The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups and Societies

Mainly Theory

Earl Hopper, Haim Weinberg, Earl Hopper, Haim Weinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855757684
• eBook ISBN: 9780429922237
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The social unconscious is vital for understanding persons and their groupings, ranging from families to societies, committees to organisations, and from small to median to large therapeutic groups, and essential for comprehensive clinical work. This series of volumes of contributions from an international network of psychoanalysts, analytical psychologists, group analysts and psychodramatists draw on the classical ideas of Freud, Klein and Jung, Bion, Foulkes and Moreno, and on contemporary relational perspectives, self-psychology and neuroscience. Volume 1 is concerned mainly with the theory of the social unconscious. It is focused on topics such as location, sociality, the social brain, identity, ideology, the foundation matrix, social psychological retreats, false collective self-objects, the collective unconscious and its archetypes and social dreaming.

Part I
The Origins of the Concept of the Social Unconscious

Chapter One
The concept of the social unconscious in the work of S. H. Foulkes

Dieter Nitzgen

The “basic nature of social influences” in psychoanalysis and group analysis was one of the main concerns of S. H. Foulkes. Even in his first book, Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy (Foulkes, 1948), he welcomed the “growing recognition of the basic importance of society” in psychoanalysis (p. 11). In fact, group analysis can be seen in terms of the recognition of the importance of the concept of the social unconscious, which Foulkes introduced as a supplement to Freud’s concept of dynamic unconscious. However, the references Foulkes made to this concept are scarce and scattered, and taken from and relating to very different contexts, such as neurobiology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, and social anthropology, as well as epistemology. Moreover, these references are dense and need unpacking. This chapter will review Foulkes’ main references to the social unconscious, and provide relevant background information regarding the contexts of them.

Foulkes’ references to the social unconscious

In a first paper on group analysis, written together with E. Lewis and published in 1944, Foulkes and Lewis listed four group-specific therapeutic factors brought about by the loosening and stimulating effects of the group situation itself (Foulkes & Lewis, 1944, in Foulkes, 1964, p. 34; cf. Foulkes, 1983[1948], p. 167; Foulkes & Anthony, 1957, p. 151): social integration and relief from isolation, mirror reactions, the activation of the collective unconscious, and interpersonal exchange.

For Foulkes and Lewis, it is “as if the collective unconscious acted as a condenser” (Foulkes & Lewis, 1944, in Foulkes, 1964, p. 34). Clearly, this notion of the “collective unconscious” had Jungian overtones (bearing in mind that Eve Lewis was a Jungian analyst working in a Jungian art therapeutic community (cf. Pines, 1999). In Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy, Foulkes (1948) supplemented these four group specific factors with a fifth and sixth factor, describing the functions of the group as “Forum” and “Support” (pp. 167–168), and again evoked the idea of a “collective unconscious” acting as a condenser in the group.

Shortly afterwards, in a paper read to the American Group Psychotherapy Association, Foulkes (1949), discussed the group’s relation to its leader in some detail. He differentiated several forms of transference reactions in groups, and made the important distinction between “familial” and “non-familial” types of transference, maintaining that although the family is a group, the group is not necessarily a family:

In the unconscious phantasy of the group, the therapist is put in the position of the primordial leader; he is omniscient and omnipotent and the group expects magical help from him. He can actually be said to be a father figure and it is all too easy to interpret his position really as that of a father or mother and see the group representing a family. This is not my impression. Whereas family transference reactions between the members of the group and the leader can occasionally be seen the configuration as a whole does not, by any means, shape according to the family pattern. It is true that the family is a group, but not that the group is a family. [1984(1964), p. 59; my italics]

Claiming there are non-familial types of transference at work in groups, such as a transference to the community and/or society as a whole, Foulkes went beyond the established psychoanalytic model of group dynamics and group psychotherapy: that is, Freud’s (1921c) understanding of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (p. 65) and Bion’s (1961) Experiences in Groups.

