3. 

The Individual Unconscious and the Social Unconscious:

The parallelism between social and psychological change is significant in a special way: in psychoanalysis we listen for the details of the past life of the patient to gradually reach the core unconscious thread in those details, so we could then initiate change. The historian does something similar with civilizations. He tries to interpret (analyse) social and political events to uncover the equivalent of the unconscious in social change. This fact raises the question: What is the equivalent of the unconscious in the individual in history or historical movements?

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious started with the intuition (inductive thinking) that there are old psychological events that act upon the present psychological life of the patient and causes his psychological disturbance. This intuition led to the notion of repression (the patient does not mention them spontaneously or even recognize them as the cause of his sufferings). We know the rest of the story of moving from repression to the primary process, leading to the concept of the none-repressed unconscious. Is there something similar to the unconscious in social life, which could shed light on the force of social change and resisting it at the same time?

There is an equivalent:  Karl Marks (F. Engels!) had the intuition that the economy is the main social agent of change in the society, and the change it initiates is salient but silent. Moving from agricultural to industrial modes of production changes the social structure of the society from family-oriented to union-centered society. Thus, all aspect of social systems like marriage and the family starts to change too. Traditions, ethics, values, laws, art, etc., also change as a response to the social change dictated by the new and different economical structures . Resistance to those changes lead to episodes of chaos and temporary break down of order in a society. In some cases boils up to become revolutions, . The unconscious workings of the primary process in the individual are parallel to the birth of new values in the society that serve the new social order; gallantry   social changes the economy initiates in the society. History of social change is the history of cultural evolution.

What brings patients to psychoanalysis is the psychological chaos the past creates in the present and not knowing what is happening.  Resistance to psychoanalysis is always-as we all discover is part of that past, i.e., in the past of the neurotic there is aspect in his past that created a narcissistic self mage that was protective of itself. Hence, there is no psychoanalysis done without encountering a narcissistic resistance against such dissolving that image. Just think of a masochistic patients who resists the analyst who is interpreting his masochistic inclinations.