The Group and Its Matrix

By GREGORY VAN DER KLEIJ

READING about concepts is a tiring business, so let me begin with a quota-tion from Nietzsche, whose directness makes one think:-

'Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties,peoples, ages, it is the rule'.

I then want to ask how we manage to keep that madness within its ownboundaries. The fact that a group is 'mad' need not worry us too muchwhen it comes to group psychotherapy: we may even take it for granted.But there has to be some measure of agreement between all the membersof the group, otherwise we would be like nine people talking to each other,in nine different languages, and nobody would understand anything at all.In other words, there has to be a matrix, in this case, an unspoken agree-ment that we will all live with this peculiar kind of group-induced madnessand will do so for better, for worse. Why should we agree on that?

The reason is not difficult to find. Members of a therapeutic group arenot satisfied with the kind of sanity they carry around as individuals. Theywant change; they want to get out of the mood they are in and the madnessof the group offers an alternative culture in which to try again. One leavesrationality behind for a while for the simple reason that all one's efforts tobehave from day to day as rationally as society demands have not pro-duced a very happy result. To dive into the madness of the group is quiteattractive - provided one knows what is going on. One has to have precise'boundaries' in order to prevent total anarchy, both for oneself and - in thecase of the conductor - for the group.

If the matrix is, among other things, that which binds a group togetherthis way, then the boundaries are the conditions to be fulfilled before thatmatrix can lead to positive results. Nothing can emerge until the group hasits own boundaries firmly established. Neither can people's fears be over-come if they do not experience that there are, indeed, firm boundaries,

GREGORY VAN DER KLEIJ is a Roman Catholic priest who trained at the Institute ofGroup Analysis and now works in private practice. He takes part in training schemesin Germany and Switzerland.

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beginning with such simple rules as that the group begins at seven and endsat eight-thirty, and then sharply at that. We meet regularly; have a calendar;pay fees, and so on.

Having fulfilled these conditions, the group can function within its ownmatrix and that means that people have more in common than divides them.Put people together in a group and they are 'mad': that means they musthave agreed to respond like that to the new situation. As individuals theyhave desperately tried to be REASONABLE people, but as a group theysuddenly let go and flop all over the place, having the wildest thoughts andthe most absurd desires. They go 'mad' together, but then find they havea common language for it, a most remarkable fact that justifies bringingthem together in the first place. This matrix is built from their culture andfrom the fact that language is the common vehicle for their actions insidethe group. Language imposes patterns of thought and feeling and coloursthe 'madness' in a particular way.

There is a personal matrix as well, because beyond the group, whichforms a circle of nine people with common characteristics, there is also theindividual as an individual. Say that the group is the foregound: then youfind the individual as the background, providing, as it were, the stage sceneryagainst which the tragedy is going to be acted. If we do not reflect, we arelikely to see an individual as a machine 'producing' actions and thoughts.Freud tells us this precious 'ego' is rather like the circus clown who, betweenthe acts, pretends to direct the changes to be made while the 'id' and 'super-ego' quietly go their respective ways. The individual is, as it were, an in-dividual 'group', a circle inside of which a number of forces reside, someworking together, some fighting each other, but all of them held together.By what? To quote Nietzsche again, by the fact that '. . . ultimately oneloves one's desires and not that which is desired'. Lacan seems to needwhole books to say just that. But this is what goes on inside that circle whichis 'me', and if that is not 'mad', in the sense of being totally irrational, butunderlying everything that 'reason' is so desperately trying to work out,what is? A consequence of this peculiar situation is that it allows us to cometogether. If we only loved objects, we might become very divided indeed.But we can share the situation of all of us loving our desire: we can evenidentify with one another on that basis, at least to begin with.

The personal matrix and the group matrix, the one from which westarted, can therefore meet. But before we think that now all is well, let mereturn to Nietzsche, who wrote:

'It is more comfortable for our eye to react to a particular object byproducing again an image it has often produced before than by retain-ing what is new and different in an impression. To hear somethingnew is hard and painful for the ear; we hear the music of foreignersbadly'.