The first explicit reference to the “social unconscious” as a group analytic concept is found in “Group therapy” (Foulkes, 1950). He wrote,

… the group analytic situation, while dealing intensively with the unconscious in the Freudian sense, brings into operation and perspective a totally different area of which the individual is equally unaware. Moreover, the individual is as much compelled by these colossal forces as by his own id and defends himself against their recognition without being aware of it, but in different ways and modes. One might speak of a “social or interpersonal unconscious”. [p. 52]

In Group Psychotherapy: The Psychoanalytic Approach (Foulkes & Anthony, 1957), Foulkes amplified this first statement. He now explained that the “social unconscious” consists of “such social relationships as are not usually revealed, or are not even conscious” (1984[1957], p. 56, my italics). He again emphasized the “advantage of the group situation” and “the opportunity it affords for the exploration of what may be called the “social unconscious” (ibid., p. 42). In groups, “each individual’s feelings and reactions will reflect the influences exerted on him by other individuals in the group and by the group as a whole, however little he is aware of this” (ibid.). Therefore, it is in and by the group setting that unconscious social relations become “particularly open to exact investigation”, sometimes with results “which can be surprising” (ibid.). With regard to clinical practice, he maintained that the “translation” of the “social unconscious” follows the same principles as the translation of Freudian “repressed unconscious” (ibid., pp. 55–56).

The last reference to the social unconscious in his published work is to be found in “Problems of the large group” (Foulkes, 1975). In it, Foulkes discussed this concept in relationship to mental processes that he again suggested should not be considered as intrapsychic, but as “per se being multipersonal” (1990[1975], p. 253). He reaffirmed his earlier views on the social unconscious, and emphasized that the group analytic understanding of “translation” applied to the repressed unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis and to the social unconscious alike (ibid., p. 252).

The various contexts of the concept of the social unconscious in the work of Foulkes

Foulkes’s references to the social unconscious suggest a variety of contexts, all of which are relevant to illuminating the full meaning of this concept. In his very first communication on group analysis, presented in April 1946 to the British Psychoanalytical Society, he took pains to explain that in group analysis “the qualifying word ‘analysis’ does not refer to psychoanalysis alone, but reflects at least three different influences, all of which operate actively” (1990[1946], p. 129). As the first of these influences, he mentioned “psychological analysis” as being evolved by Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb (ibid., p. 129); the second was the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the third was “sociological analysis” or “socio-analysis”. Accordingly, we may assume that, for Foulkes, the idea of the social unconscious also reflected these three influences. I will return to the interesting fact that Foulkes did not list the influence of cultural anthropology.

Against localization: the neurobiological context

Although the social unconscious as a concept has a Freudian core, the idea of non-conscious relations between the “individual” and the “social other” precedes Foulkes’s psychoanalytic training from 1928 to 1930 in Vienna, and dates back to his formative years as a psychiatrist, when, from 1924 to 1926, he had worked in Kurt Goldstein’s neurological clinic in Frankfurt. On the basis of his clinical work with brain injured patients during and after the First World War, Goldstein had argued against the assumption of “localized” lesions in the brain put forward by classical neuron theory (Gelb & Goldstein, 1918). Instead, he advocated that the nervous system normally and pathologically always “reacted as whole”. Therefore, he argued, disorders of the brain could not be “localized” in local lesions, but were to be considered as dysfunctions of the nervous system as a whole. In a careful review of Goldstein’s (1934) book, The Organism, Foulkes (1936) had given a detailed account of Goldstein’s neurobiological findings and their epistemological implications. He reaffirmed that the nervous system always reacted as a whole, and that this reaction was determined by what Goldstein had called the “total situation” (Nitzgen, 2007, 2008, 2010). He emphasized Goldstein’s methodological principle that “no finding is to be considered without reference to the whole organism and the total situation” (Foulkes, 1990[1936], p. 43, my italics). Foulkes went on to widen the scope of these neurobiological findings from the nervous system to the organism to the individual as a whole, and finally to the society as a “network”, more or less as described by Elias (1939).

Accordingly, in 1948, his focus of interest shifted from neuro-(bio)logical to social networks. Drawing from his early group analytic experiments in Exeter and his experiences of British wartime psychiatry in Northfield, Foulkes was eventually able to transfer Goldstein’s original insights to the social field and to apply them to socio-psychological phenomena. The subject of his (Foulkes, 1948) Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy is “The individual as whole in a total situation” (p. 1). Here, he explained that what happens psychologically within the individual is determined by its “total situation”, that is, its surrounding social network. This led to a totally new perspective on the nature and origins of psychic disturbances. As Foulkes saw it, such disturbances could no longer be localized within in the individual psyche but were to be located in a total field of interaction, the group matrix. Taking this view, he repeated Goldstein’s earlier criticism of “localized” brain functions beyond neurology. By taking this step, he finally arrived at a “general formulation” regarding psychic disturbances:

