ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the broader significance of the psychoanalytic theory of groups for understanding the distinctive developmental tasks that face individuals and social institutions in the context of a modern society. Modern society is an ideal that may be realized to a greater or lesser degree in different settings. An important variant on the idea of regression for understanding group experience in a modern society is the idea of failed development. The chapter draws on the distinction between the group in traditional and modern settings more clearly that being a member of a traditional social unit means a member of a group, whereas in modern society group membership is only part of social experience. The pre-modern group is essentially a family or an extended family unit. The objective of purifying and retrieving the homeland contains no element of the normative claims of modernity and instead seems to reach back to a pre-modern condition that parallels a more primitive emotional situation.