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We will have to reckon with that fact, as people come into the room andsit down for their group session. It is all very well that thanks to their com-mon culture as expressed in language they promptly melt into the 'madness'of the group and then compose endless melodies along the lines of 'we loveour desires and not that which is desired' - they will also unite in their ef-forts to avoid the discomfort of discovering anything new at all. There willbe a lot of resistance and repression, to put it in Freudian terms. Nietzschesummed up repression beautifully in one line:-

'I have done that, says my memory. I cannot have done that, says mypride, and remains adamant. At last, memory yields.'

In the group session, how do we get out of this predicament and arrive atwhat the group members are paying money for - change? How do we

proceed?Often enough, we do not; that is a simple fact of life. When the groupturns into a Citizens Advice Bureau, life in the group can become very bor-ing, even if the session turns out to be most helpful for the individual strug-gling with the Rent Act. When the group insists on being nice and rational,there can be long spells of nothing happening at all, nothing whatsoever.(Or, to qualify such a sweeping statement, that is how it feels, for the con-ductor). It seems quite amazing that eight people will pay good money andtravel long distances for the privilege of sitting for ninety minutes of stiltedand polite conversation while doing nothing at all about changing the badcircumstances which brought them to the group in the first place. How canwe do anything about that? I return once more to Nietzsche, who tells usmore about that unwillingness to contemplate new impressions. What wedo instead, most of the time, is to take in wholes rather than details. Wenever read all the individual words on a page; we take them in groups andmake conjectures. We do not look at a tree in all its details of leaves andbranches and colours and shapes: it is much easier for us to put togetheran approximation of a tree. Now this goes deeper: when faced with a newevent we do the same. We refuse to let this newness invent anything forus; we hastily superimpose upon it what we have already experienced, makethe whole thing approximately like the experience we had before. Nietzsche,who never offers peace of mind, concludes that we are lying and that weare like artists. Thus in a group where each individual is hard at work tomake this new experience conform to all the experiences of the past, in someway or another he or she will do anything to prevent it from becoming aninventive or creative or simply new experience. The conductor can see thistaking place in the group. The group members fabricate experiences out ofwhat is happening there and then and will quite often misconstrue what is

happening.For instance, in a rather reticent, unwilling student group Mary suddenlybrings everything to life by talking about her difficult time at home, where

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her husband is not getting on with the son. She is upset about the situationand the rows which take place. She talks about it at some length and thegroup does not know what to do with it all. They are students with previousexperience of training groups (the worst possible clients because theypossess quite sophisticated technique when it comes to preventing newthings happening). They are unconsciously hostile to Mary because she isbringing something new into the group.

It all peters out and I decide to offer some assistance, saying somethinglike: 'Have you any impression at all how what you told us now linis upwith what was going on in the group today?' My purpose is to remainhorizontal, that is with the relation of what is taking place right nov be-tween the members of the group. To go vertical, that is into Mary's personalmatrix or experience, does not, for a number of reasons, feel right. I hopethat she may be able to reflect a little on what I call the seam, the momentin the group when she so suddenly felt the need to talk about her unhap-piness at home. Perhaps it was the moment when the self-appointed group-leader offered me some rather rude remarks. The idea is perhaps that simplyrepeating the facts will not get Mary out of the trap she is in - the familyis obviously stuck with a certain pattern. If however she can find out a Littlemore about the content of her relationship with her son by means of lookingat her reaction to a group-son attacking a group-father-conductor, then shemay reach what is new.

My little comment on this occasion went unheard, the whole subject wasdropped rather hastily and the group moved on to something else, whichmeant that the episode went into the freezer, not to be forgotten at all butto be preserved. When five sessions later the rebellious would-be leaderdecided that notwithstanding all his efforts the group would not give me thesack to appoint him instead, he announced that he was going to retire fromthe course. The group seemed rather pleased about this solution of theconflict, but Mary promptly came out with the statement that she felt ratheron Peter's side even if it were true that now we would have some peace inthe group. I asked her why and she said that I had put her down so verybadly that other time, when I had had asked her about the group. She said,in fact: 'You shut me up. You told me my home had nothing to do with thegroup; I ought to talk about the group instead'.

It did not take long, of course, to enlist the group as my honest witnessthat I had said nothing of the sort, but that is an example of how far peoplewill go to disfigure the events within the group. Mary had, at all cost, tohold on to the known experience of father and son brushing her aside inorder to fight with each other, so I had to be experienced as doing preciselythat. The new experience of somebody wanting to listen to her and lead hertowards something new, that was much too frightening.

