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Juan Tubert-Oklander was originally from Argentina but now lives and works in Mexico. His first psychoanalytic training was as a Group Analyst following the teachings of Pichon-Rivière. Pichon-Rivière was forming his ideas about ‘operative groups’ in Mexico at the same time as Foulkes was theorizing analytic groups in the UK. The work of both these men overlaps considerably and, in many ways, both were in advance of their times as from the very beginning they understood psychoanalysis as relational or intersubjective. It is thus with great pleasure that I am reviewing this book for the BJP, which integrates group analytic ideas within the general development of psychoanalytic theory. The implications of relational psychoanalysis have been discussed for many years in the group analytic world, but as a Latin American Tubert-Oklander is not caught up in the partisan or hierarchical anxieties of the UK or American Schools, so it is very refreshing to read the development of psychoanalytic theory as a matrix that includes the emergence of group analysis.
Juan Tubert-Oklander is described by Earl Hopper as an analyst, thinker and writer. I would also like to add teacher to this list. The One and the Many is a complex book, a collection of papers written over a 10-year period from 2002 to 2012, presented as a series of ideas in process about the relationship of the social to the development of the individual. All the chapters can be taken alone, although the themes build and inter-weave. The book needs to be read as an ongoing dialogue, between himself, his colleagues, his patients, his students and us, his readers. His thoughts and ideas are fundamentally evolving and unfinished with the understanding that they need other people's contributions for their development.
The book begins with an overview of Freud's ideas about the biological nature of man as well as the impact of society on the human condition. Perhaps its key is a quote from an interview with Malcolm Pines in 2