The Individual, the Group and Society: Their Psychoanalytic Inquiry*

Classical psychoanalysis tended to pose a sharp opposition between “internal” and “external,” arguing that the psychoanalytic inquiry should refer only to the internal, and that any attempt to interpret human affairs in terms of the external—i.e., of group, institutional, social, political, and cultural phenomena—implies leaving the strictly psychoanalytic field altogether. The author considers this to be a false dichotomy, which does not correspond with the actual functioning of human beings, since we cannot identify mind with the intrapersonal, understood as those processes which take place within the limits of an individual organism. If we define the mind field as the set of symbolization, communication, and symbolic transformation processes, it is obvious that interpersonal and transpersonal phenomena—whether group, institutional, social, or cultural—are necessarily mental. Besides, clinical observation shows that these are also subject to the conflict dynamics and defensive processes that Freud originally discovered and studied in the intrapersonal field. Therefore, most of the “external” phenomena and processes are also unconscious, both in the descriptive sense—i.e., they are out of consciousness at a given moment—and in the dynamic sense—i.e., they are kept out of consciousness as a consequence of an active effort to prevent their recognition by the subjects involved. In this phenomenon of false consciousness, there is a confluence of the Freudian concept of repression and the Marxist one of ideology. The inquiry of this unconscious dimension is the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic research. Conversely, the external is also internal, since not only is the individual psychic structure constituted from the internalization of the experience of relations that take place in the interpersonal, group, institutional, and social fields, but also the inter- and transpersonal processes pervade the individual, thus determining his or her experience and behavior, and becoming the deepest stratum of the unconscious. The individual, the group, and society thus become one and the same matrix, extending in all directions in space and time. This should be the object of the analytic inquiry.