ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with the new theme introduced in the previous chapter, that of the function of identifications in the subject’s link to the collective. It reminds us that for both Freud and Lacan, the question of the link is introduced at the point where the historical dangers of mounting collectivism in their times converge with their strictly analytical elaborations.
It emphasises the change perceived in the present social context, which is characterised by a crisis of symbolic organisation and hierarchy, such as the family, and by the fragmentation of social links. It refers to Lacan’s thesis regarding the real of jouissance, Y a de l’Un, and the disintegration of the discourses that make up for the non-rapport in capitalistic society.
It then proceeds to an extensive elaboration of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, emphasising the Freudian and Lacanian hypotheses that individual psychology is also social psychology. It shows that Freud, with his thesis of the drives inhibited to their aim, was preoccupied with the question of what can produce the suspension of hostility and limit the narcissistic objection to the social link, a question to which Lacan responded with the theory of the identifications determined by the unifying semblants of the discourse of the master.
Lastly, the chapter reviews the three identifications discussed by Freud in the article: identification with the father, or the parent, independent of object-choice; identification with a trait, such as a symptom, to a libidinal object; and the third identification, also to the symptom, but one which does not pass by a libidinal object-choice. According to Freud, this identification is the one that operates in the group as a link of love which necessarily excludes desire and sexual jouissance.
