This clinical-theoretical paper develops the concept of translation-function for group analytic work with severe psychic pain, schizoid withdrawal, and psychotic transference. It draws on a clinical episode in which a group member left treatment while experiencing the analyst and other members as persecutory ‘monsters’, alongside intense suicidal feeling. After the rupture, brief WhatsApp messages provided a minimal communicative bridge. With the agreement of the patient and group members, and with careful attention to confidentiality, selected material was returned to the group matrix and, where clinically appropriate, shared with the patient. The group’s poetic responses enabled destructive, suicidal, and persecutory communications to be received neither as literal facts nor as material for premature interpretative confrontation, but as images held in an intermediate space between subjective experience and external reality. The article situates this approach within group analysis, object-relations psychoanalysis, Winnicott’s transitional phenomena, Bion’s container–contained, Meltzer’s claustrum, Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, and Husserlian accounts of horizon and vitality. It defines translation-function as the shared capacity of analyst and group matrix to receive overwhelming, concrete, or persecutory communications and return them in an imagistic, relational, and affectively authentic form without endorsing their literal status. Wittgenstein’s concept is used as a heuristic for distinguishing the relational and communicative functions of an utterance, such as accusation, appeal, threat, metaphor, or symbolic address, from its literal content alone. The notion of horizon is important because it illuminates how this process may reopen a constricted sense of possibility, relation, and future. The point is not to aestheticize psychosis or to avoid clinical responsibility for risk. It is to sustain a protected third space in which traumatic experience can become communicable and gradually thinkable.
In group psychotherapy, self-disclosure is often regarded as central to therapeutic change, whereas silence and secrecy are frequently understood as forms of resistance or withdrawal. This paper re-examines this assumption from a group analytic perspective by exploring the relational and clinical functions of secrecy within the group matrix. It is argued that withholding is not inherently antitherapeutic. Selective silence may constitute a meaningful form of participation in the group field, expressed through affective tone, positioning, and interactional dynamics. From this perspective, what remains unspoken is nevertheless communicatively present within the matrix. Drawing on Foulkes’ concept of the group matrix, Winnicott’s notion of the right not to communicate, and Akhtar’s concept of the adaptive secret, the paper differentiates between defensive and adaptive forms of secrecy. Two clinical vignettes illustrate these positions: one involving the protection of vulnerable, not-yet-symbolised experience, and the other highlighting agency, timing, and readiness in disclosure. The paper concludes that the group analyst’s capacity to tolerate not-knowing is central to facilitating a therapeutic space in which both speech and silence can be understood as meaningful forms of participation.
Dr. Penna’s excellent and inspiring Foulkes Lecture (Penna, 2026) offers us fruitful soil for further group-analytic development both in our theories and practice. This response focuses on the internationalization area of our tripartite matrices within their different dimensions and their spiralling dialectics. Understanding their relationality with the dialectics of local fields is important, especially in times of the polycrises of our globalized worlds and of our professional organizations.
This article introduces Analytic Group-Vision (AGV) as an emerging model of psychoanalytic group supervision. AGV is formulated in dialogue with the traditions of psychoanalytic supervision, Foulkesian group analysis, Balint groups, and Bion’s thinking on groups, containment, and the basic assumptions. Its aim, however, is neither the treatment of group members nor merely an educational discussion of a case, but the use of the group matrix as a third position and a group supervisor. In AGV, the reported therapeutic relationship is re-enacted within the group field, and the group, through distributed reactions, silences, jokes, tensions, associations, transferences, and counter-transferences, brings into view dimensions of that relationship that are not readily accessible to the presenting therapist alone. The article first clarifies the theoretical location of AGV in relation to adjacent traditions, then outlines the model’s working structure, including: the matrix barometer, case presentation, clarification, discussion, work with parallel process, and the presenter’s conclusion. A two-session clinical vignette is then used to show how themes active in the treatment relationship may be represented and thought about at the level of the group matrix. The article argues that AGV may move supervision beyond the transmission of knowledge or technical advice towards lived experience, group reflection, and transformation in the therapist’s position within the therapeutic relationship.
