ABSTRACT
Although Foulkes (e.g., 1973–1974) proposed a concept of the social unconscious, traversing an individual, “dynamic unconscious”, it was not developed in theory. Exploring textual tensions within the corpus of Foulkes’ work, Dalal (1998) argues that Foulkes ultimately collapses a potentially radical concept of the social unconscious into a more biologically derived, relatively static, “foundation matrix”; a foundation matrix where, in the minimal description of Foulkes (1971), group members, “have the same qualities as a species, the same anatomy and physiology, and also perhaps archaic traces of ancient experiences” (p. 212). As all theories are developed in response to that which is missing, Dalal (2001) reminds us that “the notion of the social unconscious seeks to compensate for … the absence of the social in much psychoanalytic discourse. Thus at the very least, the phrase brings some notion of the social into the discursive frame” (p. 539). However, in Dalal’s judgment, Foulkes’ concept of the social unconscious remained “weak”.
