1975-1989 The professional world: Group Psychotherapists, Groupanalysts, their Training and their Associations (2)

1981 Crossroads and a decisive year for the GAS

The contact of Juan Campos with the Group Analytic Society (London) and quite a number of its members during the second half of the seventies is continuous and direct for various reasons. Firstly, the fact that Foulkes entrusts him with the technical supervision and publication of his Method and Principles. Then there is the collaboration with members of the Institute of Group Analysis for the two workshops in Group Analysis organized in Barcelona and Bilbao and the fact that his wife Hanne follows her own training in the Institute in London, so that often on week-ends he travels there, staying in Elizabeth Foulkes’ house where Hanne also lives during her training.

Juan Campos is very vigilant in reference to the effects the death of S. H. Foulkes was having on the Society he had founded and the relationship of the latter with the Institute charged with the official training of future groupanalysts. Juan had the intuition and the conviction that Foulkes did not oppose the development of an institute —how could he have?—although in fact he destined his energy to the creation of GAIPAC from 1967 onwards. That year, Foulkes during a Mediterranean trip made a stop-over in Barcelona to hand Juan personally the first number of Group Analysis International Panel and Correspondence[1], this large group by correspondence, in Juan’s opinion the most creative of works of the author, constitutes, together with the regular face to face encounters in the Annual London Workshops and the triennial European Symposiums of Group Analysis, the basis of a continuous groupanalytic training.

Foulkes was the spirit of GAIPAC and its editor until October 1975 when, after twenty-five editions and thousands of pages of scientific interchange and correspondence, he passed on the torch to his lifetime colleague, Pat de Maré, who in turn was to be the editor until 1979. In response to the last editorial of Pat de Maré[2], Juan in his “Bystander’s View…”[3] asks for the first time about what it is that is left from Group Analysis, that is to say from the spirit of GAIPAC as a platform of an international association of groupanalysts and about the risk of becoming only just one more professional journal between many. He communicates his feeling that without face to face contact alternating with a free and profound dialogue of all who feel committed with this shared enterprise, Group Analysis runs the risk of being institutionalized and that the dynamics of power will take away the spirit and soul of what it could have been.

Juan attributes still greater significance to the second transfer of the editorship of GAIPAC from Pat de Maré to Harold Behr, since the latter is the first editor who is a groupanalyst graduated from the Institute of Group Analysis. Juan interprets this as a generational change[4]. Juan has the habit of reading GAIPAC as if it was the free-floating discussion of a large group. From later correspondence with Harold we read that he still lets him have his interpretation of “the large group of GAIPAC”.[5]

But let us go step by step. The important event in 1980 is the IAGP Congress celebrated in Copenhagen. Juan Campos brings along his major paper on “Foulkes’ Network Theory and the Scope of Group Analysis in Family Therapy”[6] and the complementary one of “The Analyst’s Family Health”[7].

To call attention to the danger of the aforementioned progressive splits in the GAS, on occasion of the IAGP Congress in Copenhagen —and with the beneplácito of the then president of GAS, Jane Abercrombie— Juan calls a joint meeting of all classes of members of GAS, the regular ones as well as the overseas members and correspondents of Group Analysis. Upon return from the Congress, Elizabeth Foulkes informs of this meeting in Group Analysis XIII/3[8] and Juan writes “Some Afterthoughts to the Copenhagen Meeting” for Group Analysis XIV/1 of April 1981[9]. In this same number of GAIPAC we refer to the pages describing exactly those “Critical Moments of the GAS”[10], including the reports to the Annual General Meeting of the then honorary president Jane Abercrombie and the then honorary secretary Andrew Powell, and other related correspondence.

