Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

78 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
I began to be interested in the subject of Northfield after taking
over the psychiatric management of a small ward. In retrospect, I think
that my curiosity about this was part of an inner process that included
my double identity as a psychiatrist and group analyst. My efforts to
understand the events of the day helped me to have an attitude that
freed itself from the yoke of omnipresent individualism and developed
an organic feeling for the functioning of a treatment unit. This
reloading does not claim to be exhaustive nor free from subjective
distortions.
In the preface to the book by Tom Harrison (2000), Robert
Hinshelwood wrote that "the legend of Northfield is one of those
myths of creation," however, it failed to specify this myth. Was it part
of a creatio continua? Or a creatio ex nihilo? Personally, I like the idea
of Bion, Rickman and Foulkes as three tricksters or dei-ex-machina,
three boundary-crossers with a special flair for a stagnant situation.
One of the dead-ends was already mentioned in connection
with the war neuroses and concerned the psychological relationship
between the individual and the societal.
Another touched on the institutional application of
psychoanalysis, especially in relation to the importance of regression
within treatment, as designed by Simmel in 1928 and implemented in
his Sanatorium Schloss Tegel, here in Berlin. The institution was for
Simmel nothing other than “an expanded Person of the analyst, the
primary type of his family” (Simmel, 1928).
A third was, in my view, the idea of imagining any resistance
within the treatment in such a way that it would stem from the patient
alone and be interpreted accordingly. Merely a thin, almost invisible
thread combined Ferenczi's propagated mutational analysis with the
role exchange between Burrow and his analysand Shields, right up to
the moment when Foulkes said to his wife:
"Today, there was an historical moment of psychiatry,
but nobody knows it." (Foulkes, 1964)
Each of these three protagonists bore in themselves traces of social
exclusion: Bion who had lived apart from his parents since his 8th
birthday in a British boarding school; Rickman, as a member of a
Quaker community; and, of course, Foulkes, an immigrant Jew, who
was in danger of being denounced as a German in England. This
experience was repeated for everyone within the framework of the
history of Northfield: Bion and Rickman were mercilessly expelled
after a short time and Foulkes remained more or less marginalized to