ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the development of Foulkes’ work, mapping its theoretical foundations, its clinical consequences and its technique. Pointing out the different usages Foulkes made of free-floating group discussion, it clarifies his approach to the repressed and to the denied social unconscious. Viewed from the perspective of his mature work, with its emphasis on cultural inheritance and socio-cultural transmission, an extended view of the group matrix was a logical consequence, theoretically, clinically and with regard to a group-analytic technique. The mature model of the matrix as a tripartite structure – foundational, dynamic and personal – avoided the Cartesian split between subject and object, the group-old ‘juxtaposition’ that Foulkes had been contesting since his very first book in 1948.
