DOMESTIC ISSUES[1]
Malachi McCoy
Abstract: Freud’s 1921 text Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego confirms that a superficial glance between individual and group psychology loses its sharp contrast when their relations are properly examined. Accordingly, what can a close reading of Lacan’s 1938 text The Family uncover for us when it involves intrusion?
In his comprehensive text Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual,[2] Lacan writes the family plays a primordial role in the transmission of culture, as it controls the first stages of the infant’s education, and in the inhibition of drives with what we appropriately call the mother tongue! Traditionally the family was formed through the relationship of a husband and wife, and as Lacan writes:
It is the relations the psychology of modern man has with the conjugal family that are available for the study by the psychoanalyst.[3]
Contrary to the animal, human drives are in essence vulnerable to conversion and inversion, they are highly malleable. From the outset, the girl or boy, whose full term yet premature birth reveals biological deficiency, is so susceptible that it will literally embody any number of behaviours issuing forth from this first embryonic domestic group.
Lacan writes that, at first, the family appears to be a natural group of individuals held together by a twofold biological relationship. Reproduction traditionally provided the group with its intrinsic elements and certain environmental conditions essential for the development of the young.[4] Human beings are characterized by social relations sustained by exceptional capacities for mental communication, and correspondingly, by a paradoxical economy of drives[5].
The concept of The Family[6] was surrendered to the inclination of Irish citizens, who on 8th March 2024, were asked to vote in a Constitutional referendum which would change the wording of Article 41.
The first vote concerned the following text:
The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society [and] guarantees to protect the family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order…to guard with special care the institution of marriage on which the family is founded[7].
The 39th Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland proposed to delete the words “on which the family is founded” and to insert the new wording: “Whether founded on marriage, or on other durable relationships”.
The second vote concerned the Care Amendment, in respect of women in the home. Judge Marie Baker, Chair of the Electoral Commission at that time, said the proposed wording of the referendum would replace the existing text with: “What is called, in the texts arounds this, a more gender-neutral phraseology”.[8]
An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar at that time, stated that the referenda were “defeated comprehensively on a respectable turnout”. This respectable turnout, as our head of government put it, was registered just four months after he stood in Dublin’s O’Connell Street the day after a less respectable horde unleashed violence in what appeared as chaotic anti-immigrant violent scenes across the city on the evening of 23rd November 2023. The manifestation of conflict inscribed with discontent in our contemporary ‘civilization’ demands analytic examination.
Freud asks how the group acquires its capacity for exercising such decisive influence over the mental life of the individual and what unites the individuals in a characteristic bond.[9] In his paper, Group Psychology, as contemporary today as it was when written in 1921, he writes:
By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultured individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian…he possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.[10]
In his chapter on The Herd Instinct, Freud states that essential characteristics found in common groups include weakness of intellectual ability, lack of emotional restraint, incapacity for moderation and delay, the inclination to exceed every limit in the expression of emotion, and to work it off completely in the form of action, show an unmistakable picture of a regression of mental activity to an earlier stage such as we are not surprised to find among children.[11]
Isn’t it incredible that what could, misguidedly, appear as innate in the individual’s line of descent, be revealed by psychoanalysis to descend from familial psychical dispositions? In other words, the social heredity which is established through the line of the generations is passed on at the level of mental life. The beginnings of the development of what is termed social can therefore be discovered in the family[12].
A concrete factor in the psychology of the family is defined by Freud as a complex which has an essentially unconscious factor. This discovery revolutionizes the psychology of the family where the unconscious representation of the imago is shown by analysis to play an organizing role in psychical development.[13] In the light of these findings, it is interesting to hear other motives being rationalized concerning emotional attitudes.
In chapter ten of Group Psychology – The Group and the Primal Horde, Freud details succinctly what he evidenced in his researches and recorded of the historical aspect and the horror of incest in the primitive form of human society. The model of the father of the mythical primal horde laid down the law in the family. All of the sons in the group knew that they were equally persecuted by the primal father, and feared him equally[14] as his law prohibited murder and incest his sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last resort the causes of group psychology[15]. As we know, his sons formed a murderous horde and killed their father. As a result of the transgressions of the prohibitions their father had prevented, their guilt and remorse became the agency which they in turn prohibited. As the primal father had prevented his sons from satisfying their sexual impulsions, he forced them into emotional ties with him and with one another. The fortunes of the horde have left indestructible traces upon our human history, especially in respect for the beginning of religion, morality, and social organization. Killing the father resulted in transforming the paternal horde into a community of brothers.[16] Freud’s case history of Little Hans[17] shows clearly how the boy, left in the lurch by his gentle father had a close luring relationship with his mother. Little Hans represented something phallic for his mother, as Melman writes. “By the fact of her motherhood a woman will find herself finally decorated with the phallic medal.[18]” Ensnared as his mother’s trope in his former paradise, Hans developed a crippling horse phobia. We are reminded once again, that the events of group psychology can be uncovered in the psychology of the individual[19].
