When Trying to Understand the Individual-Group Relationship, Can We Talk About the Group Unconscious or the Social Unconscious?
… from the very beginning individual psychology… is also social psychology.
Sigmund Freud, 1921
Although psychoanalysis provides us a framework for working with the psyche of the individual, Freud, with increasing emphasis, invited us to grasp the social as well as the individual. Freud began with Totem and Taboo (1913) and developed the path he had begun with Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego (1921), The Ego and The Id (1923), Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930) and Moses and Monotheism (1937). He makes us think about the artificiality of the distinction between the individual and society, through his writings and he shows us that man is a social being. In this presentation, firstly, Freud’s views will be mentioned in order to understand the functions of groups, the movements of communities and the relationship between individuals and groups from a psychoanalytical point of view.
Following Freud’s views, psychoanalysts such as Bion, Käes. Foulkes has discussed group processes. There are also psychoanalysts such as Hopper (2011) who wrote about the “social unconscious” and these views will also be mentioned in the presentation. As we set out to grasp the relationship between the individual and the group and the social with a psychoanalytical way of thinking, that is, when we leave the safe space of individual analyses in the rooms, which concepts will we proceed with? Can we speak of a group mind? As psychoanalysts, can we psychoanalyse the social? Can groups have unconscious defenses like individuals? Are there social and cultural factors affecting the unconscious? Or can we talk about the Social Unconscious? Within the framework of the views of all these authors, we will try to answer these questions together in the presentation.
Yeşim KORKUT is a training analyst at Psike Istanbul Psychoanalysis Association. She is the former president of Psike Istanbul Board of Directors. She has served as the chair of the Ethics Committee for three terms in our association. She is currently the Chair of EPF Ethics Forum. She is interested in the use of the psychoanalytic perspective to understand families and group dynamics. Korkut, who is a couple and family therapist and who has group therapist training. She is the representative of Psike İstanbul in the COFAP (Couple and Family Psychoanalysis studies) commission of IPA and has participated in different training activities of IPA on groups.