ABSTRACT
In his chapter on the group matrix, Foulkes says of a group-analytic group: What an enormous complexity of processes and actions and interactions play between even two or three people, or these people and myself, or between two in relation to another three, and so on. By mental processes, Foulkes seems to mean communications such as "acts, active messages, movements, expressions, silent transmissions of moods" both conscious and unconscious. One privileges the group as a psychic system transgressing the individuals and the other privileges the genetically/culturally determined individuals as constructing the group. Mind and self do not emerge out of a clash between something that is already there in the individual and social constraint as in the classical Freudian view. The author suggests that group communication is processes patterned as many themes that organize the experience of being together in the group.
