‘Every child that’s born alive . . .’ — Response to Regine Scholz and Earl Hopper

Abstract

This is my response to Regine Scholz’s and Earl Hopper’s commentaries on my 2019 Foulkes Lecture. Here I discuss Foulkes’ concept of the matrix and the limits of his metaphor of individuals as knots in the communicational network, as well as the opposition and mutual relation between classical psychoanalysis and group analysis, on the one hand, and the relational perspective on the other. I also emphasize the urgent need to revise our underlying assumptions that contradict the discoveries of analysis, in order to develop a new interdisciplinary and all-inclusive paradigm of the human being.

A further response

“…In response to Juan Tubert-Oklander’s elaboration of his Foulkes Lecture Beyond psychoanalysis and group analysis: The urgent need for a new paradigm of the human being (Tubert-Oklander, 2019, 2020), I am pleased to clarify that I both said and wrote that ‘the relational perspective’ is often used as an excuse for sloppy clinical work, not that it was a form of it. I ‘fully agree’ that adherence to the classical doctrine of the essentialist individual monad can also be used as an excuse for sloppy work, and in some respects is even more dangerous to the patient.…”