ABSTRACT
“The community is represented”, so argued Foulkes (1966 p. 155), “in the treatment room”, including the “valuations” and “norms” of that community. “Community” has changed immeasurably since this was penned and this chapter considers four domains in which group analysis, as therapy and theory, can play a modest role in containing or illuminating some complex issues of the contemporary world. It is not only a question of “modernity” in the singular, for, as Taylor (2004) argues, we live in an era of “multiple modernities”, consisting of divergent amalgams of practices, institutions, and ways of life. And, as Giddens (1991) argues, “… because of the ‘openness’ of social life today, the pluralisation of contexts of action and the diversity of ‘authorities’, lifestyle choice is increasingly important in the constitution of self-identity and daily activity” (p. 5).
