This work extends our investigation in the possibility of quantifying or, at the least, objectifying group dynamics (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Trojaola-Zapirain et al., 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019). We have already exposed the basic tenets that have led us to this research in the referenced papers, and therefore we will give here only a short reminder. The present work will compare the four groups, two composed of parents and two of adolescents, who attended the DBT skill group training.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (Linehan, 1993, 2015; Miller et al., 2017) has emerged as an effective transdiagnostic treatment for teenagers with emotional dysregulation and impulsivity. The Psychiatric Service of the Basurto University Hospital (Bilbao, Spain) has deployed a therapeutic system based on DBT with several modules, including adolescent and parent groups.

Carl Gustav Jung did not devote his attention explicitly to group phenomena. His emphasis on the process of individuation seems to relegate the “collective” to a state from which the individual must differentiate himself. Nevertheless, his concept of collective unconscious offers a precious theoretical frame to analyze and understand the “collective soul” (Jung, 1959) as the metaphorical place where the world of reality connects with the world of the soul (Jung, 1952, 1960).

The perception of the sensible evidence of these connections is what Jung has called “synchronicity” (Jung, 1952). Synchronicity is, according to Jung, an emotionally perceived correlation between an affective event, feeling or thought and an external fact that bears no evident relation of causality with each other.

In quantum mechanics, we can detect microscopic processes via their interaction with macroscopic devices that we can call detectors. This effect is what we indicate with “quantum amplification”. Jung also employs the term amplification (Jung & Hull, 1911) as the extension of the meaning of an image perceived in a dream via the patient’s free association activity and the analogies between the image and similar representations in socio-cultural and historical contexts. According to Jung (Jung, 1962), it is only thanks to this hybrid process (personal and social) that the dream’s meaning becomes accessible to interpretation. Thus, analogical reasoning based on the term amplification may suggest we consider unconscious mental processes such as dreams as “microscopic” quantum processes that we can detect and interpret only via their interaction with consciousness performing here an amplification and measurement process. This is one more case of the interesting analogies that we can find between quantum physics and psychodynamic.

When Jung met W. Pauli, a towering figure of 20^th-century physics, they postulated that the concept of synchronicity was the psychological equivalent of the recently hypothesized quantum entanglement (Jung et al., 2001). Several authors have expanded on the possibility to draw parallels between psychology and quantum mechanics, giving rise to a new field of inquiry loosely known as psychophysics. This discipline explores the possibility of applying quantum mechanics concepts to studying the human soul. The essential tenet of this field is that we can describe consciousness by a universal field of quantum nature (Baaquie & Martin, 2005; Conte et al., 2003; Orlov, 1982). Other authors have explored the relation of mind and matter in terms of the monistic implications of a unique theory explaining the behavior of both (Freeman & Vitiello, 2016; Pitkänen, 2010). Several studies have looked for a physical location of quantum phenomena in the brain (Beck & Eccles, 1992; Galli Carminati et al., 2017; Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., 1994; Hameroff & Penrose, 1996; Sabbadini & Vitiello, 2019). Quantum Information Theory has been proposed as an attractive framework to describe mental phenomena (Cerf & Adami, 1998; Martin et al., 2009, 2018; Martin & Galli Carminati, 2009). Other works are of more general nature and revisit the epistemological foundations of quantum mechanics in the light of its supposed connection with the explication of mental activity (Marshall, 1989; Martin & Galli Carminati, 2009; Penrose & Gardner, 1989; Penrose, 1994; Vitiello, 2003; Zurek, 1981).

Wilfrid Bion (Bion, 1961) was the first to develop a psychological theory of the groups by elaborating the “basic assumptions”, i.e., universal principles regulating the working of all human assemblies. Other authors extended and deepened his works describing the complex network of interactions within and without the group (Foulkes, 1964; Vergopoulos, 1983), and even proposed that the individual psyche itself has a “group” nature (Kaës, 2010). However, Bion’s principal tenet is that we should not consider the members of a group governed by the “basic assumptions” simply as individuals but rather as the expression of the group’s psychical entity (Bion, 1961). This is precisely what happens in the microscopic world when quantum entities interact and form a collective “entangled” state. In this case, the behavior of every single entity can only be studied and understood as an expression of the global state of the system (Aspect et al., 1982; Bell, 1964, 1966; Bohr, 1935; Einstein et al., 1935; Richens et al., 2017; Schrödinger, 1935, 1936).

