Keywords

The notion of the unconscious has been part of the vocabulary of philosophers, scientists, and literati throughout Western history. The term “unconscious” was coined by philosopher Friedrich Schelling in 1800 and emerged under the influence of Romanticism and German idealism in association with “the modern need to theorise individual independence” (ffytche, 2012, p. 13). Moreover, for more than a century – from Mesmer’s animal magnetism in the eighteenth century to Charcot’s hypnosis at the end of the nineteenth century – different attempts were undertaken to use the subject’s “unconscious psychological energies” therapeutically (Ellenberger, 1970). However, it was Freudian psychoanalysis that gave meaning to the idea of the unconscious as a way of transforming the conception of human subjectivity.

In Freud’s work, discussions about unconscious processes go beyond the individual realm and include the relationship between subject and culture, drive (Trieb), and civilization (Freud, 1921, 1923, 1930, 1933), along with interconnections between phylogenetic inheritance and ontogenesis and their repercussions on psychic transmission (Freud, 1913, 1937, 1939). These considerations have undoubtedly brought to the fore the relevance of archaic inheritance and of the unconscious dimensions that transcend individual experience (Freud, 1937). In this direction, Freud (1923, 1933, 1939) draws attention to connections between the unconscious and the history of humankind, fostering a glimpse of the possibility of a social dimension in the unconscious. However, despite Freud’s words – “and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well” (Freud, 1921, p. 69) – the psychoanalytic mainstream took decades to realize that individual psychology is connected to the context in which an individual is embedded and his/her unconscious is constituted by intersubjective, trans-subjective, and transgenerational relations. For this reason, before engaging in investigations of the social unconscious in group analytic theory and its contribution to psychosocial studies, a fragment of Freud’s thinking should be highlighted: “The hypothesis of there being inherited vestiges in the id alters, so to say, our views about it” (Freud, 1938, p. 299). It is not much, but this fragment offers phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and sociogenetic perspectives that are linked to investigations into the social unconscious (Penna, 2022). Moreover, it ratifies new avenues of inquiry opened by psychosocial studies by pointing to the influence of social phenomena on the unconscious.

Ideas underpinning the notion of the social unconscious have been found in Shakespeare, in social philosophy, and in the social sciences since Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies, and especially Marx (Hopper, 1981). Discussions on topics such as alienation, the sociality of human nature, nature versus nurture, and the individual or the social a priori, even inadvertently, posed questions related to the idea of the social unconscious. In this regard, it is important to consider the work of Durkheim (1895) and other French sociologists who explored the concept of “constraint” with respect to unconscious constraints of social facts. They did not refer to the idea of the social unconscious but to collective conscience, which does not imply the “unconscious of society”; it is based on the existence of social facts internalized and shared by the members of a particular society (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011, p. xxvi).

In his studies of the role of ideology and discourse in the social unconscious and in debates on approaches that prioritize the social over the individual – the social a priori – the group analyst Farhad Dalal (2011) points to similarities between the work of philosophers such as Hegel, Marx, Althusser (1969), and Foucault (1972), sociologists Elias (1939, 2001) and Bourdieu (1986), and psychoanalysts such as Lacan (2007) in the formulation of the concept of the social unconscious in group analysis. In this sense, although investigations into the internalization of the social world and its effects on the unconscious life of persons have been conducted, the research finds its theoretical and clinical perspectives in group analytic theory.

The psychoanalyst and founder of group analysis S.H. Foulkes was especially concerned with the investigation of the social a priori, particularly with the impact of the individual’s internalization of social objects and forces (E. Foulkes, 1990, p. 57). His pioneering intersubjective approach takes into account the idea that an “individual person is a social being immersed in a social context” (E. Foulkes, 1990, p. 277). Foulkes was interested in the idea of “socially created identities” (Hopper, 2018), close to the notion of the social unconscious. For him, the interweaving of the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal was fundamental to the understanding of the nature of socialization processes and the formation of personality.

As Dalal (2011, p. 250; italics in original) states, “One name for the social a priori is the Foulkesian one of the social unconscious.” In this sense, exploring the social unconscious is not to discuss how the social is in the unconscious of a person or how this person is affected by society and culture (Dalal, 1998). In order to understand the idea of socially unconscious processes, it is crucial to take into account the interdependencies between individual and society (Elias, 1939, 2001), because “the individual is formed by, and simultaneously informs, the social” (Dalal, 1998, p. 211). This perspective avoids the pitfalls of prioritizing the individual or the social in individual-society relations by conferring value to “individuals-in-social-relations” (Dalal, 2011, p. 252).

