ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the evidences of disintegration of the individual in all fields of contemporary experience, from social, political and economic processes to those in learning, art and poetry. They are but different aspects of one vast, comprehensive transformation that has come to affect the very inner structure of man and threaten the human values which were inherent in him as an individual. The primary characteristic of the human structure as an individual is indivisibility, implying coherent unity, wholeness. In daily experience the individual is given as a compact unity. The various strata of the unconscious—the generic, the individual and the collective—are rarely found in reality in clearly separated or separable form. Collective battlecries may mobilize deep-seated genealogical or individual attitudes and prejudices. In fact, antiquity arrives at the stage of a full-grown collective in the elaborate administrative body of the Roman Empire.
