Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 87
The concept of the social unconscious has to be
accepted.
What is now happening in Europe with nations, with groups of people,
is difficult to explain in terms only of politics, political science,
sociology, history... Whole groups of people, nations, states,
sometimes act with thoughtfulness and awareness; at other times,
irrationally as though against their own conscious will, and even to
their disadvantage...
Just as psychoanalysis examines the unconscious motivation
of individuals, so group analysis explores the unconscious contents
and actions of human groups, large and small. The purpose is to
become aware of that which was hidden from conscious knowledge;
the purpose is for human groups not to surrender to destructive forces
but to behave with clear awareness. The trigger of destructive forces
is the traumatic experience unsolved in the past; at such a time “…the
members of a group are likely to re-live and even to re-enact their
unmourned and unresolved ‘issues’, both from their own pasts and
from the pasts of previous generations that have been transmitted to
them.” (Hopper & Weinberg, 2011)
It is the instinctive power of aggression – or rather, how we
handle it – that is the central concept for understanding the
contemporary situation. Man makes use of his capability for
aggression not only to destroy others and himself; from days of old he
has used it for positive purposes: to cut down a tree, to hunt an animal,
to chew food. Above all, to create a community, and not by violent
enslavement. The community with which someone wants to identify
emerges voluntarily, that is, by the reorientation of instinctive forces
with the help of rituals, deeply experienced through the body as well,
and through the senses. The instinctive force of aggression transforms
itself into a creative power that holds the human group together and
renews it in the course of rituals, games, ceremonials....
The outcome is then also the circumscription, the
demarcation and the boundaries of the human group.
The theme of boundaries is now a sign through which the
social unconscious breaks into our attention. The theme of boundaries
is clarified by two powerful experiences of contemporary Europe, the
refugees and Brexit.
Boundaries, however, are not only about politics and
geography. “Boundaries” emerge as a theme unrealised by the
consciousness in the form of very varied phenomena.