Pines, Malcolm (2009) The matrix of group analysis. An historical perspective. Group Analysis, 42 (1). pp. 5-15. ISSN 0533-3164

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Abstract

In 1939 a German—Jewish psychoanalyst who had left Germany in 1933 and who had, in 1938 moved to Exeter, a small city in the south west of England, began to practise group analysis. Soon caught up in military psychiatry, where he had ample opportunity to put his ideas and experience into practice, S.H. Foulkes elaborated his theoretical ideas in his first book in 1948. Thus the practice of group analysis began in England, geographically far from Frankfurt and from Vienna, where Foulkes had trained and worked, and in relative professional isolation. This is often a necessary condition for original work; compare the example of Ronald Fairbairn, contemporaneous in Edinburgh. But no man is an island and Foulkes' work has to be set in the context of the European ideas of his intellectual and social inheritance. We must situate him in history, figure against ground, as he himself insisted was a basic component of group-analytic theory.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This paper was given as the keynote address at the European Symposium on Group Analysis: 'Mistrust in the matrix. Conflict, cooperation, creativity in groups and institutions', 8th Sep, 1990, Oxford, United Kingdom
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Foulkes, S H, Social Inheritance, Wundt, France, Le Bon, Tarde, Solidarism, Trotter, Group analysis, Background
Subjects:	Groups & Organisations > Group Psychoanalysis
Department/People:	Honorary Staff
URI:	https://repository.tavistockandportman.ac.uk/id/eprint/287

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