Peer Pressures
The editors
Here are two homophones, obscured by internal sibilance: group struggle; group’s struggle. One is a compound noun that refuses translation into the legally recognizable and therefore redressable expression of personal injury and insists upon the registration of pain at the level of the social, a claim expressed in choral form. The other is an acknowledgement of the pains incurred within this very formation, its vulnerability to fracture and schism and difference of wish and opinion that threaten to thwart a collective direction.
We are brought into the world under the sign of enduring dependency; the fourth term of gestation swaps the womb for the world but retains a kind of physical helplessness. And yet, so we are told, the horizon of healthy development is separation, individuation, maturation, independence. Returning, then, to a state of dependency in the form of a collective organism functioning as a bloc or body runs counter to the messages we receive about boundaries, self-preservation, and free will.
Before we arrived in the bloc, we lived our lives in other groups: the family, the religious order, the cafeteria table clique. You can sit with us. You can’t. Some groups we remember entering. Others we didn’t elect, but deselected. For the groups we join, the feeling binds security with risk: We belong until we don’t. Belonging means flirting with the precipice of the group’s boundary; it’s only as good as the possibility of exclusion. For the groups we leave, the feeling binds freedom with loss: We can roam beyond the enclosure, but we must leave something behind.
To be in a group is to submit to a form of disorganizing organization that hangs on careful balance: to be devoted to a collective without being engulfed, to be disciplined by it without sleepwalking to the tune of a leader’s will, to integrate without dissolving into it.
As Didier Anzieu glosses the problem of thinking about groups, the “commonplace” and idealized assumption is that the group “is a pooling, a sharing” through which “the energies, enthusiasm and capacities of individuals who freely assent to the discipline of the group” coalesce into a unified forcefield. Yet, as Anzieu stresses, this description eats itself. It collapses union with sharing, with collectivity. We know that groups rely on sharing. He asks, “a sharing of what?”
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Despite the fact that psychoanalysis has, as a profession, always relied heavily on groups—from Freud’s Wednesday Psychoanalytic Society to Lacan’s cartels—Freud, in the wake of World War I, set up a psychoanalytic antipathy to theorizing group life after trying to imagine a mass psychology that failed to imagine a leaderless group. The theory of mass psychology suggests that the group is a risk to individual freedom, that in sharing we lose property and our properties. As crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon writes, “Groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions and cannot do without them.” Or, in Wilfred Bion’s revision, the group produces the illusion of itself, evermoving in the “direction of producing a Messiah, be it person, idea, or Utopia.”
This proved too much for Freud: The crowd, whether the uprisings of Red Vienna or the mass of the student movements, needed to be held at bay, at least in mind. Thus, from Freud onward, the basic assumption of mainstream psychoanalysis has been, indeed, that its practice transpires between two people, even as the medically-relevant family (our first group) and the world of analysis may be presupposed to hover over that scene, like the specters they are. Many have moved to renovate that theory, to pose the question of what would happen if the analysis was conducted by the several towards itself: Can you do a group analysis instead of merely a partial analysis of groups?
The first analyst to pose this question systematically was Trigant Burrow—and he called it a contradiction. Burrow was a Freudian by accident. He converted when, one night at a New York theater, he met three men visiting from Europe by the names of Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung and then became the latter’s patient. Burrow began to experiment with mutual analysis with a patient and then, for the very first time, with group analysis—one he thought of asa social psychoanalysis. Burrow paid the price for this: Once the president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Freud’s invisible hand had him removed. Even though Freud himself argued that all analysis was social analysis, moving it from the dyad to the group was a mutation that needed to be foreclosed.
Although psychoanalytic work in groups would quietly persist and advance, whether in hospital settings or in experiments, this restricted mainstream psychoanalysis doubled down on the authoritarian, dyadadic form Burrow and his patients had criticized, despite a reliance on groups we call institutes, which were highly considerative and happily restaged the logics and psychical valences of the family.
In repressing the power of groups, psychoanalysis scotomized its own organizing principle while creating one of its many problems in scaling itself, in thinking synthetically with other disciplines. After all, the twentieth century was defined by group formations: the league, the union, the club, the party, the clandestine cell, the scene. But for psychoanalysis, the group became evermore the bad object in light of European fascism and Soviet communism, just as sexuality had been assumed always to be disordered some thirty years prior. Somewhere between the Third Reich’s total domination of the utopian impulse through mass media and Wilhelm Reich’s turn to mass psychology, psychoanalysis honed its attention on the pathological group when it thought about group life at all. It found that both formations on the left and the right fit the bill.
