This study investigates the collective behavior of the participants in six therapy groups, two closed and four slow-open, as part of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills teaching at the Basurto University Hospital Psychiatric Service (Bilbao, Spain). Three of the groups were composed of teenagers, three of some of their respective parents or legal guardians.

Our reason for this work is to explore whether the supposed entanglement of unconsciouses in a group experience is observable in an “objective” and quantifiable way. We suppose that the group setting “amplifies” intra-unconscious interactions making them “macroscopically” manifest. Given the central importance of our unconscious in all normal and pathological behaviors, factual evidence for this phenomenon could be highly relevant both theoretically and, possibly, therapeutically.

This work, the latest in a series of studies on the subject (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Trojaola-Zapirain et al., 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019), analyzes the evolution of the participants’ absurd questionary responses by focusing on the entropy of the answers. As in our previous works, we make the hypothesis that the group setting “amplifies” the unconscious interaction making it “measurable” at the “macroscopic” level, in this case, via the evolution of the answers’ entropy. In physics, entropy characterizes the “disorder” of a system, and it is maximum when the system is at equilibrium.

As we will see later, we observe a different trend in the entropy evolution between closed and slow-open groups. Even if the members of the closed groups interact with families, friends, and society, we detect differences between these groups and the slow-open ones, where participants enter and leave the groups during the training. This result suggests that we have amplified the interaction between unconsciouses and can observe a difference between the intrinsic order of “closed” and “open” systems. We can suppose that the different settings and attendance in the two kinds of groups cause a difference in their “Bionian” nature, which is what we measured with our questionnaire.

We apply a discrete Fourier transform to characterize the entropy variation during the training. The amplitudes of the Fourier coefficients indicate the importance of a given frequency in describing the fluctuations of the measured entropy. We performed this analysis with and without the initial questionnaire administered before the beginning of the training.

In this work, we administered a version of the questionnaire to the participants before forming the groups. We then analyzed the differences in entropy in time and between the six groups, considering their initial picture choices and how these evolved in time.

We have explained the rationale for this research in the mentioned publications (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Trojaola-Zapirain et al., 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019), so a summary will suffice here.

Several authors (Linehan, 1993a, 1993b, 2015; Miller et al., 2006) have identified Dialectical Behavioral Therapy as an effective transdiagnostic treatment for adults and teenagers affected by impulsivity and emotional dysregulation. The Basurto University Hospital Psychiatric Service (Bilbao, Spain) has implemented a DBT therapeutic program with all its components, including adolescent and parent skill training groups.

The prolific relation between C.G. Jung and W. Pauli led to the hypothesis that synchronicity, discovered by Jung (Jung, 1952), was the psychological expression of quantum entanglement (Jung et al., 2001). According to Jung, synchronicity is an emotional connection between a feeling or thought and an objective event with no detectable causal relationship. Jung did not explicitly study group behavior since the individuation process, which he considers the ultimate process of moral evolution, demands that the individual emerges from the “collective” to find his true self. Moreover, Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious allows us to analyze and understand the “collective soul” (Jung, 1959) as the locus where reality connects with the soul (Jung, 1952, 1960).

Wilfrid Bion (Bion, 1961) proposed the first psychological theory of the groups with his “basic assumptions,” i.e., universal laws regulating the working of all human gatherings. Other authors completed this theoretical framework with the description of the complex interaction network inside and outside the group (Foulkes, 1964; Vergopoulos, 1983) and even postulated that the individual psyche has a “group” nature (Kaës, 2010). Bion’s principal teaching is that we should not see the members of a group moved by the “basic assumptions” merely as individuals but also as expressing the group’s psychical entity (Bion, 1961). This behavior is evocative of what happens at the microscopic level when quantum particles interact and form a general “entangled” state. In this state, the behavior of each single particle can only be observed 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).

According to quantum mechanics, we can observe microscopic processes via their interaction with macroscopic objects that play the role of detectors. This process is what we indicate with “quantum amplification.” Jung also uses the term amplification (Jung & Hull, 1911) as the process of expansion of the meaning of a dreamed image thanks to the patient’s free associations and the correspondence between the image and similar symbols in socio-cultural and historical contexts. Jung (Jung, 1962) says that the analyst can interpret the dream’s content only thanks to this double process (personal and social).

