ABSTRACT

EXPECTING PSYCHOLOGY We see in the foregoing epigraph Freud’s style of extending individual psychology into an analysis of the social order. Words are his best justification, but they also carry ambiguity. Assuming

an intimate relation between group and individual psychology, does the individual give its psychology to the group or is it the other way around? Freud’s 1921 study, Group psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, transforms this question and plunges readers into the thickets of psychological entwinement and the struggle for separation. Freud’s text is difficult, perhaps even a form of disregarding real relations to his readers. This present chapter, too, may carry such dilemmas. Readers are invited to experiment with the preceding remarks and ask: what are the exceptional conditions whereby individual psychology may disregard its real relations to others? What forms can this disregard take? We develop these questions throughout this chapter but for now can notice the complications Freud already proposes: the unconscious disregards real relations to others, the transference holds this disregard in store, and some of the ego’s defense mechanisms such as denial and undoing what has already happened can be grouped here as well. In the last chapter, we also proposed that free association in the psychoanalytic clinic invites disregard for the real feelings of the analyst and others. Freud creates more forms of disregard in his little book. We pick up this last thread in the chapter’s conclusion.