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In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology […] is at the same time social psychology as well. (Freud, 1921: 69)
I thought this quote from Freud's Group Psychology is a good place to begin to think about groups and social justice. Let me start by claiming that the dominant mode of thinking in our late neoliberal age is what John Rickman (1951/1957) would call one-person psychology. It's about one individual as conceived of in isolation. Other people are added on later, as an afterthought, resulting in what Adorno (1966/1998) called “the coldness of the isolated competitor”, who would like to escape this condition, but cannot, in so far as he or she is also its product. As products of our time and age, we are limited in our ability to think beyond the given, dominant cognitive frameworks that provide for understanding, and also in our ability to step outside the affective quality and quantity which shapes our surroundings and ourselves. Though to reflect on what social justice might mean, we need to think of the complexities of affective ties and identifications between and within us.
“Identification,” Freud informs us, “is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal”, he continues, “has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond” (1921:105). In devouring one's dear enemies, does one end up posessing them, owning them, or rather becoming these people, taking on the properties of one's incorporated opponents? “The distinction between an identification with the father and the choice of the father as an object,” writes