Intimacy is often understood as something personal—a space shared for two people. However, once this intimacy emerges within a group, it immediately becomes the object of others’ attention, fantasies, evaluations, and unconscious reactions.

A couple never exists in a vacuum. It is always embedded within a broader psychological context—a group that may, on the one hand, invest the couple with hope for love, and on the other, experience tension, envy, or aggression toward it.

It is precisely at this intersection—between the intimacy of two and the dynamics of many—that complex processes unfold, involving identity, sexuality, and alienation. Psychoanalytic group theory conceptualizes these processes as follows:

In the small group, sexuality emerges in the basic assumption of pairing as a defense against primitive aggression. Here, the “oedipal couple” represents the longing for a sexual resolution of preoedipal conflicts expressed in the wishes, fears, and fantasies of the dependency and fight-flight groups. 

In the large group, sexuality is either denied or expressed in sadistically infiltrated sexual allusions. More mature forms of sexuality usually go underground, and the secret formation of couples occurs as a direct reaction to and defense against large-group processes. In the horde, unchallenged idealization of the leaders is the counterpart of the horde’s intolerance of couples that attempt to preserve their identity as a couple. In the large group, the dominant sexual ideology tends to be marked by an excessive projection of primitive superego functions onto the group leader. 

Two curious alternatives emerge here: 

On the one hand — either a sexually repressive conventional ideology 

On the other hand — a propensity to dissociate sexual fantasies from emotional relations, to combine devaluative and aggressive attitudes toward sex with fantasies in which preoedipal forms of sexuality—that is, polymorphous perverse infantile sexual trends—clearly predominate. 

In other words, sexuality becomes separated from intimacy—it may persist, but without a deep emotional connection. It is precisely this separation that often renders relationships superficial or unstable.

The psychology of group sex illustrates the latter alternative. The two ideologies are similar, however, in that they produce a conventional morality that is directed against the sexual fulfillment of the autonomous couple. It is no coincidence that historically there have been oscillations between sexually repressive and sexually promiscuous ideologies: both aim to conventionalize and flatten the sexual experience of the couple.

There is a built-in, complex, and dangerous relationship between the couple and the group. A couple in isolation can destroy itself because it has no outlet other than itself for the aggression that is generated in all intimate relations. Because the couple’s stability ultimately depends on its successfully establishing its autonomy within a group setting, it cannot escape from its relation to the group. 

Because the couple enacts and maintains the group’s hope for sexual union and love in the face of the potential destructiveness of regressive large-group processes, the group needs the couple. 

But the group cannot escape its internal hostility and envy toward the couple, which derive, fundamentally, from envy of the happy, private union of the parents and from deep, unconscious guilt against forbidden oedipal strivings.

This is clearly observable, for example, in groups of friends or workplace settings: the emergence of a couple often alters the atmosphere, evoking curiosity, tension, sometimes envy, or even subtle withdrawal from others.

The inevitable conflicts between the couple and the group lead us back to the concept of alienation. As we have seen, this is both a normal and a pathological phenomenon. The alienated borderline patient has not achieved an integrated sense of identity and lacks a mature, integrated superego. The establishment of a pathological grandiose self to compensate for this identity diffusion results in a narcissistic personality. Both the identity diffusion of the borderline patient and pathological narcissism lead to a wish to submerge the self in large groups and mobs, because such groups offer the illusion of power and meaning that patients with these pathological character formations desperately seek. The patients’ incapacity to achieve a stable sexual union with another that maintains firm boundaries separating it from the surrounding social group complements the pathological alienation of these patients.

But alienation is also felt by the normal individual whose integrated sense of identity and firmly established superego permit him to transcend the conventionality of the group, its restrictions of sexuality, and its cultural and intellectual flatness. This normal individual, as we have seen, experiences alienation where the emotionally disturbed person feels relief. The establishment of the autonomous couple that overcomes the oedipal restriction of each of the partners transforms the normal alienation of the individual into that of the couple. The achievement of this developmental stage is a crucial indicator of a successful completion of one of the tasks of adolescence.

It is likely that the capacity to tolerate this tension—between intimacy and the group, between love and aggression—is one of the most important indicators of psychological maturity.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy