Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 79
the end by the hospital management. In my opinion, it was precisely
this repeated exclusion experience that allowed Foulkes to see his
patients beyond the psychiatric or psychoanalytic conventions and to
locate them in the whole social context. His views on the patients
differed significantly from Bion and Rickman.
Where the last two saw "a rather scallywag battalion" (1943),
Foulkes found "unwilling soldiers with long-standing difficulties".
Their place was later taken over in the "hot" war phase, by "young,
active soldiers who have seen battle", also later replaced by "still the
same younger men (...) but their problems now were civilian
difficulties - they were fearful of overseas service, unwilling soldiers,
anxious for discharge. " (1948).
A "living diagnosis" (Foulkes, 1948), especially in the
special war context, was not possible with the purely descriptive or
phenomenological possibilities of psychiatry at the time. Most of
Northfield's soldiers, no matter what combat phase, were suffering
from similar symptoms: anxiety, depression and psychosomatic
complaints. Psychodynamic considerations, which tried to make an
individual diagnosis from the biography of the individual, were also
only partly suitable for elucidating the neurotic pathology. In
retrospect, in 1948 Foulkes articulated the need for a "redefinition of
psychiatric categories of a more static child in favour of dynamic,
functional ones".
We owe Robi Friedman thanks for the concept of the soldier's
matrix (2015), characterised by "reduced violence inhibiting
mechanisms" directed especially against an externalized scapegoat
and in parallel "the promotion of selfless relations". Regardless of
their constitutional homogeneity, this matrix, as the history of
Northfield shows, is not free from disruption. Three of them appeared
exemplary to me.
At the time of the first experiment, as well as the beginnings
of Foulkes' time in Northfield, they were mostly involuntary soldiers
who reacted to the social call for a heroic self-sacrifice with fear and
despair. When they entered the hospital, they experienced a smooth
separation between the hospital wing (blue uniforms) and the training
wing (khaki uniforms), which fuelled a conflicting identity split
between neurotic gain and to be a hero. Foulkes wrote:
"This delimiting and overlapping of functions was a
source of frustration and anxiety to all, but at the back
of the uncertainty and confusion of mind was the patient.
He was the focus of everybody’s doubts, and the