Group therapy. A group-analytic approach

Group analysis as a clinical enterprise started with S. H. Foulkes (1898–1976), a German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He worked a while under Kurt Goldstein, a significant person within neurology and gestalt psychology, before he spent two years in Vienna, where he went through a training analysis with Helene Deutsch. Later he became the head of the outpatient clinic at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute which shared location with the Sociological Institute at the University and the Institute of Social Studies, led by Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer, respectively. The two last institutes were later to become the hearth of the Frankfurt School in German sociology and philosophy. The three institutes had several seminars together and some of the sociologists also went through psychoanalysis. The Frankfurt sociology, gestalt psychology, and psychoanalysis became the major sources of inspiration for Foulkes and were to influence the group-analytic theories he later developed. Being a Jew, Foulkes early realized the dangers with the Nazi regime and therefore, invited by Ernest Jones, he emigrated to London with his family in 1933, and became a British citizen in 1938. As an active member of the British Psychoanalytic Society he supported A. Freud in the struggles between her, M. Klein, and the section of ‘the independents’.

In 1939, at the start of World War II, Foulkes moved to Exeter, settled as a private practitioner and had his debut as a group therapist, at an age of 42. His group patients, altogether around 50 persons during the next few years, were partly newly recruited, partly patients he already had worked with for some time in individual psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. In 1943, he was drafted to the army and stationed at Northfield Military Neurotic Centre, which treated soldiers and repatriated prisoners of war suffering from post-traumatic conditions. Many of the most eminent British psychiatrists of the time were engaged at this hospital, which beca