The group setting, then, is of very great help, providing a clarifying

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Greek chorus. 1 had not brushed Mary aside at all - but now she has to facethat fact, now she has to see something new, and now it will be less frighten-ing because time has elapsed. Groups often do it that way: it is one of themany unspoken agreements between group members and explains whygroups have such exceptional memories. Mary can admit that she super-imposed old experiences in order to avoid a new one and now that the thennew experience belongs already to the past, it is possible to admit its exist-ence, which is one tiny step forward.

To be honest, that was not all that happened. The group also declaredthat there had been something in my tone of voice which had wanted to puther down, just a little. I felt at that moment, and felt very strongly, that Ishould reply - it is called replying from the counter-transference, somethingI rarely do. So I said yes, there is truth in what you say, because withinmyself (within my own matrix, my own riotous circle) there is a desire toput people down, and at times it comes through. One can and ought as agroup-conductor be very much aware of all that, but the serpent does notgo to sleep so easily. Something in Mary made me say all that. I did notknow why, but once I had spoken the reason became clear. 'Yes', Marysaid. 'I know it was unfair of me to deduce what I did simply because youspeak with a Dutch accent, but I could not help it. It sounds rather like Ger-man. As a child in Poland, during the war, I was in a crowd and would notkeep quiet and a German soldier shot at me with his rifle'.

There was no more to be said and certainly nothing to be analysed (at thatmoment!). All things had come together; we had reached communication;a situation had become transparent; past and present had come together.As Foulkes hinted, such communication becomes a communion. Theshared initial 'madness' of the group becomes shared history, shared suffer-ing, shared protest, and reality has won.

So how do we stop all the resistance to change from dominating the life

of the group?By not believing the 'lies', to use Nietzsche's word, and by remaining the

artist. The group goes for the easy overall impression of the tree: we, asconductors, insist on looking at each leaf. Group members come withmassive histories; we go for the apparently little details of the interactionsbetween Peter and Mary. If I now say that I concentrate less on the in-dividual history of each member of the group than on the interactions bet-ween the group members, do not jump to the conclusion that I want toanalyse groups rather than individuals, that I am concerned about the groupprocess instead of the individual.

It is a false problem to presume that there is opposition between thegroup and its members and we do better to leave all that aside. In orderto break through the resistance to change, the most effective approach isto concentrate on the interactions, the seams; and this is effective simply

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because it is the most accessible experience within the group. The scams -the moments of dialogue, of interaction - are unrehearsed, very unlke the'story' the individual member has been preparing all week (and needs tobring). But the unrehearsed is what is spontaneous and therefore closer towhat is unconscious. It is the dialogues which become the equivalent of freeassociation. This is why I took more interest, to begin with, in the momentMary entered with her story - after Peter's attack on me - than in its con-tent, however moving and sad that content was. I was moved by hei storyabout her present home life but that did not make me effective as an agentof change.

With all that, I am talking about yet another aspect of the matrix. Besidesthe matrix provided by culture, language, and so on - called the foundationmatrix - and, at the other end of the scale, the personal, individual matrix,there is also the matrix as created by the group through its interactions, itsprocesses of communications. Foulkes called this the dynamic matrh. It iscertainly true that if you concentrate hard enough on these moments of in-teraction, you see how much life is pulsating in the group. Often themetaphor of the mirror comes to mind most easily because an individual soeasily sees himself in other people, becomes ready to recognize himselfthere, in the other, who provides a safer place than his own backyard. Itis a mirroring process also because group members suddenly see the jroupas whole and themselves as a fragment, so that the group constitutes theideal self they wish they had created for themselves.

The key to it all is communication and the task is to facilitate this process.When real communication has been achieved - and of course we never getthat far, but we try - then the symptom disappears. Why? Because a symp-tom is, by definition, a bit of my experience which by now only talks toitself, either because it flatly refuses to seek communication or because ithas been sat upon for so long that it no longer dares.

The symptom lives in splendid isolation. Splendid because it has alsomanaged, against all the odds, to take over a lot of the space reserved forthe ego and is a ruling power in that circle or group, ruling the householdof the ego. But it is also isolation, because nothing of what it is doing makessense to the rest of that ego-group. People then say, for instance: I amdepressed and only heaven knows why, because I have got everything Icould possibly want out of life'. But when desire only desires itself, noamount of satisfaction will bring peace.

