This lecture explores the recent and further to be expected radical changes in our nowadays world, asking for the implied consequences—for every organization/community on all levels, for every person—as well as for us as group analysists. To understand the underlying processes reference is made to the work of Karl Mannheim and Foulkes’ concept of the foundation matrix. The emotional strain of reworking its basic dimensions—as group boundaries, gender relations, relations between the generations, their power implications, which entrench the whole social structure and hence history—are carefully outlined.
When I was invited to respond and perhaps to add something to Juan Tubert-Oklander’s rich lecture and Earl Hopper’s further elaborations, I felt honoured to speak to this audience and to share with you some of my thoughts.
In a preliminary remark those brilliant-mostly Jewish-German speaking intellectuals of the 20th-century in central Europe are acknowledged, who formed the background-the matrix-from which Foulkes developed his ideas of matrix and foundation matrix.After recalling the definition and summarizing the notion of foundation matrix, this concept is discussed, comparing it to other theories that aim at large scale transpersonal processes, namely the 'social unconscious' and 'large group identity'. The article closes pleading for very precise group analytic thinking, advising against the possibility that the concepts-if their process character is neglected-could be used to underpin a right wing/fascist argument.
In this article, the author focuses on Foulkes's concept of the foundation matrix, re-examining its heuristic value in a theory of unconscious processes, trying to outline what could be the 'contents' of the foundation matrix as well as to formulate the related media of communication. Emphasis is laid on the significance of bodily communication, including gestures and rituals as conceptualized by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as 'habitus'.Group analysis considers itself and is considered as a theory and method paying much attention to the social dimension. As Dennis Brown and Louis Zinkin put it in the preface of The Psyche and the Social World:Its theoretical basis, laid down by its initiator, S.H. Foulkes , involves the recognition of the deeply social nature of the human personality. (Brown and Zinkin, 1994: xii) And:Foulkes was not only devising a new method of therapy based on psychoanalytic principles, he was also beginning to construct a new theory in which the individual cannot be separated from the social context which defines him or her. (1994: 1) This emphasis on the social is considered to be result of the cooperation with a close friend from the Frankfurt times -the Group Analysis.
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