ABSTRACT
The positivists hold that the objective world-of-things exists before individual humans, and individual humans exist before society. The patient, however, is a Freudian creature, in that the patient’s rationality is subject to, and permeated by, unconscious processes. S. H. Foulkes is not the first, or the last, to come up with the idea of a social a priori; a great number and range of scholars have proposed some version of it. Hegel, too, thought that there were a priori categories that existed prior to individuals, categories through which individuals experienced themselves and the world. The chapter discusses that the therapist’s perceptions and interventions are inevitably compromised by the ideologies that the therapist unwittingly subscribes to, as well as the discourses that the therapist unknowingly participates in. The notion of the social unconscious questions the individualistic premises of mainstream psychoanalysis and leads to other ways of reading clinical phenomena.
