ABSTRACT
The Imago Croup, to whom this paper was presented, consisted of people interested in applying psychoanalytic findings to other disciplines. They met regularly in the early 1960s, and among those attending were: Katherine Jones (Ernest Jones's wife), R. Money-Kyrle (psychoanalyst), Adrian Stokes (art critic), R. Wollheim (philosopher), the Holmes' (an LSE sociologist and his wife), and Ernst Gombrich (art critic and historian).
The author talks here about the concern with measurable possessions and how the extension of self-esteem through an identification with possession takes place through envy, delusional Jealousy, projective identification and the defences used against them. He illustrates this by examining the social attitudes towards land tenure and the introduction of machinery to thirteenth-century rural England. Towards the end of the paper he refers to the "apocalyptic dread" feared in earlier centuries, as an inevitable consequence of the loss of a 134 human relationship with the mother's body, which leads to the haunting dread of catastrophe: the death of the mother. When this paper was written in 1965, there were intimations of a "bomb" capable of apocalyptic destructiveness. This paper anticipates the writings stimulated by the danger of nuclear arms proliferation of the 1980s.
