This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Pines, M. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

The Matrix of Group Analysis: An Historical Perspective

21 Dealtry Road, Putney, London SW15 6NL, UK, malcpines{at}btinternet.com

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.

Key Words: Foulkes • Wundt • Germany • France • Le Bon • Tarde • Solidarism • England • Trotter • group analysis • background

Group Analysis, Vol. 42, No. 1, 5-15 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0533316408100929


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?