Reflecting on individual-society interdependencies is complex, because modern individualistic perspectives still prevail in many intellectual circles, strengthening the views of individual and society as separate entities. Norbert Elias’s (1939, 1984, 2001) process sociology transformed the views of individual-society relations by describing the impossibility of prioritizing the individual over the social or vice versa. For Elias (2001), the modern dichotomy between individual and society conveys a misperception of this relationship, seeing that it would not be through antinomies but rather through their interdependencies that the analysis should be guided. Elias (2001) critically claims that “it appears as if the psychologies of the individual and of society were two completely separable disciplines” (p. 6), as if there was an insurmountable abyss between them. However, this gap does not exist, since “no one can be in doubt that individuals form a society or that each society is a society of individuals” (p. 6). The society is a relational whole, and the social is conceived as a system of relations between interdependent groups and individuals. Thus, the words individual and society designate inseparable processes (Penna, 2022).

Through the concept of figuration, Elias (1984) eliminates the duality between subject and object. Figuration is defined as “a structure of mutually orientated and dependent people (…) the network of interdependencies formed by individuals” (Elias, 1939, p. 482). Thinking in terms of figurations transforms the once restricted debates on the issue of the individual into an established dynamics of social groups in different interwoven fields (Elias, 2001, p. 189). Therefore, the reflection on individual-society relations moves from a substantialist point of view to a relational mode of thought. In this direction, Elias’s (1939, 1984, 2001) epistemology for individual-society relations is essential for group analytic theory and explorations on the social unconscious and contributes to psychosocial studies by examining the interdependencies between “the psychological” and “the social.”

As a sociologist, psychoanalyst, and group analyst, Earl Hopper (2003a) has been exploring the interdependencies in individual-society relations and the importance of socially unconscious processes for decades. His work is connected with the development of the theory of what he terms “Incohesion,” which explores traumatic experiences in the unconscious life of persons, groups, and social systems (Hopper, 2003b). Hopper’s research (2003b) unveils the core principles of group analysis and takes into account social facts and social forces people are not aware of, pointing out their social unconscious as well. They allow for tackling the issue of interdependencies between society, community, organizations, family, and persons, contextualizing in time and space the figurations they co-create, especially in contexts marked by traumatic experiences. Unfortunately, several psychoanalysts continue to undervalue the importance of the “sociality of human nature, as reflected in the constraints and restraints of social facts, such as those of gender, class, race ethnicity, language, family structures” (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011, p. xvii). In turn, the social sciences continue to ignore the importance of the unconscious mind and its expressions in the relational life of persons. Group analysis and certainly psychosocial studies offer an opportunity to integrate these multiple frames of reference.

Moreover, as Hopper (2003a) stresses, it is important to distance from misleading homologies and isomorphisms that use the properties of persons to describe the properties of social systems. This concern is fundamental in discussions on the social unconscious, for it warns that it is not possible to explore the social unconscious of a group or social system as if a group or social system were a person with a mind and a brain. It means that, although persons have minds and brains, groups and social systems do not have an unconscious mind, but a culture of which their members are unconscious. Therefore, they can only refer to the social unconscious of a person in the context of their group inserted into a particular social system.

The idea of socially unconscious processes has been at the core of group analytic theory since Foulkes’s early work. The study of the social unconscious in group analysis found a clinical application and opened research fields to investigate social trauma, habitus, national character, collective memory, as well as transgenerational repetition and the transmission of traumatic experiences (Hopper, 2003a, b; Frosh, 2013a, 2019a) in persons, groups, and societies (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011, 2016, 2017, 2022).

The psychoanalytical, sociological, philosophical, political, and transgenerational dimensions of the theory of the social unconscious are marked by multiple directions and meanings that, like “lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), prevent a linear and closed form of analysis. Research requires postmodern thinking akin to the trans-disciplinarity and the criticality of psychosocial studies (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008; Frosh, 2013b, 2019b). Social unconscious processes will be presented in this chapter through the group analytic concept of matrix – more precisely by the contemporary reconfiguration and re-extension of the concept of tripartite matrix (Nitzgen & Hopper, 2017; Hopper, 2018). The multidimensionality of socially unconscious processes in tripartite matrices will be examined in terms of “dialectic spiral” processes, as conceived by the Argentinian psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1979, 1980).

