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Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 57
also worked. He wrote then about the deeply social nature of the human being, and
argued that the individual was an abstraction (following Karl Marx, but foreshadowing
Winnicott’s dictum (1960) that there is no such thing as an infant, only a mother-and-
infant), as well as that reality and unconscious phantasies were inseparable. He also
introduced his description of therapeutic factors that were group-specific, notably the
mirror reaction, exchange, social integration, and activation of the unconscious. In
‘Group Psychotherapy: The Psychoanalytic Approach’, written with James Anthony
(1957), he introduced the notion of four hierarchical levels of communication, the
Current Level, the Transference Level, the Projective Level, and the Primordial Level
(see below). He also wrote about networks of relationship, later to be called the ‘group
matrix’ (see above), modelled in part on the ideas of the neurologist Goldstein (1937)
on the nervous system, as well as processes that are transpersonal. In ‘Therapeutic
Group Analysis’ (1964) he defined the matrix more clearly, and in ‘Group-Analytic
Psychotherapy’ (1975) he defined the foundation matrix (based on the biological
properties of the species, as well as on culturally embedded values and reactions of the
wider culture) in contrast to the dynamic matrix (formed in particular situations such as
a therapeutic group).
Many of the basic psychoanalytic concepts that inform this field (such as transference,
countertransference, defences against anxiety, projection, and projective identification)
were introduced in Chapter One. In the case of group-analysis, the additional shared
knowledge and understanding of group psychotherapy helps practitioners to know how
to form Foulkes’ idea of the group-analytic matrix and then to use it.
Matrix has a meaning in mathematics as a device for arraying data, but was defined by
Foulkes in various ways at various times. (Confusingly, the term ‘matrix’ is also used