Noisy reflection

Abstract

Liebe Regine, I am grateful to you for your focus on the foundation matrix. You have kept it alive in Group Analysis (Scholz, 2003(Scholz, , 2011(Scholz, , 2014. I want to ground my response in my own understanding of the foundation matrix, then underline your proposal of 'protected and open spaces' (Scholz, 2022).My view of the foundation matrix is influenced by my being a medical doctor. To me, it is the physiological matrix. It is the map of the expected world, drawn to the scale of our human bodies. We communicate in large part through spoken language and gesture, which are breath and movement, even if meanings are not always shared. We expect a world where there are children and adults and they are not the same-and of men and women. We expect an immediate social world navigable by walking, manipulable through hand and finger movements. These views are not complete, as we all know. They lead to exclusions and inclusions, and produce the anxiety of being placed outside the norm, and the quiet confidence of being included without even realizing it. And even that wordanxiety-relates to our foundation matrix. We can make sense of the rising heart rate, shakiness, dry mouth, and so on, in a relatively shared way.

The first ‘hybrid’ Foulkes Lecture Study Day in the history of group analysis—‘From the couch to the circle to the streets and to the screens’

“…The Study Day responses continued this process of bringing a wider lens to group analytic ideas. Alasdair’s impassioned plea for taking bodies seriously, thinking about the experiences of embodied trauma (Forrest, 2022); Farideh reflecting on a lifetime of involvement and invisibility (Dizadji, 2022); María José speaking of the patriarchal violence that exercises power over women’s bodies as proof of domination (Blanco, 2022); Alice sharing the expansion of Reflective Citizens and the dialogue that can rise from the ashes of war (Mulasso, 2022). The lecture and the responses were disturbing and illuminating, uncomfortable in what they invited us to keep our eyes on, challenging us not to avert our gaze.…”

“…If one individual has a ‘problem’ it means that the group or society has a problem. Alasdair spoke of people that are ‘nodal points in extremely disturbed networks of communication’ (Forrest, 2022). But to engage deeply with a sick society can easily be experienced as unbearable.…”

Editor’s Introduction

“…Pablo Castanho (Castanho, 2022) (Brazil) spoke to the social transformative possibilities opened up by task-oriented work, undertaken at times in quite unexpected locations. Alasdair Forrest (Forrest, 2022) (UK) asked us from the perspective of his work as a medical doctor with prisoner-patients, to think about what can be reflected by the fragile noise of the anxious human body. Maria-Jose Blanco (Blanco, 2022) (Spain/UK) spoke via literature and the clinic of the theme of motherhood, of women’s bodies in ‘dark times’ to invoke Jacqueline Rose, one of the authors she cites (Rose, 2019).…”