For Pichon-Rivière, individual and society form a unity, a single dynamic field where a spiral dialectic process intertwines the internal and external worlds, creating a fluid interchange of continuities and discontinuities between them (Pichon-Rivière, 1979, 1980; W. Baranger, 2009). These Latin-American perspectives – only recently explored in the English-speaking psychoanalytical and group analytical circles (Losso et al., 2017) in connection with the study of the social unconscious in tripartite matrices – can underpin a new contribution to the development of psychosocial studies.

The Social Unconscious in Group Analysis

The theory of the social unconscious is at the root of Foulkesian group analysis. In the beginning of his career, and still living in Germany, Foulkes was influenced by the intellectual effervescence of the 1920s and the 1930s. Foulkes was in contact with Kurt Goldstein’s holistic approach to neurology and Adhémar Gelb’s psychological analysis, Gestalt psychology, and the Lewinian social field. As a psychoanalyst, he was close to Freudian psychoanalysis and the Freudo-Marxist movement. He was also in contact with studies on authority and the family (Fromm, 1936) and on the social-psychological foundations of character formation (Fromm, 1932) that Horkheimer, Adorno, and Fromm conducted in the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in the early 1930s. Foulkes was also influenced by Karl Mannheim’s and Norbert Elias’s sociology and by cultural anthropology and systems theory (Nitzgen, 2011).

It is not easy to determine the impact these early influences exerted on Foulkes’ thinking and on his work with small groups during WWII at the Northfield Hospital, in England. However, from the mid-1940s onward, Foulkes’s ground-breaking work replaced the modern dichotomies between individual and society with a new epistemology that confers value on the intrinsic relationality of human beings. Through group analysis, Foulkes (1948) revealed that “the old juxtaposition of an inside and outside world, constitution and environment, individual and society, phantasy and reality, body and mind and so on, are untenable” (p. 10). This new perspective allowed him to distance himself from classic psychoanalysis by highlighting individual persons as part of a network of interactions and communications in open systems. This view of a person as a whole in a total situation supports the investigation of social unconscious processes (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011).

Although Foulkes referred to the idea of the social unconscious in different passages of his work (Foulkes & Anthony, 1957, pp. 42 and 56; Foulkes, 1964, p. 52; Foulkes, 1975, p. 37; Nitzgen, 2011) to examine biological, social, and cultural forces people are unaware of, he never discussed the concept systematically nor explored it in his clinical work (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011). Foulkes bequeathed to his followers the task of clarifying and developing the notion of the social unconscious in group analysis. Group analysts have observed in their practice how social facts and forces unconsciously structure personality, groups, and social systems (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011). Indeed, it is natural to infer that group analysts are sensitive to the existence of unconscious processes beyond the individual’s subjectivity. For group analysts, the unconscious mind is always a socially unconscious mind from the very beginning of life, which is relational even in the womb and even in the location of the mother in her own social world (Hopper, 2018).

Investigations into the social unconscious gained weight in contemporary group analysis and are systematically examined by Hopper (2003a, 2018), Hopper and Weinberg (2011, 2016, 2017, 2022), and collaborators in a series of books on the topic.

Before moving the discussion on, it is necessary to provide a general definition that contributes to the current investigations of the social unconscious:

We use the concept of the social unconscious in order to refer to the social, cultural, and communicational constraints and restraints of which people are to varying degrees unconscious. The social unconscious emphasises shared anxieties, fantasies, defences, myths, and memories of the members of a particular social system. (…) The field theory of the social unconscious includes its sociality, relationality, transpersonality, transgenerationality, and collectivity. (Hopper & Weinberg, 2017, p. xxii)

This definition shows how the social unconscious project has evolved revealing what happens in between the persons Foulkes studied. It emphasizes the sociality of human nature by exploring the interdependencies between unconscious dimensions in psychoanalysis – “the non-conscious, the dynamic unconscious of the repressed and of the split-off, and pre-conscious with respect to the external world and internal representations of it” (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011) – with the sociological perspectives that highlight “the unconscious constraints of social objects (social facts and social forces) that have been internalized, and to the unconscious restraints of those who have not” (p. xxx).

The first volume of the series on the social unconscious edited by Hopper and Weinberg focuses on mapping its theoretical field since the identification of its origins in Foulkes’s work (Nitzgen, 2011). The book calls attention to the pioneering work of authors such as Trigant Burrow (Pertegato & Pertegato, 2013), Karen Horney (1937), and Erich Fromm (1932, 1962, 1963), who in different ways intuited the notion of the social unconscious. It also offers arguments for differentiating the notion of the social unconscious from similar concepts, such as the Jungian collective unconscious or the concept of the co-unconscious and interpersonal unconscious in Moreno’s psychodrama (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011). Moreover, psychoanalysts connected to object relations theory developed lines of thought close to the idea of the social unconscious. Pichon-Rivière (1979, 1980) was one of them, as we will discuss in this chapter. Winnicott’s (1971) descriptions of the transitional paradox and concepts such as shared reality and the location of cultural experience are at the core of the conceptualization of the social unconscious, pointing to a third area where socially unconscious processes are co-invented/co-created (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011).

