Trouble at t(he) Mill — Thinking about the Social Unconscious in Therapy and Training

Abstract

In Appreciation of Dennis Brown

This article is about the group analytic concept of the Social Unconscious, and is an attempt to grasp some of the challenges that this idea (or collection of ideas) presents, especially to students of group analysis: and perhaps one or two of the possibilities. The mill in my title means firstly the psychoanalytic ‘mill’ located wherever there are two or more people gathered in the service of analysis and secondly my own mental mill working through the learning process, with a passing reference to the class struggles centred on the textile mills in the north of England in the early part of the 19th-century¹. What I wish to investigate in particular is the choice made in therapeutic situations, between analysing the unconscious from an individual standpoint, and analysing from a social standpoint, something which has been brought to the fore by the coining of the term ‘social unconscious’.