ABSTRACT

In the last chapter, I described Freud's thinking about the relationship between the individual and the social. In essence, the individual is understood as an internal world. The social, or the group, is constituted by the projective and introjective movement of mental contents between individual worlds. And the social so constituted acts as a constraint, in fact, clashes with, the natural, innate inclinations of the individual internal worlds and it is in this clash that internal worlds are shaped. This is a very different way of thinking to that set out in the ®rst part of this book, where individuals are thought of as social selves, forming and being formed by the cooperative and competitive interactions that are the social. In this way of thinking there are no internal worlds, only private and public role-plays, that is, actions of bodies. Such social selves are not fundamentally at odds with the social since they can only come into being in the social, although as individuals in society they may, of course, ®nd themselves at odds with each other. In this chapter, I will explore the different origins of these two ways of thinking and in the next two chapters I will explore how these different origins continue to affect the further development of those ways of thinking. Exploring the historical development of different strands of thought greatly illuminates the nature of their differences.