The crisis of the Group Analytic Society begins then and, something ignored, will continue well into the new millennium. Juan Campos tries to contribute groupanalytic reasons and ideas that could help the GAS to groupanalytically conceive the crisis that keep on occurring after Foulkes’ death. He starts constructing an important historical document, “Milestones in the History of Group Analysis: The European Group Analytic Movement and the Question of Internationality of Group Analysis” [11]. After many years of face to face dialogue during groupanalytic encounters and internet correspondence, the document is presented during the Heidelberg Symposium of 1993, when at the AGM there the internationality of GAS is voted. Once again, at another critical moment of GAS, when the Committee has great difficulties in preparing the General Assembly and the scientific meetings of 2004, Juan presents the document once again to the consideration of his colleagues in the hope that it may be helpful in understanding the past and  present of GAS and designing projects for the future.

Coming back to 1981, Juan Campos continues to try and dialogue with his colleagues groupanalysts in Europe. He becomes conscious of the institutional resistance to change.  Being the specialists on change how is it, he asks, that we are so resistant to it. Curiously, the V Symposium of Group Analysis in Rome in 1981 met on the subject of “Resistances in Group Analysis”. Juan is convinced that the conflicts and splits of professional associations start the moment the group needs to train future generations. The paper he presents is “Training to resist, learning not to change”[12], in which he shows that the unconscious transmission of the resistances to change developed by the analyst during his training, a type of massive projective identification with a teacher or an idea, is chain-transmitted from analyst to analysand, and from psychoanalysis to groupanalysis. This paper continues in the VI European Symposium of Group Analysis in Zagreb, 1984, with another paper “From the politics of teaching to the pragmatics of learning: Group Analysis’ greatest hope in training”[13]. Foulkes knew that he always would need a group of colleagues with whom to learn groupanalysis, to become a groupanalyst. For him groupanalysis was an instrument of therapy, of investigation and of education, and a meeting ground of minds. Foulkes’ interest in the operational and conceptual area of the group was a consequence of his believes in the multipersonal nature of unconscious mental processes linked to a common mental matrix. In reference to the politics of teaching, he made his the maxim that “history is passed politics, and present politics is history”. These are the pathways of Foulkes which Juan Campos followed.

Between these two Symposia, Rome ’81 and Zagreb ’84, in 1982 takes place the “Bedford College Meeting”[14], so called for the place of this extraordinary GAS meeting on May 7, 8 and 9 in answer to a petition of another meeting of European grouptherapists and overseas members of the GAS during the Rome Symposium.

From 1981, when Juan Campos calls attention to the successive crisis of GAS following Foulkes’ death, until his own death, he sustains a long effort of saving the spirit of GAIPAC as the base of an international association of professionals who feel themselves groupanalysts at heart, not necessarily trained at the IGA, grouptherapists of all kinds of provenance as there always had been in GAS. His conviction was that groupanalysts should solve their problems in a groupanalytic way. In that meeting of 1982 Juan presents to his colleagues two motions[15], apparently received unanimously and with enthusiasm. He proposes to establish two subcommittees of the GAS Committee; one to take care of transnational questions, another, an international subcommittee to take care of the organisation of symposia, workshops and correspondence. Of the subcommittee to consider transnational questions in which Juan himself was interested, nothing more was heard of. The other subcommittee exhausted itself preparing the following symposium of Zagreb and activities, and some of its members channelled their energies into establishing EGATIN. In London things went a very similar way. Eventually GAS for economic reasons had to share premises with the IGA… In the words of Juan: the mother had to go and fend for her life. Samples of correspondence can be of interest for some.[16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23]

1981 was an important year for many reasons. Juan was the Reporter of the London January Workshop which offered him the opportunity to live closely the effects of the loss of the founder of the Society. The theme of the Workshop was “Group Analysis, a Wider Role?” During a moment of reflection, Juan feels that the only group in the Workshop to which he belongs is the large group. And he asks himself: So much outsight for so little insight? Will I finish looking outside towards this wider role? Who knows? This is the background to his contributions as Reporter[24] directly related to the GAS. In a letter to the Secretary of the Society Juan leads the debate towards GAS versus IGA[25].