Lacan reminds us that the weaning complex fixes the feeding relationship in the psyche of the infant. Representing the primordial form of the maternal imago, weaning forms the basis of the most archaic sentiments which unite the individual to his family. This most primitive complex in psychical development is the one which all later complexes must come to terms with. Weaning is often a psychical trauma leaving a permanent trace in the biological relationship it interrupts and whose pathological effects reveal themselves to psychoanalysis.[20] “In suckling, embracing and contemplating her child the mother at the same time receives and satisfies the most primitive of all desires.”[21] It’s not so astonishing then that weaning, dominated by cultural factors, will continue until the mother brings it to an end. This relationship, as Lacan reminds us, explains why the imago of the mother is so deeply entrenched in the psyche that its sublimation is difficult, as can be seen in the attachment of the child to his mother’s apron strings. Abandoning the securities provided by the family-group’s psychical economy are in effect another kind of weaning as it is only when this occurs that the liquidation of the complex is sufficiently realized. As Lacan says: “To reach completion every personality requires this new weaning. Hegel proposed that the individual who does not struggle to be recognized outside the family group goes to his death without having achieved a personality”.[22]
Documenting the complex of intrusion Lacan confirms that jealousy is the archetype of all social sentiments. This primitive emotion is first experienced by the child when he, or she, sees that he has siblings – a brother or sister. The place in the family which fate allots to the child will have extensive consequences. Before any conflict, the child is either the one in possession or the usurper – the one who will seize or appropriate. In Group Psychology, Freud writes of the envy which an elder child feels towards the younger one. “The elder child would certainly like to put his successor jealously aside, to keep him or her away from the parents, and to rob her, or him of all their privileges.”[23]
“Social justice, Freud says, means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is the same thing, may not be able to ask for them.[24]
As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions:
“I saw with my own eyes, and I observed carefully, a young child devoured by jealousy: he was not yet able to speak, yet he could not prevent himself from going pale at the bitter spectacle of his brother at the breast”. Infantile jealousy has long struck observers…The demonstration of infantile jealousy brings to light the role it plays in the origins of sociability, the quality of being friendly or helpful to our neighbours. Lacan asserts the critical point which psychoanalytic investigation reveals, that jealousy at its most fundamental is not about biological rivalry, but is a mental identification.
Freud continues: “Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.”[25] From the very first, however, identification is ambivalent, where the expression of tenderness can just as easy turn into the wish for someone’s removal. Yet, Lacan’s astonishing example confirms we can choose a different position, even in early infancy when the primitive sentiment is present. His illustration describes an everyday situation where two toddlers under the age of two can be seen to engage in play with each developing, what Lacan says, is clearly defined rivalry. Shockingly, each infant develops postures and gestures in manoeuvres which, Lacan writes, are provocations and counterattacks. These reveal in the young child the beginning of the recognition of their opponent at this time of their development. For that reason, it is critical that we take on board the far-reaching and psychologically decisive social implications that, as Lacan confirms, even toddlers are aware of an alternative in a conflict!
The construction of the ego takes place at the same time as ‘the other’ while the drama of jealousy is being acted out. Because of the satisfaction which the subject can draw from his mirror-image, the ego is introduced as a third object. The subject committed to jealousy via identification arrives at a new alternative situation; one that he can refuse, choosing to return to the maternal object and destroy the other, or he can decide to choose something different. As a result, he discovers both the other person and the object as social phenomena. Lacan tells us therefore, jealousy shows itself as an archetypal social sentiment.
Freud’s awe-inspiring text on Group Psychology demonstrates clearly that someone else is invariably involved in the mental life of the individual as a model, an opponent, a helper. The contrast, he reminds us, between individual psychology and social or group psychology loses a great deal of its sharpness when examined more closely. As Lacan writes: “the psychoanalyst may discover in the individual the psychical reflection of the most original conditions of man”[26].
Consequently, we can ask if the symbolic father of the mythical primal horde; the one against whom the original crime was committed, and who for that very reason introduced order and foundation of the domain of the law[27]; is he not also an indispensable helper?
As Dr Charles Melman testifies: “We cannot put Oedipus in a syringe”[28]!
For correspondence: malachi.mccoy@gmail.com
[1] This paper was presented at an MLA study day on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. (1921c) in Dublin on Saturday 8th November 2025.
[2] J. Lacan. Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual. Translated by C. Gallagher from unedited
French Manuscripts.
[3] Ibid p 42.
[4] Ibid. The Family P. i.
[5] Ibid. The Family. p i.
[6] Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland) Article 41. Enacted by the People 1st July 1937. In operation as from 29th December 1937.
[7] Bunreacht na hÉireann Article 41. Enacted by the People 1st July 1937. In operation as from 29th December 1937.
[8] Judge Marie Baker explains the wording of the referendum. Available on Youtube.
[9] S. Freud. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. (1921c) S. E. XVIII. p. 72.
[10] Gustave Le Bon Group Psychology ibid. p 2. (Gustave Le Bon. Psychologie des foules. 1895).
[11] S. Freud. ibid Group Psychology. The Herd Instinct Chapter 9 p 117.
[12] S. Freud. ibid. Group Psychology. P 70.
[13] J. Lacan. Ibid The Family p. 2.
[14] S. Freud. Op. cit. Group Psychology. p 125.
[15] Ibid. p 124.
[16] S. Freud. ibid. Group Psychology p. 121.
[17] S. Freud. Analyis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old-Boy. (1909b) S.E. X.
[18] C. Melman. Phobia Seminar20th March 2014. Translated by Helen Sheehan.
[19] S. Freud. Ibid. Group Psychology p. 124.
[20] Ibid. p. 6.
[21] Ibid. p. 10.
[22] J. Lacan. op. cit. The Family p. 12.
[23] S. Freud. Ibid. Group Psychology p. 120.
[24] S. Freud. ibid Group Psychology. p 121.
[25] S. Freud. ibid. Group Psychology. p. 105.
[26] J. Lacan. Ibid The Family pp. 42-43.
[27] J. Lacan. Book VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Miller. Trans. by Dennis Porter. p. 97
[28] C. Melman. Introduction to Dr Melman’s New Psychical Economy. Translated by Helen Sheehan. p18.
