ABSTRACT
This third chapter considers the conditions that lead individuals to establish social ties, forming configurations that at the same time as uniting individuals via identifying traits, exclude those who do not possess these same traits. Elias’s research focused on a small town in rural England. Freud’s investigations into social institutions led the psychoanalyst to come up with the concept of the narcissism of small differences. The identification processes between individuals, marked by the internalization of social rules and customs in the form of the superego, form social groups which absorb the investments of love and gratification, at the same time as they project outwards, or rather, towards all that is different, the impulses of hate, aggressiveness, and death. The formation of the self-image and the we-image, as Elias proposes, engages with Freud’s ideas about the ego ideal and the superego. Identification in a group produces processes of inclusion and exclusion which relate to every individual’s need for gratification, pleasure, and recognition by belonging to a superior, more humane group, that is, groups and individuals considered more ideal in relation to others.
