The Individual and the Transpersonal

Abstract

Why is ethnic membership so important for identity? The author answers that culture is an inseparable element of personal identity and the distinction of identity from intrapsychic, interpsychic and transpsychic experience does not correspond to the psychic reality of the self. There is a reciprocal `conception' between individual and world: the `subject' is constructed by a transpersonal world that he or she reelaborates. In such a sense the small group can be seen as a laboratory, because it allows a confrontation of similarities and differences and the elaboration of cultural, institutional, individual and family dimensions.