38th S.H. Foulkes Annual Lecture: Intimacy and Social Suffering in a Globalized World

Abstract

How is intimacy possible in a globalized world—and how does the loss of intimacy effect societies as well as individuals? This is the central question of the following article. It is argued that sociology alone cannot find any convincing answers, because we need to understand the unconscious dynamics of global developments that undermine the human capacity to bond and to experience intimacy. Group analysis offers quite a unique position ‘on the edge’, that allows us to observe and to connect, to analyse and to understand not only patients, but also people and situations outside of the clinical world. In this sense it is social group analysis that turns out to be a valid research method and an approach that is capable of deciphering the ‘social unconscious’. An extensive case study out of a research project about transnational children in Ecuador (South America) and the story of Daqui are offered to show what is unconsciously at stake in a modern and globalized world, how much intimacy has degenerated already and how this can be understood in terms of group analysis.