The World Wide Web

The Foundation Matrix

Regine Scholz Dublin 21st. Aug. 2008

The unconscious connection in a group (Foulkes):

Matrix“The matrix is the hypothetical web of communication and relationship in

a given group. It is the common shared ground which ultimately determines the meaning and significance of all events and upon which all communications and interpretation, verbal and non-verbal, rest” (1964, 292)

Foundation matrix “I have accepted from the very beginning that even a group of total

strangers, being of the same species and more narrowly of the same culture, share a fundamental mental matrix (foundation matrix). To this their closer acquaintance and their intimate exchanges add consistently so that they form a current, ever moving and ever developing dynamic matrix” (1990: 228).

Foulkes can be seen as an early communicational theoretician

of unconscious processes.

Dimensions of Content

• Foulkes: Anatomy and physiology of the species (biology), culture, language and social class

• Le Roy: Inside and outside the group, family systems, gender relations, relations between the generations

• My addition: whole social structure including power relations and history; time dimension

• communicative approach to biology & culture• national and international history • power relations• time

Contents‘ Summary

Media

• Enlarged understanding of communication

• Importance of the bodies – as carrying meanings – It is always perceived and constituted in all its

dimensions at a social level (Habitus, Bourdieu).– Habitus means embodied social values

Implications

• Time dimension– Intergenerational unconscious tradition – collective trauma & collective memory.

• Theory of group cohesion:– Body– Language/narration– Externalisations: holy books, museums, monuments, rituals

Thesis

• Social Unconscious needs a group analytic theory of unconscious processes

• Foundation matrix as starting point

• Task: to create a group analytic idea of unconscious processes in which the multiple actors are constitutive.

Tentative definition of ‘Unconsciousness’ I

In a descriptive way unconscious are all phenomena that the symbolically mediated communication of group members is not focussed on. (Mies)

Tentative definition of ‘Unconsciousness’ II

Dynamically unconscious in a group analytic perspective are relations of symbolic violence,

those scenes and communicational acts that are excluded by these relations from the ongoing communicational process.

By symbolic violence this exclusion appears as condition of group membership and the capacity to communicate.