Spiralling dialectically through the tripartite matrices

After the Second World War, Kurt Lewin’s concept of the social field was fundamental to building a theoretical framework for analytic group practices. This lecture introduces Pichon-Rivière’s concept of ‘dialectic spiral’, which describes a continuous movement between the inner and outer world of persons and their contexts in psychoanalytic and analytic group techniques. This process is conceived as a spiralling multidimensional field where progressions and regressions promote insight and new understandings, but also resistance, blind spots and paralysis in the sessions. This dynamic interplay will be discussed in connection with group analytic groups. In contemporary group analysis, the concept of matrix evolved, being extended and reconfigured in tripartite matrices. This development allowed us to explore the multiple figurations that interweave foundation, dynamic, and personal matrices in small, median and large group analytic groups. The new dimensionality proposed by the study of tripartite matrices brought to the fore new possibilities for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogue, this time through cross-fertilisation with field theories, ranging from Lewin’s social fields to Pichon-Rivière’s ‘dialectic spiral’ processes, to classic and contemporary field theory in psychoanalysis.