The Other Father

Dear Editors,

I was incredibly heartened to read (and fact-check) Lily Scherlis’s Issue 51 essay “Experiences in Groups.” I credit Scherlis for my newfound interest in group relations and my belief that it could be useful to left-wing organizing. I also found the care she put into portraying the idiosyncratic world of group relations to be especially admirable: A lesser author might have mocked these people (and their practices) for an easy laugh, but Scherlis’s examination was sensitive, giving the reader ample time to explore this rich and emotionally fraught world. I simply loved the piece.

Much like a dogmatic socialist or a doctrinaire psychoanalyst, however, I had two small quibbles. First, I was surprised that Scherlis did not mention John Rickman, W. R. Bion’s training analyst (and an analysand of Freud, Ferenczi, and Klein), who was an integral contributor to the early psychoanalytic study of groups. With a background in the social field theory of Kurt Lewin — one of the pioneers of social psychology — Rickman not only co-led with Bion the first Northfield experiment in group relations (and the earlier, notorious Wharncliffe experiment), but had also begun working on groups at Hollymoor Hospital even before Bion, his trainee, followed him there. While Bion is no doubt the patron saint of group relations, and Rickman’s work was by no means as revolutionary as his trainee’s — he made no algebra out of analysis — Rickman is still a predecessor worth mentioning, if only to make clear that Bion’s thought did not develop ex nihilo. Furthermore, Rickman’s experience as a participant in the Quaker-led Friends War Victims Relief Committee in wartime Russia can be thought of as a mirror image of Bion’s military background. As Scherlis writes, “Group relations was built for wartime,” but Rickman’s early involvement suggests it was built on the experiences of conscientious objectors, nurses, and victims of conflict as much as it was on the experiences of soldiers like Bion.

Secondly, to return to Freud (as Lacan would have us do), Scherlis is correct to note his assertion that “being in a group was like being hypnotized.” But his thinking about groups extended beyond this ambivalent comment in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and suggests that he was, like many of his successors, at least curious about group behavior. To my mind, Freud, like Bion, believed groups to be sophisticated and complex, with logics of their own; he was simply more suspicious of what this sophistication and complexity were capable of. In his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion,Freud writes that he is not ready to make a judgment about what he deems the “great experiment” taking place in Russia. His tenuous sympathy for the Soviet project had evaporated by the time he published Why War?, his correspondence with Einstein, in 1933, but there was a side to Freud — however hesitant, however partial — that found collectivist experiments worth attempting.

While the history of psychoanalysis is littered with pedantic arguments about what Freud and others did or did not think about one thing or another, there are occasions when it is still useful to make such an argument, to refer back to the primal fathers of the discipline as we seek to navigate the quagmire of the present. This essay, more than almost any other I’ve read in n+1, has challenged me with its arguments, situations, and analyses. I thank the author for that gift.

 — Stephen Dames