.18.

----- 1925, An Autobiographical Study, S.E.20.

Giard, A. 1898, ‘Transformation et métamorphose’, Compt. Rend. Soc. 10, Paris.

Green, J. 1950, If I were you … (Si j’étais vous), trans. J. H. F. McEwen, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London.

Heidegger, M. 1954, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glen Gray, Pfullingen, Neske, 1968.

Klein, M, 1955, ‘On Identification’ in New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, Tavistock, London.

Lacan, J. 1956, The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, translated as The Language of the Self: with notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden, 1968, John Hopkins Press, Baltimore and London.

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group only. Institutions, such as our own, do their best to pre-empt these questions, not always successfully, by constitutional documents, agenda for meetings, minutes and so on. The formalities we struggle with do not always successfully contain the dynamic forces behind the questions!

9. The Individual and the Group

Langer, S. 1942, Philosophy in a new Key: A study in the symbolism of reason, rite and art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 3rd edn. 1967.

Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J. B. 1973, The Language of Psycho-Analysts, Hogarth, London.

Mahler, M., Pine, F. and Bergmann, A. 1975, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, Basic Books, New York.

Mann, T. 1939, Schopenhauer, Cassell, London.

Prytula, R. 1996, ‘Seminar Series for General Practitioners (GPs)’, Melbourne Division of General Practice, 1997.

Ricoeur, P. 1965, Fallible Man, revised trans. Charles A. Kelbley, introduction Walter J. Lowe, Fordham University Press, 1986, New York.

----- 1967, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan, Beacon Press, Boston.

----- 1970, Freud and Philosophy, An essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

----- 1974, ‘A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud’ in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, An anthology of his work, Charles E. Reagan & David Stewart (eds.), Beacon Press, 1978, Boston.

Sartre, J-P. 1956, Being and Nothingness, An essay in phenomenological ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Citadel Press, New York, (see particularly the translator’s introduction).

Schindler, R. 1966, ‘A contribution to the pathology of the fixated group ‘position’ in Exerpta Medica International Congress Series No. 150 (World Congress of Psychiatry, Madrid, 1966).

----- 1967, Group Psychotherapy and Clinical Practice; The Meaning of Social Dynamics for Group Psychotherapy, Veb Gustav, Fischer Verlag, Jena.

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Schopenhauer, A. 1818, ‘The World as Will and Idea’ in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, ed. Irwin Edman, The Modern Library, New York, 1928.

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Turquet (1975) also emphasizes a large-group as one that cannot be encompassed by any one member in a single glance; in principle each individual is surrounded on all sides by unknown subjects – sources of opinion, judgement and potential action who remain ambiguous.

In the large group, according to Turquet, tension develops between new arrivals (singletons), the active individual members (IM) and the membership individuals (MI) who form the bulk of an institutionalized group. In the latter individuality has been lost or diminished through a phantasy of being absorbed into a group ‘mass’.

On the other hand the active individual member (IM) struggles to organize his or her expression of ‘I’ness’ to defend against being overpowered by a sense of confusion through the loss of personal authority or selective alienation by the group.

The interaction between the individual and the large group or institution is manifested in the first place by this struggle to become an individual member (an IM) of the group without losing identity as subject (as an ‘I’). The group boundary is a watershed with pressure at first towards rejection of the singleton and then (on acceptance) towards conformity – towards giving up the power of independent thought. The group exerts an internal pressure dragging the IM into being of the group mind only; into being a ‘membership individual’ (an MI).

Southwood, H. 1974, ‘The communicative relationship’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5, pp. 417-423.

Tillich, P. 1967, On the Boundary: An autobiographical sketch, Collins, London.

Turquet, P. 1975, ‘Threats to identity in the large group’ in The Large Group, L. Kreeger (ed), Constable, London.

Windelband, W. 1894/1924, History and Natural Science: Classics in the History of Philosophy, trans. Guy Oakes using text of 1924, History and Theory, 1980, XIX.

Winnniott, D. 1971, Playing and Reality, Tavistock 1971, Penguin 1974, London.

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An IM thus has to work at retaining and displaying some ‘I’ness’ while also impressing the group as a whole as to his acceptability as a group member because of his commitment to the group belief system. An identity struggle develops between person and role ‘with survival as an important emergent aim’.