The second volume of the series on the social unconscious examines the significance of social trauma, structural oppression, intergenerational and transgenerational transmissions of traumatic experiences, and defenses co-created by persons and groups in different foundation matrices. It is a study that reveals how internalized social objects of particular societies, habitus, collective memories, national and social character, and identity, together with collective assumptions about social reality – especially disavowals as a social defense against the threats of social trauma – are transmitted, inherited, and co-constructed. Volume two puts into perspective field theory, in the Lewinian sense of the term, enabling the emergent Foulkesian theory of the social unconscious to explore dimensions of sociality, relationality, transpersonality, and collectivity (Hopper & Weinberg, 2016, p. xiii). At this point, it becomes clear that advances in the theorization of the social unconscious require the re-examination and reconfiguration of the Foulkesian (1964) concept of matrix. This task was undertaken by Nitzgen and Hopper (2017) in the third volume of the series (Hopper & Weinberg, 2017) and leads to the emergence of the concept of “tripartite matrix.”

The Tripartite Matrices of Socially Unconscious Processes

The development of the concept of tripartite matrix is connected to the ripening of the theory of the social unconscious. It required the examination of Foulkes’s work from the late 1940s to the 1970s (Nitzgen & Hopper, 2017), and, in this journey, one of the most important theoretical advances of Foulkesian theory was the shift from a Cartesian view of the mind to the group matrix. Previously, the idea of mind was confined to an individual organism, but Foulkes observed that, when persons meet in a group, transpersonal processes take place, and “like X-rays in the bodily sphere, go right through the individuals composing such a network” (E. Foulkes, 1990, p. 224). This observation allowed Foulkes to move from the idea of an intrapsychic mind to the concept of matrix, which he defined as:

the hypothetical web of communication and relationship of a given group. It is the common shared ground which ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events and upon which all communications and interpretations, verbal and nonverbal, rest. (Foulkes, 1964, p. 292)

The concept of matrix encompasses the relational perspective of what happens between persons within a group. The word matrix comes from Latin and designates a “breeding female,” a “womb.” For Foulkes (1964), the group matrix is the basis of all mental processes and comprises the sociocultural network of communication among interrelated persons. In this sense, the idea of matrix seems more appropriate to the study of the social unconscious than the concept of mind (Hopper & Weinberg, 2016).

Years later, in 1973, Foulkes explored the concept of matrix at two different levels:

I have accepted from the beginning that even this group of total strangers, being of the same species and more narrowly of the same culture, share a fundamental, mental matrix (foundation matrix). To this, their closer acquaintance and their intimate exchanges add consistently, so that they form a current, ever-moving, ever-developing dynamic matrix. (E. Foulkes, 1990, p. 228; italics original)

The dynamic matrix refers to the social organization of different kinds of groups. In turn, the concept of foundation matrix describes the social organization of a given society or a nation state (Hopper & Weinberg, 2017) based not only on its particular habitus and communicational patterns but also on other dimensions, such as biology, body, language, culture, education, socioeconomic structures, power relations, and intergenerational and transgenerational transmissions (E. Foulkes, 1990, pp. 213–215).

Foulkes (1975, p. 130) also introduced, even in an inchoate form, the idea of a personal matrix. In a few words, he states that “just as the individual’s mind is a complex of interacting processes (personal matrix), mental processes interact in the concert of the group (group matrix).” Foulkes did not explore this idea, but Nitzgen and Hopper’s (2017, p. 15) investigation equates the personal matrix to:

… “culturally embedded values and reactions” (Foulkes, 1975, p. 131) … “developed and transmitted” in the process of socialisation, especially in the nuclear family, in the social network, class, etc., and have been maintained and modified by the intimate plexus in which the person now moves. (ibid., p. 132, italics added; cf. Foulkes & Anthony, 1957, p. 27)

The conceptualization of a personal matrix, in association with dynamic and foundation matrices, allows for understanding the matrix as a multirelational process. Therefore, “The social system of any grouping can be considered as a tripartite matrix and deconstructed into three overlapping and interpenetrating matrices” (Hopper, 2018, p. 112). So, by interweaving the mind of a person (personal matrix) with the collective mind of a particular grouping (dynamic matrix) in the context of a particular society (foundation matrix), a multidimensional perspective emerges in the examination of socially unconscious processes. This way, it can be inferred that the social unconscious is not an agency located within a person or in any particular group. The social unconscious finds its expressions in the tripartite matrix as a whole (Nitzgen & Hopper, 2017).

