Hidden Legacies. S.H. Foulkes,Kurt Goldstein and Ernst Cassirer

Abstract

Apart from being himself a creative and prolific writer, Malcolm Pines has also been an important editor of group analytic writings. In that role, he has generously encouraged, furthered and tutored a good many group analysts in their own efforts to write (including myself). As an editor, a particular focus and concern of Malcolm’s have been the writings of S.H. Foulkes, which he tirelessly sought to make public and to promote— and which, after all, was never an easy task from the beginning. The following article has been written to honour this huge editorial effort, its intellectual rigour and underlying eros. In it, I shall (re)approach Foulkes’ early review of Kurt Goldstein’s The Organism (1934), one of his lesser known articles which was to appear in English only after Foulkes’ death. Translated and abridged by E. Foulkes and introduced by M. Pines, it missed some of the nuances of the German original, and thus important traces regarding the scientific background of Foulkes’ work, especially the legacy of Goldstein’s cousin, the philosopher E. Cassirer.