Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 95
Fear over possible guilt, similar to social neurosis, rises
in place of simple solidarity and mercy
In the social unconscious of the generations, it is transformed into a
powerful motivation.
Those who feel and appear as potentially guilty (although
free of real guilt), can encourage punitive behaviour in others, revenge
seeking, resistance, passionate aggression. We Europeans then,
without the need of any devastating wave of foreign ideology and
foreign presence, are ourselves sufficient for our own self-destruction.
The traces of suppressed traumas, difficult to process, enter into the
decision-making and experiencing of the present. Family generations
ruminate over their past, digest the destinies of grandfathers and
grandmothers; school classes of adolescents, while creating new
worlds from inherited damaged material, in the search for the guilty,
easily succumb to the temptation of polarisation: that is, to the
temptation to appoint someone the role of the one who is different,
excluded, scapegoated. We learn from reports in the media about
cases of lonely shooters; such an individual has almost always, before
carrying out his fatal crime, experienced a story of being excluded
from school or the society of his neighbours, or the story of an abused
child. He then decides to elevate his personal misfortune, to redeem it,
through some received destructive ideology. Personal pathology and
social pathology are mutually attracted, with a fateful clash.
In reality, both pathologies are an expression of the same
thing; our contemporary human group is living through a critical time.
Lonely shooters (or murderers with a knife or a car...) are a symptom
of our present time; they are the executor of the unconscious,
unprocessed forces of the increasing aggression of the human group,
of the whole of society.
Human culture, the shape of the group, is reborn from
inherited material in every generation
The individual still in the womb follows a path appropriate to the
development of its kind and, starting after birth as a small animal, is
gradually “domesticated”; this small primate becomes a human being
in every individual, in every generation anew. A human being does
not emerge automatically readymade; it emerges and develops
through uninterrupted “domestication”, through the repeated
reorientation of instinctive forces into firm personal relationships of
closeness and mutuality. It takes shape with the reciprocity of its
mother, parents, group and generation. Inter-group relationships are