This new perspective reshapes the concept of matrix. It introduces to the study of the social unconscious a four-dimensional time/space paradigm that enables researchers to explore the interdependencies between the personal, the interpersonal, the transpersonal, and the transgenerational in tripartite matrices (Nitzgen & Hopper, 2017).

The social unconscious can be analyzed in terms of social systems theory, since there is always an interface between the realms of the tripartite matrix. Each realm can be appreciated as a system and a subsystem in its own right or in relation to the whole. Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that, through “processes of equivalence” (Hopper, 2003a, p. 94), what happens in global dynamics may be recapitulated within societies, and societal dynamics may be recapitulated within regions, organizations, families, and dyads, which makes the investigation of the social unconscious in tripartite matrices an exploration in open systems.

However, the multidimensionality of social unconscious processes in tripartite matrices can also be explored through field theory. Field theory emerged in physics, and, in the late 1920s and 1930s, Gestalt theorists brought it into psychology, where it was developed by Kurt Lewin (1947). Lewin’s social field considers that the whole is prior to, and more elementary than the sum of its parts. Lewin used physical fields as a metaphor to explore the interactions between the individual and the environment as in a social field (Tubert Oklander, 2017). From then on, the idea of field has played an important role and lies at the root of the work of Bion, Foulkes, and Pichon-Rivière on groups, as well as in developments of the psychoanalytic theory (Hinshelwood, 2018).

During the 1950s and 1960s in Latin America, Gestalt theory, Lewin’s social field theory (1947), and Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) phenomenology, in conjunction with Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics, influenced psychoanalytic and analytic group thinking. These ideas led to the building of original concepts such as “link” (vínculo), “conceptual, relational operative schema (CROS),” “dialectic spirals,” and work in operative groups, all formulated by Pichon-Rivière (1979, 1980; Tubert-Oklander & Hernández de Tubert, 2004; Losso et al., 2017). Moreover, studies on transference and countertransference conducted by Racker (1960), Bleger’s (2013) ideas on the psychoanalytic frame, and Madeleine and Willy Baranger’s (2008) conceptualization of “the analytic situation as a dynamic field” in 1961–1962 contributed significantly to new developments.

Lewin’s ideas on the social field are in the foundations of psychoanalytic field theory, gathering different psychoanalytic approaches based on the idea of the analytic session as a bi-personal field, distancing itself from the classic paradigm of psychoanalysis. Investigations of psychoanalytic field theories encompass a whole family of related approaches to psychoanalysis that reveal “a family resemblance, although they are by no means equal” (Tubert Oklander, 2017, p. 191). Contemporary models of psychoanalytic field theory lie in the intersection of Bion’s and Baranger’s perspectives, developed initially by Antonino Ferro in Italy but now present in many countries. Post-Bionian psychoanalytic field theory expands the theory and clinical work of Bion while exploring the oneiric and playful dimension of the analytic session, enabling the transformation of unthinkable elements of patients’ mental life into thoughts, dreams, and narratives. In North America, also influenced by Lewin’s work, postmodernism and hermeneutics, interpersonal, intersubjective, and relational psychoanalysts developed psychoanalytic field approaches grounded on the idea of the analytic couple as a unit. Their clinical emphasis is on the contextual nature of the communication established by the analytic pair in the here-and-now of the session (Montana Katz et al., 2017).

In group analysis, the notion of field is completely implicit in several Foulkesian theoretical and clinical conceptualizations (Foulkes, 1964). A spiral can be used to explore social unconscious processes among the three realms of the tripartite matrix, enabling the researcher to examine, in time and space, what Foulkes envisaged about collective mental processes in terms of a matrix: “We cannot make the conventional sharp differentiation between inside or outside, or between phantasy and reality. What is inside is also always outside, what is outside is inside as well” (E. Foulkes, 1990, p. 278). In this sense, the use of the spiral “emphasizes the openness to the environment, the paradox of inside/outside and outside/inside, and the variability of the starting point in social, personal and organismic life” (Hopper, 2018, p. 115). This approach is quite similar to Pichon-Rivière’s view of a dialectic spiraling field in personal, family, and group structure and dynamics (Losso et al., 2017, p. 74).

