You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The question of whether one can imagine group psychic processes as being comparable to those of the individual was answered long ago. In his seminal paper “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego,” Freud, as early as 1921, wrote:
The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. 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, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (Freud, 1921, p. 68)
Nevertheless, the group possesses a psychic functioning of its own, which can be different from that of the individuals that belong to it, a collective psychic reality that should not be reduced to a simple sum or even to the interaction of individual realities (Anzieu, 1975; Käes, 2004).
According to Freud, identification plays a crucial role in the building of group bonds:
Thus social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification … Many equals, who can identify themselves with one another, and a single person superior to them all—that is the situation that we find realized in groups which are capable of subsisting. (Freud, 1921, p. 120)
In the above passage, the issues of identification, hostility, leadership (the leader representing an ideal), and the relation of the individual to the group (be it the group leader or a member of it)