ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the manifestations of “psychic retreats” in social systems ranging from dyads to societies in the context of traumatogenic processes, especially in connection with the theory and concept of the social unconscious. “Social–psychic retreats”, unconsciously formed within groups, families, organizations, and societies, might also be more positive or more negative, as well as partial or total. Many similarities between intra-psychic pathological organizations and social pathological organizations have been noted, but this has been mainly in order to convey the nature of the internal organization, rather than the other way around. Psychic retreats are spaces for perverse mimicry, tending to distort and misuse good objects, truth, and reality. Unlike the vast literature about treating patients with individual psychic retreats in one-to-one psychoanalytic settings, there is little literature concerning their healing in human groups. The work in group analytic settings is useful for understanding the dynamics of social–psychic retreats in larger systems.
