ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social processes that induce splitting in individuals. The principle of personal integration that has been derived from psychoanalysis is one that can be employed in social and political contexts. Social influences can induce those primitive mechanisms of splitting, projection, and introjection. External influences that rob the person of vital mental faculties have been found by experimental social psychologists. Under social pressure, a group induced an individual to give up his capacity to make ordinary visual judgements. In another experiment, the individual was relieved of his capacity to make a moral judgement about the way to treat other persons. The social psychology experiments confirm how identity becomes dislocated. The primitive processes are deeply implicated in certain social occurrences, including: spreading; the social moulding of personal identity; the allotting of one-dimensional roles, or stereotyping, which includes scapegoating, racism, sexism, and other prejudices; and the demolition of the personality under organized state coercion.
