Response to Neuroscience and the Social Unconscious by Claire Bacha

Abstract

I welcome this article into the paradigm of group analytic thinking. The author wonders whether findings in neuroscience can have application in the delivery of group analysis to clinical groups, the economy and politics. And in raising this thought poses a tension. Will incorporating discoveries from neuroscience into the conceptualization and theory of group analysis change the theory of group analysis? Neuropsychology in collaboration with biochemistry, whilst not new sciences, have in the past 30 years benefitted from technological improvements of scanning equipment to map, measure and deduce brain functioning. There has been a growing interest amongst neuroscientists in considering the brain/mind relationship. Biology meets psychology in seeking new ways to understand emotions and higher order verbal expression of feelings with associated meaning. Most brands of psychological therapies are now reaching towards neuroscience, considering this as a hard physical science, with credibility, rather than a social science, to gather evidence that supports their model of therapy. This is an imperative placed upon psychological therapies in the context of funding for therapies being driven by economic and evidence based practice political drivers. Do we pick and mix specific aspects of neuroscientific discovery to fit our group analytic paradigm, or more radically do we develop our theory even if that means leaving our founders behind? Not necessarily behind, but perhaps re-finding them. This article is prescient and reminds us that both Freud and Foulkes started their careers in psychoanalysis as neurologists.