All this leads us to the general formulation that the disturbance we see in front of us, embodied in a particular patient, is in fact the expression of a disturbed balance in a total field of interaction which involves a number of different people as participants. [Foulkes & Anthony, 1984(1957), p. 54]

It is not difficult to see that the understanding of the individual as a whole in a total situation anticipates the later concept of the social unconscious. In both, the individual is considered to be “determined” by the conscious and non-conscious social relations of a given situation. For Foulkes, such a holistic or systemic perspective implies an altered view of the psychoanalytic situation itself. Thus, he insisted that we must

perceive and evaluate the analytical situation including all its ‘unconscious’ components as determined by the patient’s total life situation and not, contrariwise, see ‘life’ and ‘reality’ merely as a projection, screen and reflector of his ‘unconscious phantasies’, which they are indeed, at the same time. [Foulkes, 1948, p. 15]

This was in direct opposition to the ascendant view in the UK concerning the Kleinian emphasis on the centrality of innate unconscious phantasy. In contrast, Foulkes maintained that the general principle of a specifically group analytic orientation is that the group analyst “orientates himself in the light of the total situation and its context” (1990[1968a], p. 183).

Foulkes’s epistemological orientation

It is necessary to consider Foulkes’s clinical perspective in the context of the epistemological orientation that informs group analysis. In “Problems of the large group” (Foulkes, 1975), he maintained that “we cannot isolate biological, social, cultural and economic factors, except by special abstraction”. “Mental life”, he said, “is the expression of all these forces, both looked at horizontally, as it were in the strictly present reality, and vertically in relation to past inheritance” (1975, p. 252). In this statement, Foulkes recurred to Goldstein’s epistemological perspective, which he himself had outlined in Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy (Foulkes, 1948), stating that “the old juxtapositions of an inside and outside world, constitution and environment, individual and society, phantasy and reality, body and mind and so on, are untenable” (p. 10). For Foulkes, they are “untenable” because, as juxtapositions, they are not substantial but “artificial, though plausible abstractions”, referring to an underlying life process which remains outside all positive knowledge (like Kant’s thing-in-itself, which in itself is unknowable). This is the essence of Goldstein’s epistemological legacy to Foulkes. As I have shown elsewhere (Nitzgen, 2010), this legacy also reflected the influence of Goldstein’s cousin, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (cf. Cassirer, 1910), and informed Foulkes’s entire clinical thinking, pushing it relentlessly towards the uncompleted project of a group analytic theory of mind (Foulkes, 2003).

The social location of neurosis: the psychoanalytical context

It is likely that Foulkes was also influenced by the work of Bernfeld. An influential member of Anna Freud’s inner circle, Bernfeld was a partisan of socialist ideals and ideas, and a pioneer of psychoanalytically informed education. In 1925, he went to Berlin, continuing his seminar on psychoanalysis and education. (In his autobiographical notes, Foulkes (1968b, p. 120) mentioned that when he arrived in Vienna, Bernfeld had “already departed to Berlin”.) In 1929, Bernfeld published a paper on the relevance of the “social location” for the understanding of “neurosis, deprivation and education”. Although Foulkes does not refer to it in his written work, it is more than likely that he had learnt of it during his psychoanalytic training from 1928 to 1930 in Vienna, where Bernfeld had been a member of the teaching staff from 1922 until 1925. Bernfeld’s paper was part of the ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and Marxism in the 1930s (Bernfeld, Reich, Jurinetz, Sapir, Stoljarov, 1970). Although Bernfeld acknowledged the correctness of Freud’s theory of the drives, he maintained that their “vicissitudes” (Freud, 1915c) were moulded by the social situation in which they originated no less than by biological factors. Accordingly, he maintained that “normal and pathological mechanisms” do have a “historical aspect”: “We may resume the question of the historical aspect and the social moulding of a mental process in terms of the perspective of the social location” (1929, p. 210; my translation). For Bernfeld, the concept of a social location of neurosis was useful in clinical psychoanalysis (Bernfeld, 1931) as well as in education (Bernfeld, 1935). In terms of language, it is interesting to note that his origina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I THE ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT OF THE SOCIAL UNCONSCIOUS
• PART II THE ORGANISMIC AND NEUROBIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
• PART III THE RELATIONAL AND INTERPERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
• PART IV THE MIND OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
• PART V THE MATRIX OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
• PART VI THE NUMINOUS AND THE UNKNOWN
• INDEX