Response to ‘The Mexican social unconscious—Part I: The roots of a nation’ and ‘Part II: Politics and group analysis’ by Reyna Hernández-Tubert

2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642110633
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Rohr
2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642098473
Author(s):  
Dick Blackwell

Institutional racism is a social unconscious process. It is the collective operation of shared unconscious assumptions and values that exist in groupings and cultures such as group analytic institutions where individuals may consciously believe they are not racist. In such cultures this conscious belief is protected by unconscious processes of denial, avoidance and negation. Attempts to address the issue within group analysis reveal some of its problematic dynamics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199231
Author(s):  
Anne Aiyegbusi

Group analysis privileges the social and political, aiming to address individual distress and ‘disturbance’ within a representation of the context it developed and persists in. Reproducing the presence and impact of racism in groups comes easily while creating conditions for reparation can be complicated. This is despite considerable contributions to the subject of racism by group analysts. By focusing on an unconscious, defensive manoeuvre I have observed in groups when black people describe racism in their lives, I hope to build upon the existing body of work. I will discuss the manoeuvre which I call the white mirror. I aim to theoretically elucidate the white mirror. I will argue that it can be understood as a vestigial trauma response with roots as far back as the invention of ‘race’. Through racialized sedimentation in the social unconscious, it has been generationally transmitted into the present day. It emerges in an exacerbated way within the amplified space of analytic groups when there is ethnically-diverse membership. I argue it is inevitable and even essential that racism emerges in groups as a manifestation of members’ racialized social unconscious including that of the conductor(s). This potentially offers opportunities for individual, group and societal reparation and healing. However, when narratives of racism are instead pushed to one side, regarded as a peripheral issue of concern only to minority black or other members of colour, I ask whether systems of segregation, ghettoization or colonization are replicated in analytic groups. This is the first of two articles about the white mirror. The second article which is also published in this issue highlights practice implications.


2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642110139
Author(s):  
Reyna Hernández-Tubert

The origins of the Mexican people and their impact on their social unconscious have been presented in the first part of this article. This second part starts with a discussion of the unavoidable need to include the political dimension in any group-analytic theory and enquiry. It then sketches the socio-political evolution of the country up to the present and its impact on the collective mood and relations among individuals and groups.


2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jale Punter

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Rohr

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-288

Trouble at t(he) Mill — Thinking about the Social Unconscious in Therapy and Training, Sarah Lloyd Jones, Group Analysis 49(3): 278–90. 10.1177/0533316416664000


2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 420-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Tubert-Oklander ◽  
Reyna Hernández-Tubert

This is the third of a series of three articles, based on the lecture we delivered at the International Workshop ‘Studies of Large Groups and Social Unconscious’, which took place in Belgrade in June 2013. In the first part we compared the British and the Latin American traditions of group analysis. In the second, we discussed the conception of the social unconscious and the group analytic large group, in both traditions. Now we present our own approach to large groups and discuss the problem of the wider context in which the large group takes place.


2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Brown

An initial attempt is made to discern more details in Foulkes's concept of the social unconscious, relating it to his deeper levels of group communication where it connects with, transcends and penetrates the individual unconscious revealed by psychoanalysis. The work of Earl Hopper is called upon as well as the findings of workshops conducted by the European Association for Transcultural Group Analysis. A tentative classification is proposed involving assumptions, disavowals, social defences and structural oppression representing blocks to communication and awareness within the field of relationships described by Giovanni Lo Verso as collective, transpersonal and transgenerational.


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