The colour of the poppies. A comment on functional dissociation to creativity in groups. The effects of a pandemic on a dance company

The article presented by Vollon and Gimenez (Vollon and Gimenez, 2022) explores the emergence of group creativity during the 55 days of detention imposed by the French authorities as a protective measure to control the spread of Covid19 from 13 March to 11 May 2020. It does so by pointing out the impact on the members of a dance company in southern France. As such, it is one of the rare attempts to understand the pandemic’s ‘unprecedented social repercussions throughout the world’ through the lens of both group analysis and psychoanalysis which the authors rightfully say forced ‘each of us to change our daily habits by radically reorganizing our intimate, private and personal spaces’. According to René Kaës (2020) it led to ‘a crisis and eventually a collapse’ of what he refers to as the ‘metasocial’ and ‘metapsychic’ guarantors of our psychosocial existence, i.e. the ‘larger structures that frame and coordinate social and cultural life’ including the ‘alliances, pacts and contracts that shore up and structure the psyche of each subject’. To explain the various effects and manifestations of this collapse and the potential trauma involved in it, Vollon and Gimenez first of all provide a group analytic frame of reference to understand the psychosocial dynamics involved in it, and also suggest possible means to 1135170 GAQ0010.1177/05333164221135170Group Analysis 55(4)Nitzgen: Response to Vollon and Gimenez research-article2022