Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 81
meaning of his Army mythology, of his "neurosis" in the reality of his
life" (1948).
In the time after Northfield, it seemed that the two disciplines
of psychotherapy and social psychiatry approached each other. At the
inaugural meeting symposium of the newly founded Section of
Psychotherapy and Social Psychiatry of the Royal Medico-
Psychological Association in 1949, Rickman said that the joint
development of the two disciplines would remain dependent on these
basic principles:
"To give priority to the client's need and let the doctor's
curiosity and therapeutic ambition come second".
(Rickman 1950, 2003)
Only a few years later, in 1965, the two disciplines had moved
far away from each other. In his role as chairman of the joint section,
Foulkes organized a series of lectures published in 1969 under the title
"Psychiatry in a changing society". He himself wrote in the preface:
“To me it seems that there is a need for a new
orientation in social psychiatry as well as in
psychotherapy; that psychiatry itself will be subjected
to change in view of changing social and cultural
conditions, with the result that the whole of psychiatry
will have to become more conscious of social and
cultural factors. In this sense, the whole of psychiatry is
social psychiatry as well.” (Foulkes, 1969)
And further:
"The antithesis between social and intrapsychic is
misleading. The implication of the individual has been
a psyche, which is his innermost private self and
possession, and that the social and cultural are external
forces, the individual interacting with them, is wrong,
but it is a traditional notion and still reigning - often
quite unconsciously."
The difference between an allegedly objective and a more
personal psychiatry is that "the latter is a dynamic pursuit, entailing
involvement and change in one's own person, and threatening values
and attitudes. There is resistance against such change. " (Foulkes,