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Chapter one of the book is entitled ‘Introduction’. In this chapter the author states the central concern of the book as that of making sense, in general, of the phenomenon of human relating. While the arguments developed in the book are relevant to those concerned with managing, leading and belonging to organisations, as well as to those involved in education, training and development, the focus of the author's attention remains on therapeutic groups.
The issue that the book begins with, is the nature of problem arising out of the split that exists in current Western thought between thinking as theory and action as practice. The author believes that, in order to understand the differences existing between different ways of thinking, it is essential to explore how they have evolved.
He takes the reader from there to Dalal's teasing out of two contradictory strands in Foulkes' thinking about therapy groups. These are, first, the Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which treats the individual (the inner world of the individual), and social groups (the outer ‘real’ world) that act on each other, as discrete entities. The second strand is based on the process sociology of Elias, which fundamentally contests the notion of innate behaviours. For him, the individual mind and social relations are simply two aspects of the same process.
The author rejects the idea that the two approaches can exist simultaneously. He accepts Elias' process sociology that grants primacy to neither the individual nor the group, but considers both as aspects of basically the same social process evolving over long time periods. Further, he combines Elias' theory with that of Mead's theory of symbolic interaction. He also goes on to argue that the complexity sciences provide analogies for action terms, using the theories of Elias and Mead. The assumption here is that mind and social groups are