Regression and the Maternal in the History of Psychoanalysis, 1900-1957

This paper examines the history of the concept of ‘regression’ as it was perceived by Sandor Ferenczi and some of his followers in the first half of the twentieth century. The first part provides a short history of the notion of ‘regression’ from the late nineteenth century to Ferenczi's work in the 1920s and 1930s. The second and third parts of the paper focus on two other thinkers on regression, who worked in Britain, under the influence of the Ferenczian paradigm – the interwar Scottish psychiatrist, Ian D. Suttie; and the British-Hungarian psychoanalyst, and Ferenczi's most important pupil, Michael Balint. Rather than a descriptive term which comes to designate a pathological mental stage, Ferenczi understood ‘regression’ as a much more literal phenomenon. For him, the mental desire to go backwards in time is a universal one, and a consequence of an inevitable traumatic separation from the mother in early childhood, which has some deep personal and cultural implications. The paper aims to show some close affinities between the preoccupation of some psychoanalysts with ‘regression’, and the growing interest in social and cultural aspects of ‘motherhood’ and ‘the maternal role’ in mid-twentieth-century British society

The matrix of group analysis. An historical perspective

In 1939 a German—Jewish psychoanalyst who had left Germany in 1933 and who had, in 1938 moved to Exeter, a small city in the south west of England, began to practise group analysis. Soon caught up in military psychiatry, where he had ample opportunity to put his ideas and experience into practice, S.H. Foulkes elaborated his theoretical ideas in his first book in 1948. Thus the practice of group analysis began in England, geographically far from Frankfurt and from Vienna, where Foulkes had trained and worked, and in relative professional isolation. This is often a necessary condition for original work; compare the example of Ronald Fairbairn, contemporaneous in Edinburgh. But no man is an island and Foulkes' work has to be set in the context of the European ideas of his intellectual and social inheritance. We must situate him in history, figure against ground, as he himself insisted was a basic component of group-analytic theory