So came the edict, never quite spoken: No more groups. As psychoanalysis scattered and became, especially in the US, evermore repressive, its radical impulses curtailed, the commune or the collective became the sign of a new pathology of unfreedom. Surrender and devotion were rendered equally the domain of the red and the brown, with only the latter deserving thought and the former condemned or shut out altogether. Only in its minor tendencies and in its hospitals—whether they went by the names Saint-Alban or Chestnut Lodge or Blida—did the group form necessitate theorization and practice.
Out in the mainstream, psychoanalysis largely retreated further, to the domain of mere individuals—as if individuals are perfect beacons of freedom and never experience or produce the un-. There was one exception to this rule: when psychoanalysis became a tool to treat the aftermath of war, whether in the hands of the US Congress or in the work of ardently antiwar clinicians. And indeed, psychoanalysis has made some of its greatest contributions to understanding group functioning and group care during and after combat, whether Francesc Tosquelles in Septfonds or Bion in Northfield Military Hospital or Robert Jay Lifton’s rap groups with Vietnam War veterans. These psychoanalysts leveraged the destabilization of war toward the transformative power of groups. Just at this moment of the greatest suspicion of the power of the mass, psychoanalysis rediscovered the cure it had repressed for the first three decades of the century: the group.
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The group is no easy salve: It is a medicine that can taste rank going down and force hierarchy upon us. How do we reconcile a freedom predicated on individuation—a process integral to the fashioning of bourgeois subjects—with the history of revolutionary movements for whom liberation is achieved precisely through agitating in and as a group? The issue seems to hinge on the fickleness of the mass or the crowd, at once a risk and a requisite. On the one hand, fascism and cults and the denial of difference; on the other, the magic of surplus populations devising and demanding transformation.
But the crowd is different from the group. It is spontaneous, porous, motivated by growth, indifferent to its internal content. The crowd, Freud argues, has an unconscious. The group is a managed form, a conscious constellation. The group understands itself to be a group. And like any assembly of constitutive parts, it must eventually manage the Theseus paradox. Who or what is essential? Can the group still exist beyond the loss of all its members? How is the group a determinate entity protected against leakage and invasion? And how does this protection of a boundary maintain a radical ethical stance? How does it not become a friendly border with a regime?
Between the risk and reward of the group is a space of constant negotiation called group dynamics. The instant and immediate intoxication, the endless and tedious maintenance. The group is neither a family nor a society. But as both mirror and mirage of our earliest collective experiences, the group falls prey to outsize desires and fantasies of repair. Groups are expected to hold it all, to be it all, the place of shelter and sustenance. In being able to do something, better than anyone can alone, the group can succumb to the desire for it to do everything.
The necessary limitation of a group’s task is easily confused for the restriction of its essence or identity. But these are not the same. An express purpose, a redirected energy is not equal to a border regime or affinity separatism. Because the task itself is historically contingent and open, responsive to immediate material conditions, the central premise of a group often dies before the members are ready to say goodbye. Thus emerges an essential question: what, then, are we here for, which is perilously rephrased as a demand to answer who we are. This is where the focused remit of the cadre slips into the xenophobic impulse of the nation. The group addresses itself to a common cause, but runs the risk of essentializing a common core.
That’s the problem of the inside. There is also no escaping the group’s constitutive outside—the limit or threshold or border. The group is as much as a supersession of the one as it is a delimitation of all. By foregrounding the task at hand, the group becomes capable of entertaining a porous border, a members-only policy that excludes no one but those who do not self-select. As Anzieu has it, “The group is a place where images are transformed in interaction.” To transform the image of our present, we need our groups. And as we interact, as the image changes, we must keep forming new ones.
Like constellations whose makeups are always changing with the combustion and death of differently-assembled stars, groups are born of exigency and then last as long as they make sense, or so we might hope. As a form of critique whose object of analysis is suffering, psychoanalysis understands the pains of the group; its full task is to make sense of them as a condition of the many as much as of the one. In a moment of factionalist relapse and geopolitical stress positions that force a choice between two differently configured unfreedoms, we must be careful to acknowledge the possibility of bad groupings. The form is not itself salvific. We must labor to invest it with the desire for a future in which land, labor, and liberation are safeguarded against the runaway wishes of fascist cadres who likewise move to protect their group.
We want to thirst after truth together; that’s another name for horizon. Under the sign of a fantasy of all for one, which falls to the service of the bad unification fascism demands, we remain invested in the one for all. Nothing belongs to anyone. We want everything for everyone. We want everything as everyone.