ABSTRACT
The previous chapter provided a brief review of some of the major movements of Western thought that are relevant when it comes to putting into context the thinking about the individual, the group and psychotherapy. That chapter paid particular attention to Leibniz, Kant and Hegel and concluded by pointing to the link from Hegel to Mead and Elias, both of whom rejected Hegel's notion of absolute spirit but took up, in different ways, his dialectical logic in understanding the development of selves and society. Others, however, largely rejected Hegelian thinking and continued to develop the Kantian tradition and also the tradition of Leibniz. An example of a thinker in these traditions is Herbart and although he is not a wellknown ®gure, his work is relevant here because of the in¯uence it exerted on Freud. Quite consistent with the philosophical traditions of both Leibniz and Kant was the enormous development in mainstream science re¯ecting a realist, materialist and positivist way of thinking. And one example of this was the medical work of Helmholtz and BruÈcke, relevant again because of the in¯uence exerted on Freud's thinking. During this period, Lamarck and Darwin were also developing their theories of biological evolution and they too had an impact on thinking about selves and society, being taken up in rather different ways by those developing the Hegelian strand of thought compared to those in the traditions of Kant and Leibniz.