Here it is worth taking into account the description of the Association for Psychosocial Studies, registered on its website. Psychosocial studies:

studies the way in which subjective experience is interwoven with social life. Psychological issues and subjective experiences cannot be abstracted from societal, cultural, and historical contexts; nor can they be deterministically reduced to the social. Similarly, social and cultural worlds are shaped by psychological processes and intersubjective relations. (Association for Psychosocial Studies, n.d.)

The concept of “dialectic spiral” used to examine the social unconscious in tripartite matrices can inform, contribute, and provide a dimensionality in time and space to psychosocial investigations of the entanglements between “the psychological” and “the social.”

Pichon-Rivière, Dialectic Spirals and the Dimensionality of Social Unconscious Processes

Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1907–1977) was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He was 4 years old when his family moved to Chaco, Argentina, a tropical region inhabited by the native people known as Guarani. Pichon-Rivière’s experience of being influenced by two different cultures and living in a magical, although nearly wild environment, aroused his interest in establishing relationships between contrasting fields in the human sciences. In 1936, while working as a psychiatrist at Hospicio de Las Mercedes, Pichon-Rivière realized that the development of mental illnesses transcended individuality. It is co-constructed by the patient’s family structure and its environment. Pichon-Rivière was one of the founders of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association in 1942 and, in 1953, the Argentine Institute for Social Studies (Tubert-Oklander & Hernández de Tubert, 2004).

Pichon-Rivière’s ideas, grounded in the essential unity of the intrapsychic and social realms, exercised a powerful influence on psychoanalytic, group analytic, and social psychology theories in Latin America. His epistemology focuses on a pluridimensional approach of “man-in-situation” (Pichon-Rivière, 1980, p. xii; translation mine). For him, “One cannot think in terms of a distinction between the individual and society. It is an abstraction, a reductionism that we cannot accept, because we carry society within us” (apud Tubert-Oklander, 2011, p. 61).

Although Pichon-Rivière never had any contact with Foulkes, both shared a pioneering conception of the socially unconscious dimension of human beings. For Pichon-Rivière (1979, p. XX), the mind, the body, and the external world form a unity and are dialectically interrelated in time and space. In the same vein, Foulkes (1948) postulates the intrinsic sociality of human nature and the indissolubility of the network co-created between persons and their contexts. For Pichon-Rivière as for Foulkes, there is no opposition between individual and collective psychology; therefore, the individual and the group are mere illusions (Tubert-Oklander, 2011).

Pichon-Rivière reveals how the subject is born and grows within a linking network that supports relationship and socialization processes. The concept of “link” (vínculo) replaces the notion of instinctual drives and is defined “as a complex structure that includes a subject, an object, and their mutual interrelations through communication and learning processes that take the shape of a dialectic spiral” (1980, p. xi; translation mine).

Consequently, through the link established by the mother-baby relationship as a mechanism of interaction, as a Gestalt, the child internalizes a relational, “a linking structure,” which will enable him/her to learn from and about the world and the environment. However, there are more than two subjects in the link, because there is no link without the presence of others, the family, the environment, the outside world. The link includes, but is not restricted to what we know as object relations, as introduced by Melanie Klein. In this sense, “the object relation is the inner structure of the bond [link]” (Tubert-Oklander, 2011, p. 60). The link involves the confluence of two fields, the inner field and the outer field:

There is, then, a perpetual dialectics of the inner and the outer, which is the very stuff of human existence. The internal bonds [links] and the external bonds [links] are integrated in a dialectic spiral process, by means of which that which was originally external becomes internal again, and so on. There is fluid interchange between the two fields, which helps to establish the differentiation between the inside and the outside, while at the same time keeping a deep continuity between them. Hence individual and society form an indissoluble unit, a single dynamic field because we all carry society within us. (Tubert-Oklander, 2011, p. 61)

The field comprised by the link (Pichon Rivière 1979) is a living, ongoing, ever-changing structure, as an evolving Gestalt that is both internal and external, conscious and unconscious, personal and interpersonal, psychological and social at the same time. The link also has a temporal dimension of two axes, “the vertical links to past and future generations, and the horizontal link to family members and the wider social community” (Losso et al., 2017, p. xxv).

