The Communicative Unconscious - The Relationship Between Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis. Remarks on a Vignette by Sigmund Freud resp Theodor Reik

Using a vignette on collective forgetting, written by Theodor Reik and cited by Sigmund Freud, the article discusses the relationship between psychoanalysis and group analysis. The author finds fundamental differences in the conception of an unconscious communication between Reik/Freud and Foulkes. But it also emerges that with the intersubjective turn the psychoanalytic and group-analytic conceptions begin to converge. The opposition of a psychoanalytic and a group-analytic perspective becomes obsolete and has been superseded by a relationship, which may be understood most appropriately as a relationship of complementarity.