The threat experienced by the IM is of the group disposing of his subjectivity either by alienation or by what Turquet describes as ‘disarroy’ (Turquet derived this term presumably from the French ‘desarroi’ and its English usage phonetically connects it with disarray, dismay, distraught, destroy). The effect involves both distress and the destruction of thinking – what Heidegger (1954) identified as the capacity to respond to ‘what-is-most-thought-provoking’. Both the capacity for distress and thinking become abandoned, or destroyed, in the group mass – in what Turquet describes as the MI or lumpenproletariat state.

Survival is sought by strengthening personal boundaries or by taking refuge within the boundaries of another by identificatory processes. In this way centripetal and centrifugal forces may be experienced, and observed, within the group. These may be primitive and potentially explosive, creating dread or overt fear in the individual. These manifestations of group existence occur in their most dramatic form in the large group.

One can construct a dimensional diagram using Turquet’s view of the tension in the group:

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Since it is a question of survival, group members make sporadic or sustained efforts at exercising ‘I’ness’ with, more or less aggressive, attempts to reinforce their own identity as an IM – at the expense of other IMs.

To save internal splits the group may collude in selecting one particular member to ‘pay the piper’ – or a particular member may, for masochistic or other reasons, select him or her self for this position. This position corresponds to that of omega in Schindler’s (1966, 1967) analysis of group structure in the natural history of the movement from ‘pre-group’ to ‘institution’. This complex struggle in the group seriously compromises the individual’s capacity for thinking and knowledge.

10. Group Life Thinking and KnowledgeThe great historian of philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband (1894/1924) made a classic division in the ways of knowing (and therefore types of science), contrasting the following of a single theme or process with the abstraction or superposition of a ‘law’.

On the one hand, knowledge emerges through personal individual experience aided by reflective thought. On the other hand, knowledge is grasped in common – becomes ‘common knowledge’ – by the formulation of generalisations, of laws. While every law implies a synopsis of personal experience(s), the converse is also

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true, in that laws tend to guide and direct experience ie to provide containment and safety for personal thinking. But in a negative sense, the cross-sectional pattern of ‘generalisations’ and ‘laws’ stifle the spontaneity of the on-going movement of thinking. The unique experience of an emergent event may be submerged in the consciousness of a generalisation or law.

One can see the relevance of this dimension of thinking as a factor in personal survival in the group. In Windelband’s terms ‘idiographic’ refers to that approach which aims to provide a complete and exhaustive description of a single process located within a unique domain of reality. The ‘nomothetic’ method, by contrast (from Greek ‘nomos’) makes possible ‘predictions on future states and a purposeful human intervention in the course of events’.

In this approach a single datum, unless it becomes a building stone in a more general cognitive structure, remains nothing more than an object of idle curiosity … ‘A phenomenon qualifies as a fact only if science can learn something from it … the essential objective … [is] its incorporation into a more extensive whole’ (Windelband 1894/1924, p. 181).

But, for Windelband: ‘Our sense of values and all of our axiological sentiments are grounded in the uniqueness and incomparability of their object’ (p. 182). So that every human value judgement, if it is to be dynamic and authentic, is based upon the singular and unique.

He continues:

The law and the event remain as the ultimate, incommensurable entities … [they determine a] … boundary condition … Therefore, in all the data of … experience a residuum of incomprehensible, brute fact remains, an inexpressible and indefinable phenomenon . … the ultimate and most profound nature of personality resists analysis in terms of general categories … this

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incomprehensible character of the personality emerges as the sense of the indeterminacy of our nature – in other words, individual freedom.

(p. 184)

This individual freedom, this sense of indeterminacy, this awareness of a space for choice may be subdued or sacrificed in a search for (or a clinging to) a sense of predictability. Groups are brought together by common attachment bonds, aims, interests or beliefs, and membership may seductively appear to offer such a predictability. Individual freedom, and the very capacity to think meditatively, may in this way be threatened by a categorising pressure of group life experienced as hope, seduction or threat. Thus individual freedom, ‘the indeterminacy of our nature’, rests in the act of meditative, idiographic, thinking sustained against this pressure.

