Freud’s Transindividua lMoment: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
by Etienne Balibar
pp. 88-105 Issue 13 (7,1) – January-June 2020 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2020.7.1.4
Abstract
The essay on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego published in 1921 marks the theoretical advent of a properly trans-individual structure in Psychoanalytical theory, which maximizes the tension with the evolutionist myth from Totem and Taboo. By turning the individual into an effect of the group, the new Freudian ontology of the relationship that draws on the schema of identification opens onto two opposing paths of interpretation. One of them, a regressive path, identifies the genesis of the group with the repetition of the originary parricide: it posits the regression to indistinctness on the model of hypnosis. The other, a repressive path, posits the Superego as the origin of guilt in order to conceptualize individualization as an autonomization in relation to the group.