ABSTRACT
Group analysts locate problems that hinder development in relation to personal development or task performance in the group matrix and foundation matrix of the wider system and not in a pathologised individual. In primary care the projected problem GP is the single-hander. The planners of primary care reforms seem to think that if these ‘dinosaurs’ of general practice could be made to join in a group, the whole system would be more efficient. Primary care is formed by the interactions between the unconscious mind of each PCG and the social unconscious of the NHS foundation matrix. The internal, psychological inability to respond to change in a rational way in primary care is tied up with the overidealised doctor-patient relationship which hides the fact that many GPs suffer from what psychoanalysts have called helper syndrome. What is interesting about the latest primary care reform is that it seems to represent a halfway house between the old and the new organisational paradigms.