The foundational hypothesis of psychophysics is that it is possible to model consciousness as a universal quantum field (Baaquie & Martin, 2005; Conte et al., 2003; Orlov, 1982). Other scholars have studied the link between mind and matter in the light of a monistic theory describing both behaviors (Freeman & Vitiello, 2016; Pitkänen, 2010). Several works have searched for the location and mechanisms of brain quantum phenomena (Beck & Eccles, 1992; Galli Carminati et al., 2017; Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., 1994; Hameroff & Penrose, 1996; Sabbadini & Vitiello, 2019). Several works have discussed Quantum Information Theory as a possible formalism to describe mental activities (Cerf & Adami, 1998; Martin et al., 2009, 2013; Martin & Galli Carminati, 2009). Other contributions, more general in nature, tend to reconsider the epistemological bases of quantum mechanics in the context of its supposed ability to explain also mental activity (Marshall, 1989; Martin & Galli Carminati, 2009; Penrose, 1989; Vitiello, 2003; Zurek, 1981).

Starting from this interesting analogy, some of the authors have considered studying the human group activity as a multi-body entangled system (Galli Carminati & Carminati, 2006; Galli Carminati & Martin, 2008; Martin, Carminati, & Galli Carminati, 2009; Martin, Carminati, & Galli Carminati, 2010; Martin, Carminati, & Galli Carminati, 2013). 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, 2021a, 2021b; Trojaola-Zapirain et al., 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019).

For each picture pair, we label with A (A_i, i = 1, 50) the most often chosen in the Qst0 submitted before the beginning of the training, and we label the least often chosen picture of the pair as B (B_i, i = 1, 50).

We report frequency tables for each couple of images and each session for the six groups. We study the evolution of the whole group rather than that of the single participant’s changes of choices. Therefore, we have analyzed the modification in time of the A’s picture frequencies and not the individual participant’s choice.

For the open groups, we did not consider it appropriate to correct completely missing data. Since many participants abandoned the closed groups toward the end, we did the same for the closed groups. However, we used LOCF (Last Observation Carry Forward, (Hamer & Simpson, 2009)) to fill in incorrect or missing (forgotten) answers in existing questionnaires. In case of a missing or incorrect answer, we took that of the preceding session or the one before it, if also this was missing, and so on. We selected the picture randomly if the faulty answer was in Qst0. Table 2 shows the number of corrections.

We performed the study after the approval of the Basurto University Hospital Ethics Committee (Bilbao, Spain) in adherence to the Helsinki Declaration for research with human subjects. All participants gave written informed consent after receiving oral and written information about the experiment, and specifically for adolescents, both the participant and their parent or legal tutor gave their informed consent. All participants’ identities were coded to become completely anonymous, including to those analyzing the data.

We concentrated our study on the frequencies of the A’s answers. Given that this is a binary process, we can calculate its entropy via Bernoulli’s formula (MacKay, 2003):

H b ( p ) = − p log 2 ( p ) − ( 1 − p ) log 2 ( 1 − p )

where p is the probability of having a given number of A, which is given by the binomial distribution:

p ( k ; n , P ) = ( n k ) p k ( 1 − p ) n − k

We consider the a priori probability of choosing one of the two pictures to be 50%. Next, we built tables of entropy for each of the 50 pictures and each of the sessions. We have then made four analyses.

1) A longitudinal analysis for each of the groups. First, we perform a Friedman test (Hollander & Wolfe, 1999), and if we find that it is significant (p < 0.05), we perform a post-hoc test for each pair of successive sessions (Conover, 1999; Conover & Iman, 1979) with the Holm correction (Holm, 1979).

2) A comparison for each pair of groups session by session with the Wilcoxon rank sum test (equivalent to the Mann-Whitney test) (Hollander & Wolfe, 1999).

3) Since the number of participants fluctuated with the session (primarily diminishing), we studied the relation between the average entropy of the 50 answers of each session and the number of participants.

4) We performed a Fourier analysis (Terras, 2005) of the fluctuations of the average entropy with time. First, we detrended the entropy as a function of time by subtracting the linear trend as a function of time from the entropy value. This operation provided us with a function of time with 0 average without altering its time-dependent fluctuations.

We will describe the results in the next section.

To set the context of our analysis, we show the evolution of the average percentage of A’s choices with time (Figure 5) and their evolution with the number of sessions (Figure 6). We remember that we call A pictures the ones most chosen in each pair in Qst0, submitted to participants before the group’s creation.

