Salaam Abdel‐Malek, Hana. (2023). “A Group Psychoanalytic Approach to the Social Dreaming Matrix: A Found‐and‐Created Device”. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 39(4), 732–750. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12862
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Hana Salaam Abdel-Malek has written a dense and well-researched psychoanalytic piece on social dreaming and group relations, suggesting the importance of the frame, the inter-subjective transferences to each other and the hosts, and defences against the task of social dreaming itself. The main focus is that social dreaming is a “task” taken on by a group with group dynamics needing more attention. One of the main issues in group relations or any group is how the group resists or reframes the task. The article goes on to show through a series of matrices how the task “social dreaming” is challenged by the dreams and associations reflecting the lack of containment or holding in the role of the hosts, the training set-up, various seating arrangements and note-taking, paradoxically pointing to how the social dreaming as set up is part of the lack of containment and holding in the social world. Inside and outside are reflected in the Matrix itself. Abdel-Malek, in attempting to enrich the social dreaming experience, says, “Through understanding the dream tellings personal and social, aspects of the relationships between self and culture are transformed” (p. 735). Social dreaming, as practised, generally avoids these group dynamics as represented by the relations between individuals and hosts and setting in the matrix. Over the years of practising social dreaming, I have become more aware of the group dynamics, especially in matrices, which last over an extended period of time. Social dreaming appeals to Jungians mainly because of the symbolic nature of the dreams and associations, which can have individual and collective resonance. Social dreaming can reveal a cultural complex, which we may be in but not be aware of. The group you are literally in, or that you know, is transformed in the matrix to a more symbolic group which is “found” in the matrix through the dreams and associations. This symbolic group may be a painful and challenging place. There can be enormous relief in this because we discover this and each other as a community of dreamers, which has prospective possibilities. For example, many years ago we (myself and a refugee colleague) were running a two-day workshop on working with refugees in a large international charity. There were around 20 participants. On the first day, the group were asked to imagine the refugee journey from being at home, being in danger, fleeing from home, being on a journey to a destination, arrival at a destination, being interviewed with an interpreter involving a role-play and being put in detention. All this was done in small group formats returning intermittently to the large group. It was a very challenging and exhausting day for all and there were resistances and distancing from the task. Day 2 started with a social dreaming matrix to process the difficult feelings Day 1 may have evoked. Day 2 was about how what they had experienced on Day 1 affected how they thought about refugees in their roles in the charity. In the social dreaming matrix, there were a couple of dreams, after a long silence, pointing to shops with faded colours on jumpers and how there was a hand in a till which implied something was being stolen. In the ensuing associations the group started discussing the bitter feelings that existed in the organization (the colours and jumpers and shops) between the staff, who felt like second-class citizens, and volunteers who ran the organization. The staff were vilified for being paid and the volunteers were elevated through their sacrificial ethos. The paid workers felt like refugees and thus demonized in their own organization. The basic organisational group dynamics were somehow unearthed. All defences against the experience on Day 1 had now transformed into an identification in their work lives with this sense of exile and devaluation. This identification with the refugee experience in their own lived organizational experience then enabled them to think much more clearly about the Day 2 task regarding refugees who were clearly not only “out there” but also “in the organization” and felt individually. The symbolic group found was one in which there was a sense of injustice and exile from the social group shared by the refugees and the staff—a loss of home, alienation and violence, based on how the one who selflessly sacrifices is superior to the one who works for a living. This group was therefore touching on a wider preoccupation to do with abuse of power, and pointing to the presence of justice as a preoccupation in most groups as a shared compass for understanding and protection. The refugee was already clearly there as the overall task, but the social dreaming and associations enabled the group to make the connection to themselves in a safe way. This example also points to how group relations and social dreaming work together and how, as Abdel-Malek points out, the group dynamics can be unearthed through this process. It is both inside and outside. The social dreaming in this context enabled the voicing and finding of an unconscious symbolic group full of rage and fury in the organization. The hosts, myself and a colleague who was a refugee, a duality, i.e., one with a home and one without a home, also enabled this schism to be voiced in the group (the transference). This was the complex. This simple example points to how we find something “inside” which is also “outside”, an identification, and how this enables the group in the matrix to feel relief, feel orientated and think more clearly and creatively. The social dreaming matrix acts as a container for a dynamic or a symbolic unconscious group or complex, which can now be discovered and owned as a feeling place, which can be thought about creatively in the organization. This is both a collective and an individual set of feelings, which, once identified with, become real and thinkable.
Source: Journal of Analytical Psychology
Author: Ali Zarbafi
Institution: Society of Analytical Psychology
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4396229574