Starting from this tantalizing analogy, some of the authors have considered the possibility to study the group behavior as a multi-body entangled system (Galli Carminati & Carminati, 2006; Galli Carminati & Martin, 2008; Martin et al., 2009; Martin, Carminati & Galli Carminati, 2010; Martin et al., 2018). This hypothesis has led to the formulation of the “absurd experiment” that is the subject of this paper, and that has already been performed on different psychodynamics groups (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020, 2021b, 2021a; Trojaola-Zapirain et al., 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019).

The rationale for this study is to try to determine whether the supposed entanglement between the unconscious during a group experience is measurable in an “objective” and quantifiable manner. We presume that the group situation “amplifies” the interaction between the unconscious so that it becomes observable at the “macroscopic” level. Given the paramount importance of our unconscious in all forms of normal and pathological behavior, a positive answer to this question would be of high theoretical and possibly therapeutical relevance.

In this work, we analyze the differences between four groups, two composed of adolescents and two of their parents, who were following a Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills training at the Psychiatric Service of the Basurto University Hospital in Bilbao, Spain.

As is the case in quantum mechanics, the problem of measurement is also central in psychophysics. The unconscious is, by definition, unknowledgeable, and not only because it is “unconscious” but also because the “detector” is the cognitive part of the individual, which is deeply influenced by, and indeed built upon, the unconscious itself. Given the presence of several potentially connected individuals, we have made the hypothesis that the entanglement effects could be more pronounced in the case of a group setting. We believe that the amplification of the unconscious via group dynamics is the best way to observe it. In quantum physics, a microscopic process is “amplified” by the “observer” at the macroscopic level, allowing the measurement. Only after the amplification, we can observe a microscopic quantum process as a physical phenomenon with an act of measurement. The irreversibility of such an act is still an open argument of discussion.

This article analyzes the differences between the groups attending the DBT training. In our previous publication (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2021b, 2021a), we noticed that the answers to the questionnaire zero, administered before the training, are very polarized, which is similar to what we remarked in a previous study of DBT closed groups (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020).

We begin discussing the evolutions of the A’s answers. These are different in the four groups. At the end of the training, the parent groups PG1 and PG2 show an increase in the choice of the initially preferred image (+4.1% and +11.5%) while the adolescent groups YG1 and YG2 present a diminution (−11.7% and −5.6%). In a previous experiment on closed groups (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020), we observed a decrease to 73% (PG1), a growth to 80% (PG2), a reduction to 62% (YG1), and 56% (YG2).

From these results, it seems possible to conclude that A’s pictures’ evolution depends more on the age group (parents or adolescents) than on the therapy setting.

We now turn our attention to the changes between A and B answers. The two adolescent groups show relatively few statistical differences in the A → B and B → A transitions during the therapy. The groups of parents present, with a similar trend, few differences in A → B but more differences in B → A. The differences between parents and adolescents in A → B and B → A transitions are more frequent than within parent and adolescent groups throughout the training without a clear time pattern.

The pattern of the flux (sum of A → B and B → A transitions) is similar to the A’s choice and the A → B transitions. There are few differences between the two parent groups and the two adolescent ones, and the generational status produces similar answers and a similar trend throughout the therapy.

The focus (difference between B → A-A → B transitions) measures the tendency to revert to the initial choice of pictures before the training begins (0^th questionnaire). We remark very few differences between the groups, generational, in the same therapy and crossed therapy, without the previously noticed lowest rate of significant changes between the two parent and two adolescent groups.

Lastly, we observe that the non-casuality (significant difference between A → B and B → A transitions)shows few differences in the longitudinal analysis for all the groups (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Trojaola-Zapirain et al., 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019).

We try now to interpret the results obtained. As previously reported (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2021b, 2021a), participants in slow-open groups probably experience the influence of the environment more directly than in closed groups, with strong clanic loyalties eventually prevailing on the group continuum. The group therapy could help the individuation (in the Jungian sense), attenuating the clanic loyalties in favor of the group continuum. For this reason, the therapeutical work could create deep anxiety that the slow-open group setting, milder than the closed group one, could help attenuate. We consider the high initial “orientation” (A’s choices before the group’s socio-cultural effect. The group experience (“group continuum”) tends to reduce this polarization introducing a “group identity” drifting away from the external environment. However, this is a transitory phenomenon, and clanic loyalties recover and, in the parent groups, even exceed the initial orientation during the training. In other words, participants of slow-open groups experience the interaction with the external environment, producing strong clan loyalties and resulting in a high “orientation” (A’s choices before the constitution of the group largely more than 50%) that is “recovered” (and in a group even exceeded) during the sessions. We suppose that the slow-open group promotes a “clan continuum” primarily influenced by generational conditions and external environments.