We notice that the A percentage varies between the groups between Qst0 and the last session. In particular, the percentage of A’s choices decreases slightly for the parents of the closed group but increases for the parents of the two slow-open groups. In addition, the adolescents present a different trend with a decrease in the A percentage compared to Qst0.

The attendance in the closed group of adolescents was less regular after the fifth session, and in other groups, the participation was somewhat uneven, being also here the attendance less regular for the adolescents.

In Figure 7 we present the evolution of the average entropy of A’s choice versus time, and in Figure 8 the evolution versus the session number.

We notice an increase in entropy in all groups, with a steeper trend for the adolescents’ closed group. Furthermore, for all groups, the entropy increases between Qst0 and the end of the group therapy (see Table 3).

This experiment was conducted in 2017-2019 during 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 out 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 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 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 to our questionnaire.

The longitudinal analysis does not indicate a common behavior or a similar trend between the groups. However, the slow-open groups’ parents and group 1 adolescents show statistically significant differences between Qst0 before the start of therapy and the results of the first training session.

Considering the differences between groups, we note that the percentage of the statistically significant differences is maximum between the adolescents and the parents of the closed group. We also find the tendency of a significant difference in entropy between the parents and the adolescents in the closed and slow-open groups. From these results, it seems possible to conclude that entropy’s evolution depends more on the age group (parents or adolescents) in closed and slow-open groups than between the slow-open groups.

The trend of entropy is steeper in the adolescents’ closed group of young people, which is consistent with the increase in time vs. the number of participants.

Observing the absolute or normalized entropy vs. frequency, the peculiar trend of the adolescents’ closed group contrasts with the general trend. For the other groups, the entropy difference increases and diminishes for a specific frequency value.

In all the groups, the entropy at the start of the training is lower than at the end. In addition, the differences in entropy at the start and the end of the training, absolute or normalized by the number of sessions (see Table 7), appears to be correlated with the second frequency found with the Fourier transforms. However, this correlation is not present for the first and third frequencies. As the second frequency increases from 8 to 12, so does the difference in entropy between Qst0 or Qst1 and the end of the training, except for the adolescents’ closed group, which shows a very high entropy difference for low values of the second frequency.

Instead, we observe that an increased group dynamics “rhythm”—as measured by the second frequency in terms of amplitude—positively correlates with the change in entropy, but only the absolute, not the normalized, and only the difference from Qt0 to final during the training.

We can suppose a qualitative correlation between the increase in entropy and the group drop-offs. However, we cannot infer from this a cause-effect link. In other words, we cannot say whether the participants leaving the group cause an increase in entropy or, instead, if a more entropic group dynamic pushes participants to leave the group.

It is interesting to note that the first frequency found with Fourier analysis is independent of the duration of the therapy and represents a “pulsation” in the group dynamic, regardless of the type of the group, closed or slow-open.

In recent papers (Fernandez-Rivas et al., 2021a, 2021b), we find a significant social and generational environment influence depending on the setting (slow-open group versus closed group). In the present study, we could hypothesize that generational differences are more effective than the setting in influencing the group dynamic.

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, above all in the closed group setting.

The group continuum originates from the entanglement of individual psyches forming a group entity endowed with its own identity. This “loss of clanity” towards the original environment 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 0th questionnaire.

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

We supposed in a previous study that this entanglement is weaker in slow-open than in closed groups, but regarding entropy, we find the dynamic more influenced by the generational status than by the therapeutic setting.

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 a more relaxed interaction with the group continuum. However, the trend of the closed group of young suggests that the conflict between friend clan, family clan, and group continuum is particularly acute in this setting and can generate a sizeable dropout.

Suppose we want to extract a therapeutical suggestion from our study. In that case, the group’s action is firmly “countered” by the participants’ “clanic loyalties.” Although this effect is less pronounced in the slow-open setting, slow-open group therapists must remember that the “environment” remains strong and should devote special care to the emergence of loyalty conflicts and identity loss angst (loss fear or “Angst vor Verlust”) during the training.

The clear finding is the augmentation of entropy, from Qst0 and Qs1 to final in all the groups regardless of the type (closed or slow-open) and a possible common frequency (considering the first one), the number of complete cycles in the interval regardless of the type of group but also the length of the interval.

It could probably be interesting to perform a new study on Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills training in slow-open groups, focused on the entropy fluctuations from Qst0 and Qst1 for a longer time, for instance, at least one year.

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). Dialectical Behavior Group Therapy for Adolescents and Parents: Analysis of Answer Entropy. Psychology,13, 1573-1599. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2022.1311099