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The online Large Group promoted by the Group Analytic Society International in response to the Covid 19 lockdown, presented participants with the 'Chat' facility alongside the standard verbal communication. Chat rapidly became an alternative channel of communication and a forum for commentary, criticism and challenge to the primary spoken discourse of the group and became a home and a vehicle for disaffected and dissident voices, particularly those marginalized according to race, class and gender. Controversy has developed as various objections have been raised against Chat being allowed in GASi online Large Groups. In so far as Chat has become a place for marginalized and subaltern voices to speak and be 'heard', then closing it becomes a praxis of silencing and further institutionalizing racism, patriarchy and class oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper begins with a brief account of the theoretical traditions that have framed the discussion of class in British sociology. It goes on to discuss the changes in class structure in the last 50 years and summarizes the most recent work on how social class affects people's lives. Finally it makes some suggestions about the relevance of this for clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a working class man, born into the movement of organized labour in Britain, I am implicated in that failure referred to above, to achieve the unity and unionization we might have aspired to with black workers. This takes us to the internal conflict of organized labour in the West, emphasized by Andrews, (see above) that unions negotiating improved pay and conditions for their members are doing no more than claiming their own share of the profits of colonialism and slavery. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this encounter with "whiteness" is not its privileges but the shared unconscious phantasy, the belief in the social unconscious, that those privileges are deserved and earned by the superiority of white European society or perhaps more precisely, of white I people i . Post-colonial studies developed from the 1970s to study and describe the impact of colonialism on colonized societies and its lasting legacies, including the continuing relations between those societies and the West. [Extracted from the article]

S.H. Foulkes acknowledged the relevance of the 'social' in the group-analytic process by introducing the idea of a 'social unconscious' supplementing the Freudian unconscious. The present article focuses on access to unconscious 'social facts' (such as class, for instance) in group-analytic practice. In order to do so, Foulkes's reformulation of the ego-psychological principle of analysing 'from surface to depth' is reconstructed and reconsidered clinically in the context of his own group work at the Northfield Military Hospital. Additionally, his concept of 'resonance' is examined in detail from a group-analytic and systemic vertex, and then highlighted by a vignette from the inpatient treatment of a patient suffering from addiction. Finally, some further thoughts about a group-analytic theory of interpretation are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]