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Hitherto social psychology has not paid sufficient attention to the fact that human beings are not only psychic entities, but that they have bodies also. Early experiences help to form our bodies, and their final forms are maps of our instinctual urges. On the psychic side we form body-imagos 'Körperbilder' both of ourselves and of other people. These
two are so closely linked that certain lesions of the brain make it impossible for the patient to orientate himself, not only with regard to his own body but with regard to other people's bodies also. The body is a social phenomenon, and hitherto our knowledge of other people's bodies has been undervalued. The personal and the social interest in the body run side by side. Each person's imago of his own body contains that of other people also. There is a perpetual interaction between people's bodies, and the body-imagos are in a condition of continual change. In the theory of identification more heed should be paid to the fact that identifications take place between people part of whose beings are bodies. There is no body-imago of the community. Social psychology is in this respect individual psychology. Social psychology does not only depend on identification but on other actions which take the body for granted.
Our theories of beauty and ethics rest on a basis of a personality in a body and we live in a society in which other personalities and their bodies have the same fundamental importance as our own.