The 37th S.H. Foulkes Annual Lecture: One Person is No Person

Abstract

Our social nature had been an intelligent assumption for a long time, until biology demonstrated it in the 1960s. Psychoanalysis, the science of human nature has been based on selfish foundations, and its structural theory presents us with a single, lonely person of id, ego and superego. Even Foulkes, who based his group theories on psychoanalysis, could only speculate about our social nature, but gave us the fundamental notion of the social unconscious. In the 1960s biology scientifically demonstrated the social instinct. Yet, the various thinkers, who tried to enlarge group analytic thinking, continued speculating, and did not make use of the social instinct, although it was there. As if the body, the material part of us was not important, as if we existed all up there, in some higher regions. We need our body for love, and a theory good enough to understand it. What I have to offer is a personality theory based on instincts, or with other words, on the psychological affects of our genes. Our ego develops out of the older selfish instinct, as elaborated by psychoanalysis. But the new social instinct provides the foundations of our genuinely social nature, I call ‘nos’, Latin for ‘we’. Accordingly the new structural theory is made up of the id, ego and nos. On such a foundation we can build a consistent social group analytic theory.