The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups and Societies: Vol 1. Mainly Theory. Edited by Earl Hopper and Haim Weinberg. New International Library of Group Analysis. London:  Karnac Books, 2011,  400 pp.

This intellectually challenging and widely ranging volume provides the psychoanalytic community with a number of articles written by an international

network of group analysts, with specializations in psychiatry, psychoanalysis (representing a variety of theoretical orientations), clinical psychology, and psychodrama. Most contributors come from European and Latin American countries, with a few from the United States and Israel. The volume is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the social unconscious, a concept largely understudied among psychoanalysts and social scientists. The volume Mainly Theory—to be followed by Mainly Matrices and Mainly Clinical Work—is organized into six parts, each analyzing a particular theoretical aspect of the social unconscious. Earl Hopper, an American who lives in London, was trained as a sociologist, psychoanalyst, and group analyst, and his co-editor Haim Weinberger, an Israeli who lives in the United States, formerly an electrical engineer, is now a clinical psychologist and group analyst. In their informative introduction to the volume, the editors define the social unconscious as stemming from the construction of a matrix of relational persons within social systems. Such a conceptualization brings to the fore much-needed political, religious, and philosophical concerns in psychoanalytic thinking.

Part 1, “The Origins of the Concept of the Social Unconscious,” discusses the “fathers” of group psychotherapy: S. H. Foulkes, Enrique Pichon-Riviere, and Jacob Moreno. The three chapters are wonderfully rich and set the tone for the rest of the volume, especially around the work of Foulkes, which shows how body, mind, and society are interdependent. The holistic orientation of individuals in social situations, the impact of neurobiological processes, and the role of social networks and cultural transmission—all of these processes are part of the social unconscious. Nitzgen's article describes in detail Foulkes's phenomenology of t