The approximation of S. H. Foulkes

The second author to use the name of Group-Analysis to baptize the grouptherapy he created and practiced was S. h. Foulkes—psychoanalyst of German origin, analyzed by Helene Deutsch in Vienna 1928-1930, and emigrated to England in 1933. Around 1939 he said that having read Burrow in the twenties [1] he thought the latter had abandoned the term.  Also, we count with some foundational papers of Foulkes which contain some basic concepts, the one of 1942 (1944) written in collaboration with his colleague and co-therapist, Eve Lewis [2] and another one (On Group Analysis) of 1946 [3]. There he defines groupanalysis as well as the concept of group.

 Definition of Group Analysis:

“The type of group treatment we are interested I have been called group analysis… If you took it in a very wide sense, you could say that it uses psychoanalytic principles. In fact it is much less but also much more than psychoanalysis in group… In my approach, the word ‘analysis’ not only refers to psychoanalysis but reflects at least three different influences, which all operate actively:

First influence, Goldstein (Organism) and Gelb (Gestalt): “psychological analysis”, theories of the years twenty. The approximation of Goldstein is radically “holistic”. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. All data is significant. The observer forms an integral part of the situation; introduces dynamic forces in the field and is permeable to forces which emanate from such a field.

Second influence, psychoanalysis itself. Nothing of the unconscious is invalidated because people find themselves together in a circle: free association, the attitude of the analyst, the phenomenon of transference, resistance and defense mechanisms… in essence everything, although in detail it may be different. GA is different to other forms of group therapy.

Third influence comes from what could be called “sociological analysis”, or socioanalysis. The standards of what we consider normal or acceptable see themselves revised and re-defined with the consent and verdict of the group itself. The limits of the individual egos and the criteria of the superego become fluid and are re-founded. Karl Mannheim, in the book “Diagnosis of Our Time” (1943) [4] has used the term ‘group analysis’, independently, from a sociological perspective.

This then, is the triple sense which the name of “Group analysis” pretends to transmit: 1) Its relationship with Psychological Analysis, 2) its relationship with Psychoanalysis, 3) its relationship with Socioanalysis.

 Definition of group

“The group in what concerns us here, has a certain number of persons, not less than five and not more than ten… seated in a circle or around a table. The person who has called them together is called a conductor o director. In our case these persons are patients in treatment… who use language as a medium of communication in the intent of confronting their difficulties… Soon there start to form special dynamic relationships between the individuals and the conductor, and between them, at the same time that the assembly as a whole and every one of the members… They start to live, feel, think, act and talk more in terms of “we” than “I”, “you” and “he”. At the same time, and I want to underline this point, the individuals do not dissolve but to the contrary show more their personal characteristics… <<As soon as this small sample of community shows signs of organization and structure in the described form, we call it a group>>.” [5]