ABSTRACT
S. H. Foulkes emphasised the significance of the “concept of transmission”, and envisaged a group analytic theory of “cultural inheritance” based on sociocultural transmission. Based on the social a priori in general and on the sociological perspective of Norbert Elias in particular, the idea of a social unconscious can be found in Foulkes’s work from the very beginning of it. Foulkes’s conceptualisation of the social unconscious was definitely more S. Freudian than C. G. Jungian, and in so far as it focused on sociality and socialisation, his concept was more psychoanalytic than group analytic. Foulkes felt a growing need to distinguish more clearly between the “matrix of interpersonal relationships” and the matrix as a “transpersonal network”. Whereas the concept of the matrix is indeed the cornerstone of the theory of group analysis, the concept of the personal matrix is the capstone of the theory of the tripartite matrix as a whole, and of the group analytic edifice as a whole.