As discussed in (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2021b, 2021a), the interpretation of the return to the initial A’s choice is not evident. Therefore, we propose considering the initially preferred answer (A answer of the 0^th questionnaire) as the “personal” answer independent of the group’s influence. Then we can interpret the reverting to the initial selections as a reaction to the “group continuum” and in the direction of the familiar and social environment that we can indicate as “normal clanity”. This behavior is consistent with the “canonical” group evolution: the participants mourn the end of the group, and they tend to return to their normal clanity to preserve themselves from the group’s demise.

We can interpret the relatively few differences in YG1 vs. YG2 as adolescents experiencing the feeling of belonging to a “society in the society”. The same clanic loyalty of another kind of “society in the society” is also present in PG1 vs. PG2. The generational state orients the choices with a very similar trend in groups of parents and adolescents, probably because the influence of life experience and existential evolution are similar

This experiment was conducted in 2017-2019 during a Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills training at the Psychiatric Service of the Basurto University Hospital in Bilbao, Spain. Seven publications have reported the results of similar experiments (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Trojaola-Zapirain et al., 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019). This series of works points to the existence of a “group unconscious” operating according to the “basic assumptions” postulated by W. Bion. According to him, the psyches of the individuals participating in a group immediately bond together into a group psychical entity that evolves during the group’s existence. Bion has coined the term “valency” for this effect, more akin to a tropism than to a goal-directed attitude. The group setting enhances this effect since, according to Bion, groups “amplify emotional reactions, resulting in a combustible process of emotional contagion” (Bion, 1961).

Several authors have observed that it is hitherto impossible to measure the unconscious directly (Atmanspacher, 2004; Cerf & Adami, 1997, 1998). To avoid this difficulty, we have elaborated a protocol for an “indirect measure” via our “absurd questionnaire” in a group setting. With this experiment, we want to see whether a mental state, the hypothesized entanglement of the individuals’ minds in a group setting, can have material effects, such as the answers provided to our questionnaire.

In recent papers (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2021a, 2021b), we find a more significant social and generational environment influence than in the previous setting (slow open group versus closed group).In addition, it seems that clanic loyalty influences the group continuum more than in the previously studied closed groups.

Moreover, particularly for adolescents, the feeling of identity loss introduced by the “group continuum” could bring stress and anxiety and ultimately provoke the exit from the group when the “focus” onto A’s choices is lowest, and the entanglement is highest. The parents react with a marked return to the preferred answer chosen before the beginning of the therapy. Psychoanalytically, we would call this a resistance to change, but we can also consider this attitude as typical mourning of therapy.

Suppose we regard the eventual return to the preferred image as an expression of clanic loyalties. In that case, these clanic loyalties, very apparent for adolescents in dress code and above all body look when moving from the family to the friend’s envelope, are even more present in parents, albeit with a more hidden, less open, attitude.

The group continuum originates from the entanglement of individual psyches forming a group entity endowed with its own identity. This “loss of clanity” may create an intense discomfort and lead to a flight from the group situation (group continuum and entanglement), either leaving the therapy altogether or, more discretely, reverting to the choices of the 0^th questionnaire.

We can suppose that this entanglement is weaker in slow-open groups than in closed groups. Thus, external environment influence in slow-open groups appears more significant, making the conflict between friend clan, family clan, and group continuum less acute.

The slow-open setting probably reinforces the Dialectical Behavior Group Therapy participation, allowing adolescents and parents to experience a moderated conflict with clanic preexistent loyalties and more relaxed interaction with the group continuum.

Suppose we try to give a therapeutical valence to these results. In that case, we observe that the effect of the group, while present, is strongly “opposed” by the “clanic loyalties” of the participants, possibly due to the slow-open nature of these groups. This fact may suggest that slow-open groups trainers must consider that the effect of the “environment” remains strong, and they should give special attention to the emergence of loyalty conflicts and identity loss angst during the training.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

Fernandez-Rivas, A., Sesma-Pardo, E., Kerexeta, I., Diaz-Cosgaya, A., Vivanco, E., Carminati, F., Torres, M. A. G., Fouassier, C., Martin, F., Demongeot, J., & Carminati, G. G. (2022). Slow Open Dialectical Behavior Group Therapy for Adolescents and Parents: Comparison between Groups. Psychology, 13, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2022.131001