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The authors establish a dialogue between themselves, starting from personal experience - in one case of what used to be the collectivist values of the communist era in Eastern Europe, and the other of more individualistic ones in the West, characterized by free enterprise in capitalist society and social democracy. The authors try to explore healthy and pathological consequences of each culture, when these are promoted in an exclusive way and at the expense of the other. Using psychoanalytic understanding to reflect on the advantages, as well as the corrupting tendencies of both, they highlight the pitfalls of extremism in either direction and ponder questions of integration and movement between the positions.
The authors’ psychoanalytic hypothesis is that both these social extremes - collectivism and individualism - represent an escape fro and a socially sanctioned and institutionalized defence against, the inner struggle between these impulses in the personality and in society. Only when society and social institutions attain some tolerance of this struggle are they able to contain and creatively use the tension it creates, without denying the expression of either polarity.