Delving into the Social Unconscious. A Response to Ravit Raufman and Haim Weinberg’s Article ‘Two Forms of Blindness in the Social Unconscious as Expressed in Literary Texts’

Abstract

Raufman and Weinberg’s article is a novel and valuable contribution to the group-analytic enquiry of human affairs. Their central argument is that literary texts such as short stories and fairy tales may be taken as an expression of collective unconscious conflicts. Their focus is the blindness theme as a metaphor for denial, while ‘seeing’ represents the human need to know, which is in constant conflict with the wish of not knowing.

The article is divided in two clearly distinct parts that represent a dual approach, which combines two methodologies. The first one is an exercise in applied analysis, in which they discuss the nature and function of fairy tales, mainly in Freudian terms. The second is a group analytic experience that studies the group and the group members’ reactions to a story told by one of them, in a group of Israeli students studying bibliotherapy. The analysis of this episode opens the way for a study of the Israeli social unconscious, as compared to the German social unconscious, in terms of the use of the mechanisms of repression and denial (‘blindness’) and the attempt to overcome them.

The present author discusses these two methodologies, which he considers to be complementary for the study of the social unconscious, and the examples presented in the article. He elaborates a conceptual analysis of the type of idiomatic expressions used in both texts, and expresses his disagreement with some of the Freudian assumptions that underlie the authors’ theoretical understanding of their findings, in the case of fairy tales, since he considers these assumptions to be unduly restrictive and contradictory with their main contribution.