Dr S. H. Foulkes (1898–1976)

DEAR MR HAYLEY,

May I appeal through your pages to anyone who knew the late Dr S. H. Foulkes (1898–1976), and has personal reminiscences, factual information, letters or photographs, to contact me. I am planning a biographical study with the support of his widow Elizabeth, and many members of the International Psychoanalytic Association and of the Group-Analytic Society (London).

It might help readers to be reminded that S. H. Foulkes was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, studied medicine in Heidelberg and Frankfurt where he graduated in 1923, and for a while worked with the influential neurologist Kurt Goldstein. He trained as a psychoanalyst from 1928–30 in Vienna, where his analyst was Helene Deutsch, and then returned to the new Institute of Psychoanalysis in Frankfurt, which shared a building with the Institute of Sociology, before coming to England in 1933. Here Foulkes continued to work as a psychoanalyst and became a training analyst, whilst gradually developing his ideas about the interaction of the individual and his social contexts, developmental and current. It was during the second World War at the Northfield Military Neurosis Centre in Birmingham, that his ideas matured and eventually gave rise to the Therapeutic Community movement and the approach to psychoanalytic group psychotherapy known as Group Analysis. Foulke's influential period as Consultant Psychotherapist at the Maudsley Hospital, from 1950–1964 did much to promote the latter. He played a major part in the foundation of the Group Analytic Society as a Learned Society in 1956, and the Training Institute of Group Analysis in 1971.

Yours sincerely,