Reflections on Group Analysis and Philosophy

Abstract

The article firstly questions the possible relationship between group analysis and philosophy. It then discusses the Foulkesean ‘ethics’ of leadership and its roots in Freudian psychoanalysis and the European Enlightenment. In this context, Foulkes’ group analytic conception of the superego and his view that the group members ‘collectively’ constitute the norm from which ‘individually’, they deviate being (re-)considered. Building on this ‘Law of Group Dynamics’, it is argued that the particular kind of experience allowed for in and by group psychotherapy is one of ‘moral intimacy’, a concept borrowed from the Swiss philosopher and novelist Peter Bieri. Ending on a note on aesthetics, some aspects of the relation between imagination and social-historical creation are being elucidated.