ABSTRACT
Public relations (PR) could not exist without the individual. PR knows this but has said surprisingly little about it. Practice and scholarship in the field often bypass the individual, and concentrate on groups. This does not alter the fact that the individual must form relations with groups on a spectrum running between enthusiastic, uncertain and reluctant. It is at least a fact that human experience is locked into the dimension or as many philosophers and physicists propose, the illusion, of time. Consciousness is a sufficiently immense field in its own right, and in the words of a clinical investigator: 'persists as a fundamental question in science and philosophy'. An immense subject now presents itself, the use of symbols converting the individual need to communicate into a way to communicate with groups or as a group. Symbolic thinking is essential to individual identity and expression.
