The Social “Instinct”

Since Freud's era, psychoanalytic theory and social psychology theory have tended to develop along largely independent lines of thought. Although social psychology and social theory have incorporated certain psychoanalytic concepts (Bocock, 1976; Craib, 1990), psychoanalytic theorists, beginning with Freud (1922), have usually seen social phenomena as being of secondary importance.

Psychoanalytic theory tends to depict intrapsychic structures as being essentially complete by latency age. Traditionally emphasis has almost totally been placed on the effect of real or fantasized child-parent interactions. Broader social experiences are then usually understood as having a secondary role in the reshaping of primary structures. Drawing on observations from sociobiology, social psychology research, and psychoanalytic theories, as well as from clinical experience, this paper will attempt to show how social needs, in particular the need to be part of a group, can be seen as innate intrapsychic phenomena, independent from other intrapsychic issues. This viewpoint allows for a different understanding of certain clinical material, transference manifestations, and psychopathological conditions.

In the early 1900s William McDougall (1908) proposed a system for understanding human behavior based on a description of basic instincts and their corresponding emotions. McDougall believed that much of human behavior involved a myriad of instincts, each with a specific emotion functioning as an expressor of the instinct and a motivator for behavior. These pairs of instinct and emotion were: flight and fear, curiosity and wonder, repulsion and disgust, self-assertion and elation, parental instinct and tenderness, sex and jealousy, and gregariousness and loneliness. McDougall proposed that the gregarious instinct, the emotional pull to form groups, is crucial in creating and driving societies. Thus he stated

We are often told that the dullness of the country drives people to the town. But the