Thus there is need for a relationship of complementarity (Blomfield, 1987c) between group membership with the concurrent need for nomothetic knowledge – for group ‘laws’ – and the idiographic dimension of personal freedom – this ‘inexpressible and indefinable phenomenon … the sense of the indeterminacy of our nature’ (Windelband, 1924, p. 184). Generalisations and ‘laws’ are necessary to give structure to the thoughts of individuals and these generalisations and ‘laws’ are usually a component of group life – of the discourse of others. However differences in belief, understanding and knowledge between different groups or ‘thought-collectives’, are a function of individual freedom, and this gives rise to healthy levels of doubt, skepticism and even suspicion. It is in this context that Ricoeur (1970) was able to refer to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as ‘masters of suspicion’. Mediation between different beliefs and the structuring of understanding and knowledge is one of the pathways of science.

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The first diagram can now be improved by adding another axis derived from the dichotomy described by Windelband to make the tension experienced in the act of thought formation (thinking) by the individual in a group setting more explicit:

The situation for the individual may be that of a classical double-bind (Bateson et al., 1956) as the tensions may operate at different levels of abstraction and there may be no escape. Sensitive individuals may experience disabling mental pain – especially if there is a lack of reflective insight into what is happening. The pressure in a nomothetic direction, particularly towards giving in to the tacit ‘laws’ of the group may overpower the capacity for meditative thinking.

In relation to meditative thinking, Heidegger (1954) finds links between the Old English origins of ‘to think’ and ‘to thank’; ‘the Old English noun for thought is thanc or thonc – a thought, a grateful thought, and the expression of such a thought; today it survives in the plural thanks’. Heidegger comments ‘Compared with the root thanc, thought in the sense of logical-rational representations turns out to be a reduction and an impoverishment of the word that beggar the imagination.’ (0p. 139) … ‘The originary word “thanc” is imbued with the original nature of memory; the gathering of the constant intention of everything that the heart holds in present being.’ … ‘the

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“thanc”, being the memory so understood, is by the same token also what the word “thanks” designates. In giving thanks, the heart gives thought to what it has and what it is’ (p. 141).

The idea of ‘heart’ (thumus) or ‘spiritedness’ as derived from Plato has been developed by Ricoeur: ‘(it) sometimes fights on the side of reason in the form of indignation and courage, and sometimes sides with desire in the form of aggressiveness, irritation, and anger.’ Spiritedness

is the restless heart that knows not the surcease of pleasure and the repose of happiness … this ambiguous and fragile heart represents the entire middle region of the affective life between the vital affections and the rational or spiritual affections … the entire activity that forms the transition between living and thinking … The transitional state is at the heart of it.

(Ricoeur, 1965, pp. 82, 107-132)

It seems that thankfulness, reasoned indignation, and courage may accompany, or be the outcome of, shared meditative thinking in a ruthful group, whereas aggression, irritation and hatred flow from, or accompany survival struggles in the setting of ruthless normative group thoughtlessness.

11. Boundary Function and the Median GroupPaul Tillich (1967) in his autobiographical sketch “On the Boundary” wrote:

Each possibility that I have discussed … I have discussed in its relation to another possibility – the way they are opposed, the way they can be correlated. This is the dialectic of existence; each of life’s possibilities drives of its own accord to a boundary and beyond the boundary where it meets that which limits it. The man

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who stands on many boundaries experiences the unrest, insecurity, and inner limitation of existence in many forms. He knows the impossibility of attaining serenity, security and perfection. This holds true in life as well as in thought, and may explain why the experiences and ideas which I have recounted are rather fragmentary and tentative.

(pp. 97-8)

This view fits well into Schrodinger’s (1944) view as to the nature of life itself as a boundary phenomenon. Life can be active only at the interfaces of the states of matter – solid/liquid/gaseous/ionic, and it thus relies on the special properties of semi-permeable membranes which are the structural expression of these interfaces.

The Median Group (with say between 12 and 30 members) occupies a boundary position between the limits and possibilities of the small group in one direction and those of the large group in the other. The gripping, and blinding, intensities of transference and counter transference feelings, so often a feature of small group experience, tend to be diminished and contained. In the other direction the paranoic threat of the large group’s uncertainties are also lessened. The median group has limited access to group experiences in both directions.

The buffering effect of number means that there is some protection from individual prejudicial and transference distortions on the one side and from the grotesque judgements of mob violence on the other. This buffering effect means that a median group has important mediating qualities and social powers. It offers a pathway for the clarification and expression of common sense as a moderating influence.

