Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

90 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
Fashions in clothes and in behaviour resemble a
collective dream: they fulfil the wishes of the social
unconscious
This fashion is, to the social unconscious, what a dream is to the
unconscious individual. A group of people, a gang, a generation,
spontaneously create a fashion in behaviour and in dress as their nonverbal
expression (in which a fashion created artificially, in the salons,
may not succeed). Women walk on the highest heels of history;
walking on high heels changes the posture, it is supposed to emphasise
traditional femininity. Many young mothers carry their small children
in a sling, as close as possible to the body; for some women in labour
it is very important to give birth at home and not in an institution.
Young women search for their own route to the body’s natural
resources, to their own identity that begins by experiencing nature in
their own body. Bare feet, natural or even raw food, natural medicine....
Searching, making mistakes, exaggeration, finding, wishing to protect
oneself. From what? What is the name of that danger?
It is the violence done to nature in man, the non-respecting
of the natural boundaries in man.
Coloured, elongated, decorated nails and exaggeratedly
white teeth are another thing belonging to contemporary fashion. Why?
Teeth and nails are physical weapons, especially female (a man’s
physical weapons are his muscles, but their fashion value is lower). It
is as though they are a response to the contemporary ambivalence of
the gender roles: if women should not rely on a man’s protection, there
is nothing for it but to polish and flash their own physical weapons.
Fashion also expresses through the weapons of the body the
increasing general non-reoriented aggression of society. For
comparison: in the 1960s quite different physical components, hair
and beard, were chosen by the social unconscious as a physical
expression of the time, as a fashion. Hair is a part of the body and is,
according to myth – beginning with Samson – an expression of magic
power without need to use body weapons. Hippies, the tribe born after
the war, who discovered and publicised hair as a power symbol of their
generation, believed that they were initiating a world of peace and love
magically. The instinctive force of aggression was at that time
neutralised, reoriented through spontaneous rituals of the communities,
especially live music and dance. Hair symbolised the magic power of
rituals.
As the experience of war grew more distant, the common
reorientation of instincts receded. Instinctive forces began to
accumulate in their un-reoriented, uncultivated form. Energy, as we