ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a brief overview of Freud’s theory before outlining Foulkes’s critique. He challenged Freud’s hypothesis—that the mind is still influenced by archaic memory—showing that it is unnecessary. Foulkes’s sociogenetic model was initially intended to supplement Freud’s phylogenetic theory (Foulkes, 1990: 82). However, towards the end of his life, he recognised that it does in fact build Freud’s model anew, creating group analysis (Foulkes, 1990: 287). The overview of the roots of Foulkes’s social theory focuses on three influences on the human mind: firstly, the place of biology; secondly, concepts from holistic theory; and thirdly, concepts from social theory. It uses Foulkes’s review papers, particularly those on Goldstein and Elias, to introduce ideas drawn from outside psychoanalytic theory and reflect what was the latest research and practice of the day. These were thinkers who could shine a light on the way man develops as a social animal. Each is taken up by Foulkes in order to contribute to a different way of viewing how the reflective mind emerges. In addition to these other writers, Foulkes’s paper ‘On Introjection’ describes how the outer world becomes a part of our inner life. The chapter ends with an overview of his model of the mind, which included both the biological and the social.