In this regard, if they are reasonably mature individuals, the members of a small or median group, such as an Army platoon, can be mutually supportive in accepting ordinary

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levels of projective interaction, containing confusional and affective overflow and so on. This is the basis for good morale.

12. Will and ImaginationFreud (1920, 1925) was very impressed by Schopenhauer acknowledging that his philosophy anticipated much of what he discovered by a more empirical approach. Schopenhauer himself had paid tribute to Plato, Kant and the Veda, religious texts of India, as the sources he had drawn on for “The World as Will and Idea”. Freud, turning to Schopenhauer late in life, felt that the latter’s concept of Will was what he was reaching after in his theory of mental instinct.

As Thomas Mann writes:

The Will was the ultimate, irreducible, primeval principle of being, the source of all phenomena, the begetter present and active in every single one of them, the impelling force producing the whole visible world and all life – for it was the will to live … Will, as the opposite pole of inactive satisfaction, is naturally a fundamental unhappiness, it is unrest, a striving for something – it is want, craving, avidity, demand, suffering, and a world of will can be nothing else but a world of suffering.

(Mann, 1939, pp. 6-8).

One might remark that the notion of Will appears to be linked indissolubly with, at least the fantasy of, Causality. Imagination on the other hand, while there is a quite definite sense of Necessity about the images or ideas that present themselves to the inner eye, has a more flirtatious relation to ideas of action.

Although not based consciously on Schopenhauer, Freud’s concepts of Id and Super-ego give structural form and

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contrasting polarities to Schopenhauer’s Will while the Ego can be seen as the structural expression and source of Idea, but it also may be seen as another polarity of Will in a more malleable form.

13. Will, Suggestion, Affective FragilityAny involvement of Will, say in an attempted therapeutic interaction, necessarily involves the automatic generation of Counter-Will according to Baudouin (1920). Baudouin names this the Law of Reversed Effort and attributes its discovery to Coué. In summing up a rich clinical experience with both hypnosis and with psycho-analysis, Baudouin proposed that Suggestion is an ever-present component for generation of human interaction and that its most effective pathway is through the Imagination (p. 124). Suggestion can be seen as an instrument of Will and thus a vital process working across the interface between individuals (Blomfield, 1995). The obvious connection between ‘counter-will’ and ‘reaction-formation’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 376) invites investigation both phenomenologically and historically.

It seems that one of the strengths of the Median Group is that Imagination is given a freer rein and there is less pressure, striving and obstruction from counter-will/reaction-formation. Suggestions may be made, taken up and worked with, in an unthreatened, and unthreatening, way.

Johnson Abercrombie (1960) writes:

Discussion in a group does for thinking what testing on real objects does for seeing. We become aware of discrepancies between different people’s interpretations of the same stimulus and are driven to weigh the evidence in favour of alternative interpretations. Certain areas of one’s private world are compared and contrasted with other people’s, and in seeing differences between them it becomes possible to modify our own

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world if we wish to. Instead of seeing our own mistakes by contrast with the statements of an unquestioned authority as in the traditional pupil-teacher relationship, we see a variety of interpretations of the same stimulus pattern, and the usefulness of each must be tested in its own right.

(p. 75)

In the course of a masterly analysis of ‘affective fragility’ Ricoeur writes:

This fragile reflection of myself in another’s opinion has the consistency of an object; it conceals the objectivity of an existing end that draws a limit to any pretension to make use of me. It is in and through this objectivity that I can be recognized. … If humanity is what I esteem in another and in myself I esteem myself as a thou for another; this otherness … makes up the difference between self-esteem and the attachment to life such as it wells up in catastrophic situations that threaten my life. … Because the relation to self is an interiorized relation to another, opinion and belief are the core of it; worth is neither seen nor known but believed. I believe that I am worth something in the eyes of another who approves my existence; in the extreme case, this other is myself.

(1965, pp. 81-131).

Ricoeur continues:

… the worth of the self may be sham, feigned, or alleged; it may also be neglected, contested, disputed, as well as scorned, belittled, choked back, and humiliated. And when, rightly or wrongly, it is neglected, the lack of esteem may be offset by a self-

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overestimation or by a depreciation of others and their values: in this case aggressiveness, reprisals, resentment, and revenge are the defiant measures used against non-recognition, which itself can be understood only through the search for recognition.

