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.
Forenote [1977] - I now find this paper, written in 1939 and published in 1950, a meticulous deduction from slightly obsolescent theories and rather dull.
This paper was originally given as an open lecture at the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis in the spring of 1939. (It was one of a series of six, delivered by different analysts which, but for the war, would have been published in book form.) The examples I chose to illustrate my particular thesis were the events and attitudes most familiar to an English audience at that critical period. The fact that they can now be considered in retrospect may in some ways be an advantage and, for this reason, I have not brought them up to date - except occasionally by adding an explanatory note in brackets.
As to the thesis itself, this is an elaboration of Freud's theory as expounded in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego . He then described a primary group as ‘a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego-ideal (later called the superego) and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’. This formula, which I accept as fundamental, has been my starting point. But while Freud was concerned mainly with the paternal imago, we know that both parent figures must play some rôle. Moreover, they must do so in each of the two aspects - ideally good and ideally bad - into which they are split in the child's early unconscious fantasy. (This splitting of an object as a defence against the anxieties aroused by ambivalence towards it has been especially stressed by Melanie Klein.) Some elaboration of Freud's formula to include the rôles of