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Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 77
its epistemological basis without sufficient reflection. In contrast, because the teaching
that is the object of the current study has a profound concern with individual
psychoanalysis, a model constructed to study that teaching needs also to retain a respect
for the tenets of individual psychoanalysis. Perhaps Dalal risks rejecting a
psychoanalytic ‘straw man’ because of a strong desire to unearth what he terms the
Radical Foulkes, and a clear awareness as a theorist of prejudice and racism of the
complex constraint that psychoanalysis represented for Foulkes. 9 Hence he excludes the
work of Bion from his thinking, principally, he suggests, because Bion’s work can be
argued to be based on an essentialist fallacy. However, it can be argued that this ignores
the crucial role that Bion’s work (and by extension, the work of Klein on which it is
based) has played in the development of an intersubjective perspective in
psychotherapy.
How are the students perceived by the staff, (and indeed by
each other, and vice-versa), as individuals, as a group of
individuals or of sub-groups of individuals, or as a group as a
whole?
I think this is effectively what Matte-Blanco has called the matrix of transference and
countertransference. Taking the framework that has been sketched out above, it is
possible to see these perceptions as part of a fluid whole that will transform from
moment to moment in line with dynamic changes within the group. It is interesting that
Matte-Blanco like Foulkes chooses the term ‘matrix’, albeit to name something slightly
different. Matrix as a term is common within mathematics, and broadly used to mean a
form of structure or array, whereas for Foulkes the term was apparently evoked by the
9 A major thrust of Dalal’s (1998) argument is that Foulkes held back from a whole-hearted development
of the implications of his theories, not least out of a concern to retain the acceptance of his psychoanalytic
colleagues. As a German refugee in independent private practice as a psychoanalyst in post-World War
Two England, he would have very much needed that acceptance.