ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews S. H. Foulkes’ main references to the social unconscious, and provide relevant background information regarding the contexts of them. 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”. 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. 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 Norbert Elias. It is necessary to consider Foulkes’s clinical perspective in the context of the epistemological orientation that informs group analysis. From the beginning, Foulkes struggled to disentangle the social from the collective unconscious.