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I wish to make some remarks concerning psychoanalytic group psychology and political theory. Their meaning will be clearer if the following considerations are kept in mind.1
It can be argued that political theory in the West got off on the wrong
foot, and that psychoanalysis has followed its lead. In each instance we witness the imposition of an a priori and categorical distinction between individual and polity. In political theory, we begin with the Apology. Socrates stands before a jury of his Athenian peers and is condemned for practising philosophy — corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods of the state. This concrete and specific historical moment becomes paradigmatic. By the time we reach the modern world and classical liberalism, the Athens within which Socrates lived for seventy years and the Socrates who lived seventy years within it disappear. Only the Socrates who drank the hemlock remains, and the state is re-created as Leviathan or, at best, a Glauconian contract among consenting individuals.
For the most part, Freud and psychoanalysts coming after him have been partisans of the same enlightened/Enlightenment individual. This individual may have nocturnal emissions (d'Alembert), exhibitionistic tendencies (Rousseau), or a penchant for polymorphous sexual perversity (de Sade). At a minimum, we must pass through a Nietzschean defile when travelling from Kant's Königsberg or Mill's London to Freud's Vienna — which is to say, the individual who stands outside and against society is not necessarily rational or moral. None the less, there is (if I dare say so) a monotonous regularity in the presupposed opposition between individual and polity.
Let me be clear: I am very far from denying that specific empirical individuals often find themselves with interests and passions that bring them into conflict with other individuals, the com