ABSTRACT
Foulkes was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. His thinking was built on the foundations laid by Freud and therefore re¯ected the historical tradition described in Chapters 9 to 11. However, Foulkes made a number of highly signi®cant innovations. First, during the 1940s, he shifted his practice from the psychoanalytic dyad to therapy in a group. Second, he explained what he was doing in ways that developed and also contradicted Freud. From the 1940s to the 1960s, he incorporated systems thinking into his group analytic theory of therapy, so anticipating the development of relational and intersubjective psychoanalysis from the 1970s onwards. However, he also contradicted psychoanalytic theory in his use of sociological theories, particularly those of Elias, to understand the relationship between the individual and the group (Dalal, 1998). This chapter reviews Foulkes' turn to systems thinking and sociology and then explores the manner in which he continued throughout his life to use both the Freudian perspective as developed in systems thinking and the sociological theories of Elias in a manner that eliminated the contradiction between them. In essence he employed Kantian `both . . . and' thinking to eliminate the contradiction between two incompatible theoretical traditions. Consider ®rst his appeal to systems thinking.