The intuition of a spiral process was “sketched out in one of Freud’s letters to Fliess (May 1897 in Freud 1892–99, p. 251)” (Baranger & Baranger, 2008, p. 820). Pichon-Rivière expanded it in 1956–1958 to understand the analytic situation as a unity, as a whole. In this, he was influenced by Gestalt theory, Lewin’s work, philosophy, and Marxism. Pichon-Rivière’s theory is based on Kleinian theory; however, it brings a novel perspective to it when it designates a dialectic view of the analytic treatment connected to temporality. The spiral process shows a dialectics between repetition and non-repetition of events in a patient’s life during the session from a three-dimension perspective. It addresses the temporal development of the analytic process, the dialectic of history, and temporality (W. Baranger, 2009, p. 49).

The dialectic situation created in the analytic field moves from the here-and-now to what Pichon-Rivière used to call “Hic et Nunc et Mecum” – here, now with me – also including “as far away and long ago” and “as in the future and somewhere else” (W. Baranger, 2009). Therefore, the dialectics of the spiral process comprises “all temporal dimensions, both the past, which is repeated in the present analytic situation, and the future, which opens in a prospective way” (p. 49). In this sense, the ever-widening movement of the dialectical spiral interweaves the intrapsychic, the intersubjective, the trans-subjective, and the transgenerational. Thus, the dimensionality provided by Pichon-Rivière’s dialectical spiral process is apposite to explore socially unconscious processes – in the here-and-now, there-and-now, here-and-then, and there-and-then (Hopper, 2003a, p. 132; 2018) – in the realms of the tripartite matrix in group analysis.

As Foulkes postulated for the group analytic epistemology, Pichon-Rivière’s dialectic approach to human nature allowed him to distance himself from modern pitfalls that consider the mind and the body, the individual and the society, the “psychological” and the “social” as dichotomous and separated entities. In this regard, the study of the social unconscious in tripartite matrices in association with Pichon-Rivière’s dialectical spiral processes provides a theoretical tool that enables psychosocial studies to investigate the spiraling fields in which subjective experience interweaves with social life.

A Short Vignette

During the first year of the pandemic, Brazilian civil society created an online platform to offer free support to frontline health professionals. The “temporary institution” involved around eight thousand psychologists, psychiatrists and patients from different theoretical backgrounds, from various Brazilian cities. By mid-2020, in a reflective practice group, it was clear that the country’s atmosphere was oppressive, due to a high level of virus contamination, uncertainties regarding the production of a vaccine against COVID-19, and the helplessness experienced regarding the management of the crisis by President Bolsonaro. In their group sessions, the participants shared ambivalent feelings of despair and hope, well contained by the group’s reflective interactions. However, throughout several sessions, these group participants reported experiences of abuse in the working environment – hospital or school settings – as well as sexual abuse, such as rape in childhood or sexual violence in relationships. At a certain point, the number of discussed cases involving abusive relationship patterns was overwhelming. Thus, the participants realized that the group was functioning as a microcosm of what was taking place in the life of Brazilian tripartite matrices. This does not mean that all Brazilians had been or were being victims of abuse, but, in that traumatic moment, and through processes of equivalence (Hopper, 2003a), feelings and socially unconscious experiences of abuse at the personal, dynamic/institutional, and foundation matrix level were finding expression. In this sense, as Hopper (2018) postulates, “groups are microcosms of their contextual society and its many organizations and institutions.” Moreover, the participants can be seen as fractals of the group, “personifying a particular process which, in turn, may be a function of the ‘matrix’ of the group, including its foundation matrix” (Hopper, 2003b, p. 95).

As a microcosm of the Brazilian tripartite matrix, the reflective group revealed, through processes of equivalence (Hopper, 2003a), experiences of abuse at the personal, institutional, and societal levels in Brazil. These experiences are grounded on the Brazilian colonial past, on apparatuses of power, systemic racism, and other forms of oppression (Penna, 2016) intermingled with traumatic experiences of abuse in the here and now of the Brazilian tripartite matrices, magnified by the pandemic.

Therefore, researching and thinking in terms of tripartite matrices enable reflections and interpretations which link social-psychological-biological and transgenerational spaces. The psychodynamics of these processes happen in a psychosocial field where the realms of tripartite matrices dialectically spiral, providing different frames of reference and dimensions of analysis. From this vignette, personal and institutional experiences were intertwined with the reality of social facts and forces such as political processes, gender issues, dynamics of exclusion, racism, as well as transgenerational processes of the Brazilian foundation matrix.

