All living creatures, and even some viruses, live, we live, in groups. We can refer to their individual identity and we may be right. But we all have the experience that, depending on the group we are in, aspects, resources, qualities and even defects come to the fore that do not show up individually or in pairs. Politicians at these investiture sessionsI think it is clear that, if we think about it, I think it is clear that have been subjected to group dynamics, large group dynamics, pair dynamics. With overt and latent dynamics.
When we are in groups we can go into regression, for example, groups with messianic expectations, resorting to arousing simple emotions without doubts, with saving certainties. Or being in groups of those who live in a moral superiority, which is like being healthy in a leper colony, or formerly in a tuberculosis sanatorium, hygiene must be maximum, the danger of contagion evident. And they launch the idea of a cordon sanitaire. I become narrow-minded, I defend myself with maximum ferocity if I don't know who I am and I fear losing what little I know, my ill-defined space, I need not one but many cordons. The left must be aware that it doesn't have much room to be recognised with ideological assumptions of the last century and now where the globalisation of nonsense, of news, of the economy, of the way we dress, is global. They should have talked about what our future is going to be, embedded as we are in a growing complexity, and they continued with their rattle, with their short-sighted vision of left and right, like insults: the right, the right-wing! Image of degraded mother projected into their working language of demolition and activation of archaic jungle emotions.
Attack group is one of the definitions of this type of group. Attack group, dependency group, messianic group. These dynamics have something in common, its members are trapped by simple, archaic, survivalist emotions, attacked by who they are, but projected onto outsiders. Attacked by the power of others, which can destroy their desire for power, their only aim is to impose their ideological superiority. For in this respect the aforementioned groups function like the herd groups of many animals, fighting for territory, the alpha male who has to impose himself etc. Summary: it does not fit in your mind that we all have partial truths, truths limited by our beliefs or specialities, so that to know, analyse and solve complex issues, we need the partial visions of all and that would be what we call task groups, working groups: democratic group. And for this task few human beings can lead this group.
The prefrontal brain
It follows in hospitals, when two Siamese twins are separated for eight hours, with doctors and other staff taking turns, concentrating, each contributing his or her knowledge. That is the working group, all in a similar state of mind, aware of their identity and working for those who pay their salaries, the citizen, in this case the citizens. This is the way work is done in hospitals, in high science groups, because they live in their own flesh and blood that without the task force nothing complex can be undertaken. A nation is a nation to the highest degree, and this, our nation, where politicians, like all citizens, are incapable of agreeing to form macro-cooperatives, of understanding what is happening in the countryside.The question of which of our ills will afflict us: lack of science, lack of research, lack of role models for youth, in short, hundreds of issues that should have been put on the table and the partial vision of each group discussed and the global response coordinated.
Politicians may be unaware, and I certainly do not believe that they have been trained in group work techniques, and the consequence is what we have seen in the House, sub-groups, each with its own dynamic and in turn in a large group dynamic. 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 is happening here and now, which endangers my narcissistic belief, my personal and collective ego. Emotions slow down the functioning of what we have in our brainsThe prefrontal brain, uniquely human, the rest is the same as all flying or walking bugs. The prefrontal brain.
Those of us who have been doing group therapy, large groups in companies, group dynamics of whole families and couples therapy for fifty years perceive, feel, understand and see how intricate it is to run one of these groups and the enormous amount of detail that escapes us. A single brain, even of a trained therapist, I don't think can see too much of what is going on in a group. That is why he resorts to the help of observers with members of the group itself when he does not have colleagues at hand to do co-therapy. In this case, it is the citizens, the media, who observe, in this case, quite desolate.
When you are in a group to which you belong you narrow your vision, you stop seeing the outline and everything you feel, see and act shows that your mind is intoxicated and that you see very little of what is going on outside your group.. We see it every day when a reporter tells us about the terrible hail storm, microphone in hand, but we don't see that field of vineyards of the Rioja destroyed, in this case thousands of hectares. A concert by the music band that is making its debut in the village and the reporter, artichoke in hand, talks to a neighbour who gives his impressions of this new orchestra, but we are left with the desire to listen to it, drowned in a verbiage with which the reporter has to justify his presence at the event. We don't want to hear him, we want to hear the music of this new band. The machinery fair: another reporter with the same routine and we are left wanting to see the exhibition. These examples mean that we are very limited when we see things from our ideology, group, membership and affiliation, from our training, our party or our professional speciality. And serving the television network.
This has to do with the debate by gentlemen who, sitting in the House, have forgotten what they are there for, have won their seats by a vote delegated by the people and have forgotten about them; now they are going about their business. They no longer see what is happening outside, in the villages, in the civilian workforce, in Europe, in the world, the threats of an arthritic and bureaucratic Europe, which will be surrounded by research, science, trade, very long-term planning from China, India and some others. All of that also disappeared from the voters when they decided to vote, and now, in the Chamber seats that are there because they have largely warmed our hooves for months until our minds have been turned into a functioning mind that does not go beyond three years of age, when, for the infant, the future does not exist, and daddies are still like idealised and messianic gods. Like the voters of those gentlemen who are dogmatically clear that society needs a deployment of social engineers, village by village, brain by brain, where they have to erase any idea or belief that competes with their messianic and dogmatic proposal.
Emotion factory and other components
Every living being has a genetic programme, to survive, to fulfil itself. But in humans it gets more complicated, because breeding is usually not so perfect with the rest, we are half-finished in many aspects, and we have to complete, plug, rebuild, repair and finish off our vital infrastructure which, in general, is not finished.
Here comes the question of what we choose. Many of us chose a profession that has to do with these deficiencies. Many politicians, I think always the dogmatic, extremist and messianic ones, may have chosen this profession as a means to repair, to rebuild these shortcomings and deficits of education in the very early years. Well, to the extent that someone has not finished his development, he needs to be affiliated to a group that finishes it, or at least supports his fragilities, covers his doubts. If there are many of them, they need dogmas, categorical statements. It is the groups of belonging that need to project and even attack outside those sets of aspects that their structural weaknesses cannot support and create attack groups for what has been externalised.
On the other hand, family and school education has ignored the need for everyone to recognise within themselves what drives them, motivates them and keeps them attached to an addiction, to an affiliation, why they have chosen a certain life destiny. We behave as if there were not a whole enormity of structures underneath the modern cortexes of our brain, which, in all types of brains, are the factory of emotions, instincts, pleasure, aggression, and other components necessary for organisms to be alive.. We could summarise this by saying that the 80% of the brain is constituted by processes below consciousness. This is what anatomy and neuroscience say, and we, as a collective culture, deny it, we do not believe that the unconscious exists. Although, as we have seen in the investiture debate, almost everyone was trying to excite us and put us in an emotional state to remain closed and deciding our vote against someone. Just as we want our team to score goals, and we are "del Betis manque manque pierde".
All groups that have been created for something get caught up in intra-group dynamics and often forget what they were founded for. In this case, we did not appear as a nation, as a project, we only talked about "politics" that can excite our emotions as spectators. Incidentally, La Sexta closed the broadcast at Abascal's first sentence, a magnificent definition of his ideology.
They do not know, I believe, scientifically, the existence of the unconscious, but their intuition guides them in the right way to do, to stop doing, to say or to show what fragments, divides and festering us. Very accurate as disturbers of our mental health!
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis