Group Analytic Psychotherapy

Foulkes sets out the working method of group analysis: how a small therapeutic group is composed, how its sessions unfold, and how the practitioner reads what passes between members over months of meeting. Written late in his career, it gathers the clinical procedures behind his approach into a practical account of conducting a slow-open analytic group.

For the practising clinician it locates the cure in the group itself rather than in a series of individual treatments carried out in company. Foulkes treats the shared field of communication, the matrix, as the ground on which meaning forms, and asks the conductor to tend that field rather than steer it, trusting members to do much of the analytic work for one another. A member's symptom is read as a communication within the network, a disturbance the group can take up, mirror, and slowly translate.

First published in 1975, the book later appeared in the Routledge reissue of Foulkes' work and remains a compact statement of his mature technique.