And later

Nothing is more fragile, nothing is easier to wound than an existence that is at the mercy of a belief; … Whatever the importance of this feeling in the etiology of neuroses, we must vigorously insist that the pathological forms of self-esteem are understood only in relation to its non-pathological and truly constitutive forms.

(pp. 123-5).

14. Koinonia and the Median GroupPat de Maré instituted systematic exploration and conceptualisation of Median Group experience at The Institute for Group Analysis in London in 1975. His book Koinonia (de Maré, Piper & Thompson, 1991) is a record of this work. He writes:

Twenty members, as distinct from eight, create a more powerful, a more complex situation, which is distinguished primarily by this cultural texture, so that whilst membership of a small group may generate an infinitude of familiocentric microcultures, membership of a group of 20 may enable us to experience a wide range of social cultures literally untenable in the smaller group and primarily based on the successful negotiation of frustration and hate through dialogue and its transformations.

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(p. 34)

Again:

In the small group it is the conductor who is the main receptacle for projections of parental authority figures, and the individual ego is able to become freer and stronger through identfication with the rest of the group. In the larger group, however, the group itself constitutes the canvas onto which the superego is projected, and the conductor, more appropriately known as convenor, gives support to the role of individuals at an ego level, encouraging freedom of dialogue and interpreting the nature of social and cultural pressures.

(p. 35)

A Median Group offers a favourable milieu for imagination, prospective symbolization and creative thinking. Being middle-sized, and in its nature, mediating, a Median Group has a paradoxical strength in its quality of ‘low-keyedness’, its unpretentiousness, its modesty.

Hopefully the threat of group life from the two extreme directions is diminished so that individual members of a median group feel safe enough to express themselves spiritedly and whole-heartedly. There is something here of Winnicott’s (1971) seemingly modest but far-reaching concept of the ‘good-enough’ mother; the mother who excites neither a paralysing over-idealisation – too much love as it were – nor a paralysing disappointment and vengeful impulse – too much hate. She is surrounded by a relatively free field of emotional possibility and practical action. It is ‘good-enough-ness’ that allows the world to work in fact.

It is interesting that this analysis of the mediating/interpretive powers of the Median Group finds confirmation both in the history and the intuitional basis of

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the jury system originating in Europe and brought by the Normans to England in 1066. A coroner’s or petty jury was of twelve while a grand jury was not less than twelve and not more than twenty-three. The factual and legal questions addressed to them (and their descendants) have taken many forms, and the OED gives as early examples – What are the customs of your district? What rights has the king in your district? Name all the land-owners in your district and state how much land each of them has. Name all the persons in your district whom you suspect of murder, robbery or rape. Is Roger guilty of having murdered Ralph? Which of the two has the greatest right to Blackacre, William or Hugh? Did Richard disseise Henry of his free tenement in Dale?

The Melbourne Median Group, launched by Pat de Maré and later sponsored by the AAGP, is now in its fifth year. Meeting once weekly the members have been attracted by the idea of an on-going forum offering freedom of expression outside the constraints of usual professional and occupational settings. The current members do in fact come mainly from health professions and teaching: psychology, social work, psychiatry, nursing, psychotherapy, health administration, university. It is hoped that we may later have people from the law, business, politics, the media – in short as wide a sample of our culture as possible.

The unguided and self-activated discussion, not surprisingly, very often rotates around Schindler’s questions, ‘What are we here for?’ ‘Who are we anyway?' But tangential associational leaps bring in all sorts of aspects of the members’ professional and private lives; the frustrations of the day, the stress and repercussions of both private and personal tragedies and triumphs, local and international events with their practical and symbolic meanings. These excursions always end back one way or another with some struggle about the meaning and purpose of the group, as it is in the present or in its history or future. Interestingly, even after such a short time, there

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is a feeling of mythological substance when the group’s origins and history become the theme. Certain events tend to be regarded as anchor-points in our history and are brought up with some sense of nostalgia, reverence or excitement.

The Median Group stays on the ordinary level of daily life and leans on, and indeed finds strength in, those attributes of common-sense that enable social existence to proceed without entrapping and destructive conflict. One could say that the Median Group is specifically concerned with the on-going discovery of creative common-sense. Of course, common-sense can be misleading. A good deal of scientific research becomes involved in breaching the limits of common-sense to create areas of new experience. On the other hand common-sense marks a state of secure and predictable understanding within which it is possible to move.

