Milltown Lacanian Association
Study day Group Formation and the Ego, Avila Conference Centre in Dublin,Saturday
8th November 2025
Freud tells us:
“From the very first, individual psychology…
is at the same time social psychology as well.” (S.E. XVIII)
The following papers were presented at a study day organized by the Milltown Lacanian Association M.L.A. on Freud’s 1921 text of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
The study day, working under the title Group Formation and the Ego, was held in the Avila Conference Centre in Dublin on Saturday 8th November 2025. The day focused on Freud’s important finding by analysing the ways in which the Ego (under its positive and negative aspects) contributes to the formation of groups. Particular attention was paid on the day to Lacan’s original contribution to this topic.
Among those participants welcomed from France waspsychoanalyst and psychiatrist Yorgos Dimitriadis MD, PhD, Professor of Psychopathology, Université Paris-Cité. Prof Dimitriadis gave a paper entitled: The Hypnotic Relation is a Group Formation with Two Members. He considers some issues explored by Freud which go far beyond the collective sphere. For example, he analyses the social bond, the fundamental mechanisms of suggestion, hypnosis and the state of love and identification. Then another phenomenon which Professor Dimitriadis highlights is the social valorisation of the figure of the victim.
Emer Rutledge (MLA), a practicing psychiatrist in the Irish Health Service (HSE), focused on Groups Today. The Church and the army, she writes, are two artificial groups examined by Freud in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In his essay English Psychiatry and the War, written in 1947, Lacan gives an example of another type of group which may provide an alternative to the groups illustrated by Freud.
In his paper, Us or Me – Is the Group Always there? Glenn Brady (MLA), who works with families in Ireland’s Educational Welfare Service (Tusla), explores multiple writings of Freud and Lacan, to understand how the human subject and groups truly relate. It is postulated that a misleading tradition of Cartesian thought persists, which equates the ego with the human Subject. His paper argues that a psychoanalytic understanding uncovers a more complex relationship between the so-called individual and the group, one with less distinct lines of demarcation.
In her paper, Stephanie Metcalfe (MLA), who has worked in the social care sector in Ireland for twenty years (St. John of God / SJOG), examines Freud’s discovery that what holds groups together is the existence of an emotional tie, both among the group members themselves, and between the group and the leader. The earliest known emotional tie is that of identification. This paper explores the three forms of identification outlined by Freud; oedipal identification and object choice, identification that is partial and borrows a single trait from the object and, lastly, a different type of identification termed ‘mental infection’ that is absent fromobject choice.
Malachi McCoy (MLA), an analyst working with the national mental health organization Shine (formerly known as Schizophrenia Ireland) took up Freud’s searching words that:“From the very first, individual psychology is at the same time social psychology, where we find that someone else is invariably involved”. His paper Domestic Issues incorporates Lacan’s well-positioned text, written seventeen years later in 1938, and, having withstood the blending currents of Familycomplexes is increasingly relevant for us today.
Malachi McCoy,
On behalf of the Milltown Lacanian Association (M.L.A.), Dublin
TEXTS
