What Happened to the Masses? Solms’ Freud Through the Post-Bionian Field Theory Lens

The work of a translator and an editor is akin to a kiss, a caress of the tongue. They must pour themselves into the text to bind it, to breathe new life into it. In the Revised Standard Edition (RSE), Mark Solms and his colleagues gave their bodies to Freud’s oeuvre. Thanks to their work, new light—new life—has been given to the Standard Edition. From this point, we embarked on a rereading of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (GPAE). One of the most debated aspects of this work was James Strachey’s decision to translate Massenpsychologie as Group Psychology, a choice that has long sparked significant controversy. With the anticipation surrounding the RSE, much speculation arose about how Solms would handle this issue. In the RSE, Solms retains Strachey’s translation and offers a detailed justification for this choice. Thanks to this, we gain fresh insight into Freud’s views of groups and their relationship to another crucial perspective in group psychology—namely, Bion and the postulates of Bionian Field Theory (BFT). Freud, through GPAE, warns us of the perils group formation can entail when thing go awry, namely, the loss of individuality into the collective. The regression found in common groups can be limited—but not altogether evaded—by the level of organization a group can acquire. In a lesser-discussed Bionian concept we consider, Bion proposed a response to Freud’s warning. By introducing his well-known double arrow diagram, narcissism↔social-ism, he laid the groundwork for a genuinely intersubjective conception of human subjectivity, as well as for a new understanding of the nature of the therapeutic bond and its transformative action.