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Juan Tubert-Oklander, a Mexican psychoanalyst and group analyst, is a polyglot, fortunately for us at home in several languages. Although he is
a native Spanish speaker, this book is not a translation. Written in English, it reads essentially as if the work of a native English speaker. The One and the Many is a treatise on what modern psychoanalysis can learn from the tradition of group analysis that flows equally from Enrique Pichon-Rivière in Argentina and S. H. Foulkes in Great Britain. The lessons to be learned from this perspective—radically different, to be sure, though germinated in part from seeds planted by Freud's writing on groups—can enrich psychoanalytic theory and practice (the latter only incidentally). Fairbairn's writing on the inner structures of object and ego pairs ripened in the little-known thought of Pichon-Rivière in Buenos Aires and Foulkes in London. They saw that the individual does not develop sui generis out of a primary narcissism but is from the beginning embedded in a relational matrix. This led to their view of people as constituted by two poles: at one pole individuals are autonomous, each with an independent inner world, while at the other they are continually constituted by relationships to which they reciprocally contribute. Taking this shift in perspective as its starting point, the group analytic perspective informs the intensely intrapsychic one that until recently has dominated psychoanalytic thought.
Psychoanalysts have largely ignored the social field. Traditional training, in emphasizing the analytic dyad and the inner life of the individual over social relationships, excludes the influence—both external and internal—of the social group and the social world. In contrast, group analysts tend to emphasize the world of shared social experience over that of individual internal experience. What is needed is a blending of the two, and this book sets out to accomplish just that.
In a way, this division goes back to Freud's abando