ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Freud's thinking about the individual and the group for which purpose I will draw on those of his papers that deal explicitly with the group/social in some way. These are `Civilized ' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908), Totem and Taboo (1913), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Civilization and its Discontents (1930). For Freud, the individual mind or psyche is an `internal world' consisting of innate drives, developmentally shaped through interaction with an external world of reality. He, therefore, draws a distinction between individual psychology, the inside, and group psychology, the outside, stating that the oldest is group psychology:
The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at ®rst glance may seem to be full of signi®cance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to ®nd satisfaction of his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under exceptional circumstances is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very ®rst individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justi®able sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well.
