Group Analytic Psychotherapy

The matrix, the mind, and the deep work only groups can do

“I was very resistant… I thought I was carrying so much pent-up anger from my past that I would explode if I really talked about what was going on inside me. But curiously, the opposite happened: in my group therapy they called me the ice-cream man, because I just melted.” — Grayson Perry

There is a kind of growth that only happens in a group. The thaw of a human being encountering itself in the presence of others, as long-held armour begins to crack, old stories loosen their grip, and the nervous system realises it does not have to keep watch alone.

For almost a decade, I trained rigorously as a Group Analytic Psychotherapist at the Institute of Group Analysis in London. A long and deep process that took me through every layer of theory, personal analysis, experiential groups, and clinical practice. I spent years in an NHS psychotherapy department, working with complex mental health presentations, but I also nurtured a desire to put groups, and the shared field to work outside the framework of ‘illness’, facilitating a process group for dramatherapy students over 4 years at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and training in the progressive method of BodyMind Maturation. Within this wider framework I witnessed first-hand how creativity, vulnerability, and collective truth-telling reshape us from the inside out.

All of that study and practice taught me something simple and unshakeable: the psyche is not an individual phenomenon — it is a relational field. And nowhere does that field become more alive, more revealing, or more transformative than in a well-held group. It’s not an easy process, because the past will always play out as a painful repeating struggle in the present, until we can face and meet what we carry within us.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

People often think they’ve worked through their childhood, talked about it enough and understood it. And yet, the moment they sit in a circle with others, something utterly unmistakable happens. Old relational patterns surface and the familiar position in the family constellation reappears: the child who holds everything together, the invisible one who keeps the peace, the rebel, the caretaker, the one who must not need.

It doesn’t matter how accomplished, self-aware, spiritually developed, or therapeutically experienced we are, the group activates the original matrix of our becoming, and recreates the systemic issues of our wider society. This is both the point, and the heart of Group Analysis: we work on the past not through recounting it, but by living its imprint in real time, learning to distinguish the context we have been coming from (both personally and collectively) and so dissolving its unconscious power. The shift is in the outgrowing, in leaving what we no longer need to cling to behind, and the origins of this work deserve mention.

In a small Exeter medical practice in 1940, Dr S.H. Foulkes — a German Jewish psychiatrist who had been part of the progressive Frankfurt School and recently escaped Nazi Germany — looked at his waiting room full of patients and chose to do something radical. Instead of seeing them one by one, he gathered them together in small groups. And something began to unfold that individual therapy could not produce. Patterns emerged, insight multiplied, healing accelerated. People spoke, and others recognised themselves inside those words.

Later, at Northfield Military Hospital, Foulkes brought this same approach to his work with severely traumatised soldiers returning from the Second World War. What he discovered became the foundation of Group Analysis: that our inner world is never separate from the external, and therefore neither is our healing.

Foulkes developed a core concept called the Matrix — the invisible web of communication, meaning, history, fantasy, and unconscious connection that exists between all members of a group. It is in this matrix that transformation becomes possible. No individual grows alone; the group carries the psyche together.

The Matrix is the shared field: the emotional, symbolic, and unconscious fabric that holds the group. It is not created by the therapist, it emerges between the members through presence, honesty, and time. When one person speaks, it resonates and activates something in another. More than connection, this is deep non-verbal communication on an energetic level.

In conditions of distress or intensity, the inner world of the past can feel indistinguishable from what appears to be happening in the present moment. I think we probably all recognise that kind of acute rush of emotion that has the power to take us over. Group work helps members loosen this Psychic Equivalence — the belief that “my experience is the reality” — by offering multiple perspectives, multiple truths, multiple mirrors.

In the shared field of groupwork, Resonance is the phenomenon people feel but can rarely name: the sudden connection, the mood in the room, that sense of “I don’t know why, but what you’ve just said has really moved something in me.” It is way beyond interpretation, it is the psyche recognising itself in another.

“Resonance is a primal unconscious and spontaneous communication between people in which all-human themes inspire each other, forming an interpersonal group mind and common emotional experience.” — Avi Berman

The more I work across Psychotherapy, Maturation, Chi Kung, and Dreams, the more I witness intimacy as the central theme of being human. Not romantic intimacy — but the capacity to meet another without defence, without performance, without shrinking or expanding. We are born into relationship, shaped in relationship, and wounded in relationship. And so it is only fitting, and necessary, that we are also repaired in relationship. Group work is intimacy as encounter: raw, often uncomfortable, always revealing, fundamentally human. In the right conditions (held with precision, ethical practice, deep training, and committed presence) intimacy becomes unlearning, which then becomes transformation.

In a group, you can’t hide behind polished narratives or insight, your implicit, and unconscious, relational patterns make themselves known. Your defences are seen for what they are: protection, not pathology. And slowly, through others, new possibilities emerge:

• belonging that isn’t earned
• honesty without collapse
• conflict that isn’t catastrophic
• vulnerability that can be witnessed
• the authentic experience of interdependence

There are currently two distinct groups in my practice — quite different spaces, but united in their foundational approach.

Earth Matrix is my multidimensional group space (held online) bringing together a unique synthesis of Psychotherapy, BodyMind Maturation, Dreamwork, and Elemental Chi Kung. It is a slow-open, year-round group, with space for up to eight members, and WhatsApp dialogue between sessions. You join when you are ready, for a minimum of 6 months. This is a progressive space where the group analytic matrix meets the somatic-unconscious body, and ultimately, formlessness. The field where survival strategies become visible and can finally be outgrown. There are two spaces available to begin in January 2026.

My Therapy Group for Doctors is a new weekly group that will launch next Spring, offering a confidential space for those working within the impossible pressures of medical systems — a place to make sense of the emotional, relational, and moral injury embedded in the work of care. This is a hybrid group with three sessions per month online, and one in person at Camden Therapy, London, NW1 0NE. I’m building this group now, and offering 1:1 preparatory sessions to support new members to enter the process. Beyond self-improvement, or trying to get somewhere, this is a return to the human self beneath the role. If you know a medical professional who might be interested in joining, please do share this piece, and invite them to get in touch: emma@emmareicher.com

I return to group work again and again, because the group reveals what the individual cannot access, because the psyche does not grow in isolation, and because the matrix reminds us what we have forgotten — we are not separate.

As Grayson Perry discovered, over time something melts in the presence of others. We unlearn who we thought we needed to be to survive. And in a world of curated personas and digital dislocation, a group offers the rarest medicine: the right to be fully human, together.