All living creatures, and even some viruses, live, like us humans, in groups. We are able to refer to you by your individual identity and we can think. But we all have experiences that according to the group in which we exist, aspects, resources, qualities and even defects that are set in motion, which individually or in pairs do not appear. The politicians of these inauguration sessions, if we think about it, I think it is clear that they have been subjected to group dynamics, large groups or couples, with clear and latent dynamics.
When we are in a group we can enter into regression, for example, groups with messianic or righteous expectations, resorting to excite simple emotions without doubts, with saving certainty. Or we can be in groups who live in a moral superiority, which is like being healthy in a leprosarium, or formerly in a tuberculosis sanatorium, hygiene must be a priority in the danger of obvious contagion. And they launch the cordon sanitaire. I become stubborn, I defend myself with the maximum ferocity, even if I do not know very well who I am and my place is not well defined, I fear losing what little I know, I need not one but many barriers. The left must be aware that it does not have much space to be recognized with ideological presuppositions of the last century, especially now with the globalization of nonsense, of the news, of the economy, of the way of dressing. They should have talked about how our future is going to be fixed as we grow in complexity and yet they continued with their rattle, with their short vision of left and right, as insults: The rights, the right wing! The image of a degraded mother projected to her working language of demolition and activation of archaic emotions of the jungle.
Attack group is one of the definitions of this type of group. Attack group, dependent group, faithful group. These dynamics have something in common, their members are trapped by simple, archaic, survival emotions, attacked solely for what they project to those on the outside. Attacked by the power of others, which destroys anyone’s desire for it, with the sole purpose to impose their ideological superiority. Well, in that aspect the beloved group functions like a herds of animals, fighting for territory, imposing an alpha male etc. To summarize: it does not fit in their minds that we all have partial truths, truths limited by our beliefs or specialties, so to know, analyze and solve complex issues, we need the partial visions of everything and that would be what we call task groups, or working: democratic groups. And for this task few human beings can lead this group.
The Prefrontal Brain
It is followed in hospitals, when two Siamese twins are being separated for eight hours, in which doctors and other staff take turns, each one focused and contributing their knowledge. That is the work group, all in a similar state of mind aware of their identity and working for those who pay them their salaries, the citizen, the citizens in this case. This is how you work in hospitals, in high science groups, because they live in the reality that without the task group, nothing complex can be undertaken. A nation is in the highest degree, and this one, ours, where politicians, like all citizens, are unable to agree to form macro-cooperatives, to understand what is happening in the countryside, which one of our diseases will afflict us, the lack of science, research, role models for youth, in short, hundreds of issues that should have been put on the table and discussed with the partial vision of each group to coordinate a global response.
Politicians may be not be conscious of these strategies, and of course I do not even think they have been trained in group work techniques, and the consequence is what we have seen in the Chamber, subgroups, each with its dynamics and in turn in a group dynamic big. It was a situation of mutual barriers that occur when our mind has been tied to a particular group dynamic, which can only see what happens here and now. What endangers my narcissistic belief, my personal and collective ego. Emotions slow the functioning of what we have in the brain, they are exclusively human, the rest, the prefrontal brain, is equal to all the bugs that fly or walk.
Those of us who have been doing group therapy for fifty years, large groups in companies, group dynamics of whole families and couples therapy perceive, feel, understand and see how intricate it is to lead one of these groups and the enormous amount of detail that escapes us. One brain alone, even as a trained therapist, I don’t think I can see too much what is happening in a group. That is why we resort to observer help with members of the group itself when there are no colleagues on hand to do co-therapy. In this case, we are the citizens, the media, which we observe the situation, in this case, to be quite desolate.
When you are in a group your vision shrinks, you stop seeing the contour and everything you feel, see and act shows that your mind is intoxicated and that you see very little of what happens outside your group. We see it every day when a reporter tells us, microphone in hand, about the terrible hail storm, but we do not see that field, in this case thousands of hectares of shattered Rioja vineyards. A new concert opens in town and the reporter, talks to a neighbor who gives his impressions of this new orchestra, but we are left wanting to listen to it, flooded in a talk in which the reporter must justify his presence at the event. We don’t want to hear from him but rather the music of this new band. The machinery fair: another reporter with the same routine, and we want to see the exhibition. These examples mean that we are very limited when we see things from our ideology, group, belonging and affiliation, from our formation, our party or our professional specialty, and the television network broadcasting.
That has to do with the debate of some gentlemen who, when sitting in the Chamber, have forgotten what they are there for, have won their position by the delegated vote of citizens and have forgotten it. Now he devotes himself to his dynamics. They no longer see what happens outside, in the villages, to the laborious civilian, in Europe, in the world, the threats of an arthritic and bureaucratic Europe, which will be surrounded by research, science, commerce, planning long term from China, India and some others. All of that disappeared from the voters when deciding their vote and now, in the seats of the Chamber that are there because we have worried for months until we limited our minds into functions that do not go beyond three years of age. For the infant, the future does not exist, and parents are still as idealized and holy gods. As the voters of those gentlemen who are dogmatically clear that society needs a deployment of social engineers, people to people, brain to brain, where they have to erase any idea or belief that competes with their messianic and dogmatic proposal.
The Emotion Factory and Other Components
Every living being has a genetic program: survive and repopulate. But as humans it is complicated, because development is usually not as perfect and more complicated than other species, we are half finished in many aspects, and we have to complete, plug, rebuild, repair and finish off our vital infrastructure that, in general, is not finished
Here comes what we choose. Many choose a profession that has to do with these deficiencies. Many politicians, I believe that always the dogmatists, extremists and messianic, have chosen this profession as a means of repairing, rebuilding these deficiencies and deficits of education in the very first years. Well, to the extent that someone has not finished their development, they need to join a group that ends it, or at least sustains their weaknesses, plug their doubts. If you have many, you need dogmas, wholeness. They are the membership groups that need to project and even attack those outside sets of aspects that their structural weaknesses cannot support and create attack groups for what has been externalized.
On the other hand, family and school education has ignored the need for everyone to recognize within themselves what drives them, motivates them and keeps them tied to an addiction, to an affiliation, why they have chosen a certain vital destiny. We conduct ourselves as if there is not a whole enormity of structures under the modern cortices of our brain, which, in all types of brains, are the factory of emotions, instincts, pleasure, aggression, and other components necessary for organisms to live . This could be summed up by saying that 80% of the brain is made up of processes below consciousness. This says anatomy and neuroscience, and we, as a collective culture, deny it, we do not believe that the unconscious exists. Although as seen in the inauguration debate, almost everyone tried to excite us and put us in an emotional state that tends to remain closed and decide our votes against someone. This is how we want our team to score goals, and we are “del Betis manque pierda,” the saying of the Andalusian football club, Betis, meaning we are “with Betis despite the loss.”
All the groups that have been created for something are enrolled in intra-group dynamics and have often forgotten what they were founded for. In this case, we did not appear as a nation, but as a project, there was no talk but “policies” that can excite our emotions as spectators. By the way, the Sixth closed emission to Abascal’s first sentence, a magnificent definition of his ideology.
Our representatives do not know, I believe, of the scientific existence of the unconscious, but their intuition guides them correctly to do, stop doing, say or show what fragments us, divides and festers. Very accurate to, as it is disturbing, our mental health!
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychology and Psychoanalysis