One could say that the opposite of isolation is communication, whichtherefore has therapeutic value, can bring about change. The simplest wayto express some of the concepts behind all this is metaphorically - ptoplesit in a group in the way words sit in a sentence. There are two aspects htere.One is that words can be ugly little things if kept in isolation - they can bevery concrete, materialistic, immovable and, above all, unchangeable by

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definition, like the symptoms people bring to the group. But put the wordsinto a sentence and everything changes: they become dynamic and do allsorts of things and you may even play with them, as the poet knows.Similarly, with people in a group. One sees the delight of the desperateobsessional woman who washes clothes all day long and who knows it is allvery silly - there she sits in the group with her 'word' and insists that wesolve her problem for her. At first she will get angry because after a whilewe all say that we cannot solve the problem, do not know how to, havenothing else to say but to tell her to stop doing it; and then, having heardall that, she begins to communicate about her children and her husband andher studies and suddenly sees the funny side of it all. She is like a word ina sentence that has found a place for itself and she might even become averb one day because she begins to do things, like attending to herappearance so that she is beginning to look sexually attractive again, and sheis now enjoying that and no longer finding all things sexual very unclean.Let her play then, and do not spoil it with deep interpretations.

That is one level of communication. Another is that all communicationsbecome metaphorical. Whether the group discusses the neighbours orMargaret Thatcher, everything has overtones and undertones, and the littlespeeches are rather like transitional objects, toys played with and fought

over.That sounds attractive, but there is more. There is also a battle about life

and death and a group conductor will often remember the words of Win-nicott, that the task of the analyst is to survive. It turns out that the Nietz-schean 'madness' of the group is, in one way, only a defensive strategy. Thegroup is pretending to be 'mad' because it dares not own up to its realbusiness and desire, which is to kill off the father, in this case the group con-ductor. That is too grim a reality, so games of 'madness' take its place andthe group process becomes a ritual and a festival, the real content of whichis about life and death, nothing less. One will wonder whether this meansthat the Oedipal conflict provides a recognizable structure, or rather loca-tion, for the interactions of the group members. But there is worse to come.

At times one finds the members of the group jumping up and down, asit were, to identify with each other. They will try anything to get out of theirisolation, and in some non-analytical groups the members will be encour-aged to act out this approach, and they go and sit in each other's laps. Themoment these identifications start, the members begin to experience that allthe differences between them are falling away. Such an oceanic feeling maywell remind one of being at the mother's breast, but there will also be strongfeelings of anxiety and panic because the inevitable consequence of this pro-cess of identification is that one has to sacrifice one's whole personality, anexperience which comes too close to death for comfort. The group membersfind themselves in a very real double-bind situation of desperately wanting

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to become themselves and of desperately wanting to get lost in other people.The group conductor will make things even worse by indicating that gettinglost in others is the way to becoming oneself. He turns the double-bind intoparadox, but at what price!

Nothing is now as it seems and even reality itself will not stand still forinspection: we are all playing a game nobody can win. It is at such momentsthat the process of communication, verbal communication, reveals itspower to bring about change and truth, because now the words will standstill and become solid, refusing to yield, and black will be black, obstinatelyrefusing to turn into green. Here it is the spoken word which offers a bridgeback to the real world, the one which gave us words to speak, and this wordhas the power to bring about synthesis, to integrate, to bring oppositestogether. Now the individual can begin to tell his or her story, in which thewords of a million experiences begin to form a whole, proving that life doeshave meaning and does make sense. Finally one makes sense out of thechance experiences of all these years.

Order emerges from the chaos and that means that people begin to acceptand live with their differences: you are like that; I am like this. There ismore than that simple creed of Gestalt psychology. Our communicationsestablish that I am like this and you are different, and that makes mejealous of you. However much I already struggle with the fact that I desiremy own desire more than its object, I add to this most obscure burden stillanother. Identifying with the other, I desire whatever the other happens todesire. We know that means that since my father desires my mother, I desireher. I go further: I desire my father's desire in the same way that I desiremy own - not for its object but for its own sake: I am after his desire morethan after his object. In other words, I want a double in life, a themestudied at length in the books of Rene Girard.

