Freud's Concept of Social Bonding and Civilization Progress

Extract

[...] Furthermore, in accordance with the reality principle developed in the second topography, individuals identify with the other in the recognition of similarity. The awareness of identity and the empathy that follows allows for maintaining the level of aggression (which Freud will assimilate to Thanatos, whose principle he began to define in opposition to Eros in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) against the other beyond the acceptable limits in the norms and laws of the group. In fact, a certain level of aggression expressed in antisocial acts or in questioning the other as an equal could provoke the explosion of the group from within. [...]

[...] The articulation of desire mechanisms with those of social structure remains deeply problematic, including in medical establishments. [...]

[...] This analysis of Freud's progression in updating the social link allows us to better understand how, from a dynamic point of view, this link holds First, Freud showed in Malaise in Civilization could play the role of 'social psychology'. Thus the individual as an 'individualized and separated psychic instance from the outset does not exist'13 », it only exists to the extent that it is recognized by others, that is, accepted as a member of the group. Thus, the relationship builds the possibility of individuation and this from the earliest stages of ontogenesis since it is by separating the child from the fusional position with the mother and from the incestuous desire that the father allows/ imposes on him to constitute himself as a separate subject from his own re-elaborated desire. [...]

[...] The outcome of this process is the establishment of two major taboos, constitutive of civilization and community life: the prohibition of parricide and that of incest, which promotes a more broadly exogamic dynamic within the social group. The vision of an organization of the primitive horde makes it possible to establish a homomorphic norm and thus to articulate the intrasubjective prohibitions that we have described, and the intersubjective prohibitions: it is clear that the organization of the horde allows Freud to project the ontogenetic Oedipal conflict onto the phylogenetic social rule: 'the two fundamental taboos of totemism [ . [...]

[...] What is the perception of the concept of 'social bond' in Freud? The thought of Freud was very early concerned with what was not yet called the 'social bond', that is, in sociology, the set of relationships that allow individuals to live together according to rules they establish in the same group or between different groups. In one of the major works major on the subject, Totem and Taboo1, Written in 1912-1913, he takes up again with an evolutionary perspective and the mythic vision of the primitive horde, the explanation of the phenomena of taboos that, by founding the bases of the superego and the repression of drives in the subject, also allow for its acceptance by a normalized society. [...]