Tadej Troha (ZRC SAZU)



The Unconscious Collective: Metapsychology and Contemporary Group Formations


Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego is typically examined from the perspective of the individual: attention is directed toward the transformations an individual undergoes when becoming a member of a group and the mechanisms that facilitate this process. However, is it possible to reverse this perspective and instead ask: what happens to society when a group emerges? What changes does the formation of a group impose on society—on a structure already composed of numerous, ostensibly ‘stable’ groups? To fully explore this reversal, it is necessary to distinguish between the many intersubjective social bonds that constitute the network of society and the binding agent (Bindemittel) that establishes the emerging group's unity and disregards previously and subsequently existing social bonds. This transformation, in which the underlying symbolic order becomes provisionally reified, casts the group as a formation of the unconscious in a strict sense. In this context, the binding agent may exceed the group's internally constructed limits, overflowing and affecting its environs, adjacent groups, and society at large. The crucial question, then, is not how one enters the group but how one avoids being absorbed into a group that, paradoxically and constitutively, overflows and imposes itself.