“Freudian Groups”
by Juan & Hanne Campos
Introduction
“Freudian Groups” is a chapter of the unpublished book on “The Group Method of Analysis”, which contemplates the roots of groupanalysis from the historical development of psychoanalysis, its author and pioneers. Juan Campos quotes Freud saying: “Psychoanalytic theory is an attempt to make comprehensible two facts: transference and resistance, which emerge in a singular and unexpected fashion upon trying to refer pathological symptoms of a neurotic to their origin in his own life. All investigation which recognizes these two facts and takes them as their point of departure for its tasks can be called psychoanalysis even if it arrives at different results to my own.” The message of this chapter is groupanalytic investigations find these same two facts. S. H. Foulkes considered that the repressed in the group, the repressed social unconscious is that which cannot be said. One of the things not said or repressed in psychoanalysis is the relation of Freud with Fliess, who served him as alter ego or “analyst” during the years of his so-called auto-analysis and the writing of “The Interpretation of Dreams”. It is fascinating how Freud denies once and again this relationship talking about his “splendid isolation”, although he relates Fliess his auto-analysis from 1897 on; and their correspondence extends from 1887 to 1904. The end of the relationship coincides with a paper of Freud’s on “Forgetting and repressing” which was never to be published. Apart from other relationships á deux —Breuer, Charcot, Jung— waiting to be considered, the paper insists on the impossibility of auto-analysis and the fact that analysis always happens in a social context, with repressions and transferences.
As to the question of transference, this paper shows the complexity of the analytic situation when identifications are not only with authority figures or teachers but also with theories and writings and the different groups involved. Juan Campos takes us from the identification with the group of scientists of the laboratory of physiology of Brücke, which for Freud turned into the ideal model of what a group of scientists should be like, to the identification with his clinical teacher, Charcot. He describes the transferences and identification in the Vienna group and its changes, later in rivalry with the group from Zürich. By the by he draws before our eyes a fascinating picture of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Europe —Zürich, Vienna, Berlin— and the United States at the beginning of last century, the relation between clinic and academia and, once again, what is ignored and this way denied and repressed from one context and the other. This chapter on “The Freudian Groups” finishes on board of the George Washington, a ship which bring Freud, Ferenczi and Jung to the United States, linking up with the next chapter on the pioneer of groupanalysis, Trigant Burrow, who the following year, in 1910, moves with wife and two small children to Europe to be analyzed by Jung.
- Juan Campos Book Review (1994): M.Schur (1972). “Freud: Living and Dying”. New York: International Universities Press.