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It is important, in order to contextualize this review, to say something of my biography. I am trained as a sociologist and social anthropologist and came to look at psychoanalytic ideas to see how they might provide something lacking in traditional social sciences, that is, an account of affect and emotion. I am now committed to something that is called psycho-social studies which, as the name is meant to suggest, tries to link the social and the psychoanalytic without any desire to reduce the one to the other.
The question that dominates Freud's various works on groups is a simple one: what ties individuals into groups? If we want to summarize what Freud was attempting in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, it is to show the extent to which individual psychology and group psychology are inextricably intertwined but with the individual psychology as the bedrock for group psychology. The book reviewed here - one in the series Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues - provides a number of approaches to Freud's work, in the main from practising analysts.
The contributors provide what is, in effect, a genealogy of psychoanalytic approaches to small and larger groups, tracing a developmental line from Freud's engagement with, for example, Le Bon's analysis of crowd behaviour, to a more fully developed approach to groups in Bion, Foulkes, Rickman, and others. In brief, John Kerr provides a detailed reading of Freud's text from the point of view of the clinician. Didier Anxieu discusses the historical background to the work - including the idea that what stimulated Freud's interest in groups was the psychoanalytic movement itself - and goes on to discuss later developments in the psychoanalysis of groups. He argues, for example, that Bion's idea of basic assumptions is, at the level of the group, the equivalent to dreams at the level of the individual.
Robert Caper discusses the difference between unorganized and