I want a double and I do not know why. There are times when one seesthis working out nicely in individual analysis, where after years of hardwork a compromise solution is found, be it only to leave the receiver withthe unresolved transference for the rest of his life. In a group things go adifferent way, because members are among equals and have no option butto kill each other, and to do that for no other reason but devour their desirefor their desire. It turns indeed into sheer madness since there is no longerany object in sight at all but only the totally blind process of identificationwith desire. At the end of that day the only and last thing to do would beto commit suicide, given that in this universe only desire has a right to exist.

Now we say again how necessary communication is, how much we needspeech. What we can share and must share, each one of us reaching outfrom within our own circle, is that we really are like that and that our onlystrategy for survival consists in working towards differentiating actions un-til there is enough space between us. Hence our need for culture and hierar-

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chies and a religion which offers nothing less than a transcendental worldfar beyond our murderous impulses.

If all that turns towards rather distant horizons, the final remarks mayhelp a little by being more homely. That people sit in groups as words sitin a sentence is a handy little aphorism to carry around. Often, whenleading a group, one sits wondering what it is all about, and all one thenneeds to do is to ask how the story John is telling becomes one of thesewords the group is knitting together to form a sentence for the group as awhole. Groups are as old as civilization, of course, and prior to the in-dividual. They are there to tell a story, the story of life. They represent allmythology, if you wish. The group writes its own bible, using any documen-tation it can find, from law to poetry, and whenever a group member beginsto experience that his contribution fits in somewhere, then he is coming outof his isolation. Members often complain that they are not contributinganything to the group, but what they mean is that their contribution is stillremaining an isolated word and has not found a proper place in thesentence. When the members do come out of their isolation, the symptomfollows because it has to, and once the symptom comes out of its isolationit loses its power to dominate.

True culture is the sum of things forgotten and as I sit in my groups Isee the group members as poets of the first order who, in one or two words,can evoke whole worlds they never experienced in the first place. If only Icould hear them - that is the problem!

North London Centre for Group Therapy6b Priory CloseLondon N14 4A W

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On Thinking About the Group Matrix

By GORAN AHLIN

TO approach the matrix of a group is to approach the known but yet unseenor unheard results of what is not consciously known. It is to enter into thearea of paradoxes and to test the limits of thinking. It is like the riddle ofthe Sphynx or an old tale: 'What exists without being seen or touclied byfingers? What exerts a strong and inevitable influence without ever beingweighed or captured'? It is to enter the Hall of Mirrors or an amusementpark to find no light-reflecting glass panes covered by silver, but only humanbeings in a circle facing each other.

No wonder that we need to stretch our verbal symbols to talk about it.The phenomenon we try to communicate around is primarily an experience:when persons interact in a group, something more and different emergesfrom what can be expected or explained by the mere arithmetic sum of itsmember personalities and bodies. This 'something more and different',which is sooner or later experienced to some extent by everyone in thegroup, was called by Foulkes (1964) the 'matrix'. Yvonne Agazarian andRichard Peters (1981) called it the 'invisible group'. I often call it 'groupspirit'. My theme is to discuss how our choice of metaphors influences ourthinking about this phenomenon.

Kuhn (1970) has pointed out that in the stage of scientific developmentwhich he calls 'pre-scientific' we are compelled to use less precise and clearconcepts borrowed from poetry, existential terms, and so on, to name theparts of existence we want to explore. Not until later can we refine thenames into scientific concepts (which then paradoxically may be moreun-real).

In our present stage of knowledge about groups (and why not also iboutthe psyche per se?) we are faced with the problem of dealing with entitieswhich we experience as profoundly real although we can not see, hear or

This paper is based on a presentation to the Vlth European Symposium on Group Analysis,Zagreb, September 1984.

GORAN AHLIN, MD, is a Consultant Psychiatrist and authorized Psychotherapistand is head of the Department for Psychotherapy Training in Langbro Hospital,Stockholm. He is a me/nber of the Group-Analytic Society and since the mil-'60shas worked in therapeutic communities and psychotherapy training with specialfocus on group analysis.

I l l GROUP ANALYSIS XVIII/2 (1985) 111-119