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Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 76
the writer to make most of the overlap in concerns between Foulkes and Matte-Blanco,
and there has been some writing in response to his work. However, although Dalal
includes Matte-Blanco’s work as a key component of his Post-Foulkesian Group-
Analytic Theory, he does not go on to apply this clinically, and in particular seems to
value Matte-Blanco because his work has not generally been appropriated by individual
psychoanalysis.
Dalal’s (1998) major use of Matte-Blanco’s work is in a social theory, and his
engagement is as more with social rather than with therapeutic or educational
experience. Dalal is particularly concerned with how the human mind perceives
differences and similarities, collapsing differences within classes by symmetrisation,
and expanding differences between symmetrised classes by using asymmetrical logic.
Hence, for example, by this means all of ‘us’ are like each other and completely
different from all of ‘them’, who are similarly like each other. This will be recognisable
as a basis for phenomena like racism and other forms of prejudice. Dalal goes on to use
the work of Elias (1994; Elias & Scotson, 1994) to explore how power in society
determines the meaning and value given to the experience of groups in relation to each
other.
Although Dalal and others, for example, Nitsun (1996) and Hopper (2003a, 2003b) have
done much to extend the theoretical basis of a group-analytic perspective, none of these
writers has sought to apply a combination of Matte-Blanco and Foulkes’s ideas in
relation to what might be called a ‘life group’, that is, one formed for a purpose other
than psychotherapy. Also, in some senses Dalal is a critic of psychoanalysis, countering
the potential arrogance of the discipline (resonant with early psychoanalytic forays into
anthropological territory, real and symbolic, as the expert interpreter) in going beyond