This quality of course finds expression in many well-running small to medium groups devoted to specific tasks – focused discussion on literature for example. The only difference with a definitive Median Group is that the latter divests itself of any reason or excuse for its existence except meeting and discussion. This contrasts with a Therapy Group where entry may be felt, somehow, to require one to take a pathological view of oneself, or with a Discussion Group where the expectation is of some sort of study or homework.

15. ConclusionFreud (1921) asserted that ‘the psychology of the group or mass is the earliest human psychology’. However the very possibility of creative group or social life depends on the successful transformation, or metamorphosis of the ruthless drive towards survival shown by the foetus in the primary, and parasitic, relationship to the mother in the months before physical birth, into the foundations of ruth, concern and love during the subsequent processes of

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psychological birth. These processes, described so vividly by Mahler et al., (1978), are powered by this survival drive and its derivatives. The child must find some viable position between ruth, concern, love and sufficient residual ruthlessnesss dedicated to survival.

Language and thinking as human faculties have their genesis in the rich symbiotic interactions between infant and mother which accompany the shift of emphasis from primary to secondary process. Soon the basic interactions are related to the oedipal triangle or its homologue, presented to the infant, in the first place, by unconscious expression of inner life by the mother. In learning to understand, and to speak, the use of concepts and words introduces a reductive distancing of the child from his original naïve and intimate involvement. The child is committed to the task of establishing a personal identity in the presence of, and against, ‘others’ in the setting of the family order. His task is complicated by persistent longing for the lost immediacy of infancy, and the narrow space for development between desire and fear. His sense of personal freedom, and the possibility of creativity, are found in the indeterminacy between event and law, and carried forward from the family group and equivalences into larger groups and society. But every group setting by its very nature has the potential to inhibit or damage the capacity for meditative as against calculative thinking. Social life favours nomothetic prejudices and compromises individual idiographic interests. Meditative idiographic thinking may thus founder at the complex boundary between individual and group and between different ‘thought-collectives’ (Fleck, 1979).

This paper suggests that a Median Group, with between say 12 to 30 members, meeting solely for open discourse, and divorced from any notions of therapeutic or political purpose and utilizing as far as possible the resources of Imagination rather than Will (with its troublesome offspring Counter-will) may facilitate the creative potential

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of shared meditative idiographic thought through ruthful interaction.

In Julian Green’s story-within-a-story that we began with, the loss of the child’s primary naiveté, in his acquisition and sophistication of language, results in ‘the great gulf (that) now yawned between himself and all that could not speak after the manner of humans’. In his impressive study, “The Symbolism of Evil”, Paul Ricoeur (1967) writes of the recovery of a “second naiveté” in which one may take up something of the original openness to the world and to others. He asks ‘how can thought be bound and free at the same time? How can the immediacy of the symbol and the mediation of thought be held together?’ (p. 350). He answers ‘All criticism ‘demythologizes’ insofar as it is criticism; that is to say, it always adds to the separation of the historical … and the pseudo-historical’ and adds: ‘criticism cannot help being a “demythologization”; that is an irreversible gain of truthfulness, of intellectual honesty; and therefore of objectivity’ (pp. 352-3).

In acknowledging with Kant that ‘symbols give rise to thought’ Ricoeur comments ‘… but they are also the birth of idols. That is why the critique of idols remains the condition of the conquest of symbols’ (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 543). A failure of balanced criticism, a giving way to the seduction of shallow idols, may degrade discourse to the interchange of ‘lazy eclecticisms which are the caricature of thought’ (Ricoeur, 1974,p. 183); a caricature disclosing the great gulf of imitative meaninglessness that threatens to surround those who ‘speak after the manner of humans.’

The open and critical discourse fostered by Median Groups may do something to bridge this gap between oneself and others: to find this second naiveté, to help mutual enrichment as against contamination between the secondary process of language and thought, and the directness and power of the primary processes which

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reach from childhood through maturity. It is possible for this mutual enrichment of basic processes in the individual to spread across the interfaces in a group as a growth in ruth, hence of concern, of charity – dare one say – of love. It is a real risk as the giving up of ruthlessness is experienced as a definite threat to survival. To take it a step further it may mean extending oneself to find some increment of a ‘greater love’. This increment to be perhaps a seed in group life.

Dr. O H D Blomfield23 Urquhart StreetHawthorn Victoria 3122

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