38th S.H. Foulkes Annual Lecture: Intimacy and Social Suffering in a Globalized World

Abstract

How is intimacy possible in a globalized world-and how does the loss of intimacy effect societies as well as individuals? This is the central question of the following article.It is argued that sociology alone cannot find any convincing answers, because we need to understand the unconscious dynamics of global developments that undermine the human capacity to bond and to experience intimacy. Group analysis offers quite a unique position 'on the edge', that allows us to observe and to connect, to analyse and to understand not only patients, but also people and situations outside of the clinical world. In this sense it is social group analysis that turns out to be a valid research method and an approach that is capable of deciphering the 'social unconscious'. An extensive case study out of a research project about transnational children in Ecuador (South America) and the story of Daqui are offered to show what is unconsciously at stake in a modern and globalized world, how much intimacy has degenerated already and how this can be understood in terms of group analysis.

Talking about ‘terrorism’: A group analytic approach? Commentary on Geller and Shadach’s ‘Terrorist organizations: Group-analytic and psychoanalytic perspectives’

“…I again raised similar concerns in my response to Elisabeth Rohr's Foulkes Lecture in 2014. (Rohr, 2014). All to little avail.…”

The Times They Are A-Changing: Evolving Group Analytic Identity

“…Accompanying these developments is a burst of new thinking in the literature, reminiscent of earlier thrusts in theory development that culminated in the publication of The Psyche and the Social World (Brown and Zinkin, 1994). Contemporary developments include recent attention to social change (Rohr, 2014;Blackwell, 2014;Nitsun, 2015), the publication of comprehensive overviews of the group-analytic field interlinking theory and practice (Schlapobersky, 2016), the development of a group-analytic dictionary, and scholarly research into Foulkes' background and past influences as well as the ever-deepening roots of group analysis (Nitzgen, 2011;Lavie, 2011;Weegmann, 2011). We see a more confident and coherent location of group analysis in the relational frame (Friedman, 2014;Weegmann, 2014) and an extension of the group-analytic discourse into grappling with the core but ill-defined Foulkesian concepts of the social unconscious and the foundation matrix (Hopper and Weinberg, 2011;Scholtz, 2014).…”

Homo Clausus, Homo Sacer, Homines Aperti: Challenges for Group Analysis in the 21st-Century. A Response to Haim Weinberg’s 40th Foulkes Lecture

“…However the so-called 'pure work' conveyed in group analytic groups seems not to be enough to cope with the sources of suffering (Akhtar, 2014) co-created in the current turbulent world. In fact, the considerations addressed by incohesion processes in groups (Hopper, 2003) as well by de Maré's (1991) Koinonian plea demand new forms of group analytic engagement-'a radical, a social group analysis' (Rohr, 2014;Blackwell, 2014)-in the current depleted public sphere. They require action in Arendt's terms.…”