Towards a Psychoanalytic Concept of Community (II): Relevant Psychoanalytic Principles

Abstract

Abstract In the first of three papers the current philosophical, sociological and ecological approaches to “community” were considered from a psychoanalytic perspective. This second paper aims to arrive at a set of principles that will underpin a psychoanalytic concept of communities. Those principles include: psychoanalytic understandings of groups; the unconscious of the collective; the subjectivity and inter‐subjectivity of individuals and collectives; the symbolic function of an abstract concept; and the processes involved in making sense, such as mentalization and symbolization. The emerging psychoanalytic framework conceptualizes communities in terms of their collective psychological tasks, such as the maintenance of shared identification and boundaries, their responses to trauma and the work of mourning, rather than by their geographical or sociological characteristics. This new approach to the concept of community also highlights the utility of distinguishing the nature of groups by their respective, collective psychological tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.