Group Analysis, Dialectic Spirals and Psychosocial Studies

The theories of Foulkes and Pichon-Rivière defied the psychoanalytic mainstream by introducing the indissolubility of the links co-created by persons and their social contexts. Their perspectives pointed to epistemologies that challenged modern individualistic perspectives by crossing the boundaries of traditional disciplines and fields of study and, therefore, distancing themselves from psychoanalytic, sociological, and social psychological classical investigations. Group analytic thinking and the idea of socially unconscious processes remain unknown in many of these circles; however, they are fundamental for research on contemporary object relations, relational, and field theory in psychoanalysis, as well as for psychosocial research (Penna, 2022). Moreover, studies on psychoanalysis, culture, and society have been inspiring authors to explore ideas close to the theory of the social unconscious theory (Herron, 1995; Altman, 2010; Leyton & Leavy-Sperounis, 2020).

Today, postmodern thinking and trans-disciplinary research, characteristic of contemporary group analysis and psychosocial studies, are committed to investigations of the “in-betweenness” of “the psychosocial” paradoxes. Psychosocial studies has taken seriously these challenges by creating a critical field of analysis that:

move across disciplines in a disruptive way, without settling into any formal new shape. This means that in many ways it is inherently unstable, with the tensions and uncertainties but also the potentially creative new encounters that follow from that instability. (Frosh, 2019b, p. 5)

Psychosocial studies is forged by different languages, like emerging “psychosocial dialects” (Frosh, 2019b, p. 2), which brings to the fore different frames of analysis and, consequently, different “dialectics.”

Pichon-Rivière’s (1980) dialectic approach meets the psychosocial studies’ tenets. For him, thinking, research, and learning:

must be understood as a closing and opening mechanism that works in a dialectical way. It closes at a certain moment and then opens to close again later. If thinking remains fixed in a certain structure for too long, it becomes stereotyped and formal. We could say that the frame of reference is conceptual at first; it includes all concepts in a structure that has conscious and unconscious aspects and changes over time as knowledge and experience grow. We should combine our theory of knowledge with a dialectical perspective. New knowledge will modify prior experiences and will be integrated in such a way that it will enhance subsequent ones. (Pichon-Rivière, 1980; Losso et al., 2017, p. 90)

As a whole, the dialectic approach serves as a general framework to inquire into both the context of the object of study and the contradictions emerging within it (Losso et al., 2017, p. 51). Dialectic spirals link inner and outer fields (Tubert-Oklander, 2011), allowing for observing in the “group analytic dialect” the multiple figurations created by personal, dynamic, and particular foundation matrices or, in “Pichon-Rivière’s dialect,” the fluid interchange between the mind, the body, and the external world. The “psychosocial studies dialect” favors studies in “trans spaces” (Frosh, 2013b) through the paradoxes and tensions that “bind the psychosocial together as one entity” (Frosh, 2019b, p. 7).

In sum, following ffytche’s (2012) reflections on The Foundation of the Unconscious and Ellenberger’s (1970) work on The Discovery of the Unconscious, one can understand how the history of ideas and new sociopolitical and cultural contexts culminated in modernity with the emergence of the subject’s individuality and interiority and consequently with the creation of the notion of the unconscious. However, a long journey was undertaken until Freud could conceptualize the psychoanalytic unconscious.

After more than a century of Freudian original “discovery,” the world has changed and so has the way of conceiving of human subjectivity, definitely interweaved with social and cultural contexts. Today, this idea may seem obvious, but investigations of the topic require a radical transformation in the way knowledge is produced. It demands trans-disciplinary thinking and a critical attitude to deconstruct certainties and undermine metanarratives. The social unconscious project communes with these perspectives. The study of the social unconscious has been opening new trans-disciplinary fields, broadening the thinking on unconscious processes by highlighting its socially unconscious dimensions in tripartite matrices. In this respect, observing how the notion of the unconscious slowly opened its path in the history of ideas of the nineteenth century, it is possible to understand the huge task the social unconscious project has ahead. It is still difficult to predict how social unconscious theory will evolve; however, in this journey, the affinity and the ongoing dialogue with psychosocial studies are fundamental.

Summary

This chapter introduces social unconscious theory from the work of S.H. Foulkes in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany to theoretical developments in contemporary group analysis. Building on investigations of the social unconscious in persons, groups, and societies and using the concept of tripartite matrix as a benchmark, this chapter unveils affinities between group analytic epistemology, grounded on the intrinsic relationality of human beings and the trans-disciplinarity and criticality of psychosocial studies. It also introduces Latin American psychoanalytic thinking, through Pichon-Rivière’s concept of dialectic spiral and its importance in the exploration of the multidimensionality of socially unconscious processes. Indeed, dialectic spiral thinking provides a theoretical tool for psychosocial studies to investigate the spiraling fields in which subjective experience interweaves with social life.