Introduction to day two: One hundred years since Freud’s group psychology: Challenges for groups in the 21st-century

Abstract

Welcome to the second day of this year’s GASI workshop, 100 years after Group psychology and analysis of the ego (Freud, 1921) and two years ‘cum pestilentia’. As we will be trying to form a social dream matrix with the help of Marina in a moment, I would like to mention the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu (1923–1999), who thinks that we enter the group as we enter our dream when asleep. From Anzieu’s point of view, the group is like a dream, ‘Human beings go into groups as they go into dreams’ (Anzieu, 2015: 129). Let us not get annoyed too much by the contingency of this statement—pace, Anzieu! Freud already dared the analogy 100 years ago when he wrote in a footnote: ‘The same extreme and unmeasured intensification of every emotion (in groups—our note) is also a feature of the affective life of children, and it is present as well in dream life’ (Freud, 1921: 78). A few lines earlier he quotes Le Bon, for whom the group ‘is led almost exclusively by the unconscious’ (Freud, 1921: 77), and in another footnote, he summarizes this statement as follows: ‘Unconscious is 1118431 GAQ0010.1177/05333164221118431Group AnalysisChita: Introduction to day two: One hundred years since Freud’s group psychology research-article2022