ABSTRACT
My Introduction to The Tripartite Matrix in the Developing Theory and Expanding Practice of Group Analysis, the fourth in the series of volumes concerning the social unconscious in societies, organisations, and persons, in the context of the New International Library of Group Analysis, is also an introduction to both the theory and concept of the social unconscious, and a review of the perspective developed and advanced in the preceding three volumes (Hopper & Weinberg 2011, 2016, 2017). The study of the social unconscious is at the core of group analysis, which is based on psychoanalysis, sociology, and the study of group dynamics. This underlying orientation has crystallised in creative ways in several academic settings, sometimes within small groups of colleagues rather than within formal departments of generally recognised disciplines. These “constellations” have gone under various names, for example, “personality and culture”, “mind, self and society”, and “personality in nature, society and culture”, but it is axiomatic in each of them that the unconscious mind of a person is always both a socially unconscious mind and a neuro-physiologically unconscious mind, as well as a psychologically unconscious mind.
