Subscribe to DeepL Pro to edit this document.

Visit www.DeepL.com/profor more information.

TOPICAL ARTICLES
16

Body, transmission and civilizing process: Sigmund Freud and Norbert Elias.
Body, transmission and civilizing process: Sigmund Freud and Norbert Elias.

André Oliveira Costa 1

Paulo César Endo 2

Summary:
This article aims to establish a dialogue between Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and Norbert
Elias' sociology, having as point of approach the hypothesis of pulsional loss as an operator that
articulates the relationship between subject and culture. For Elias, the civilizing process
transmits to the individual social norms and rules in the form of self-regulation and self-control
of objects and bodily functions. In Freud, the imbrication of the subject with culture is a
relationship operated by the body. The drive provides the conditions for collectivization of the
subject.
Keywords: body, transmission, civilizing process, drive.

Abstracts:
This paper aims to provide a dialogue between Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and Norbert
Elias's sociology. The common point is the hypothesis of drive loss as an operator that articulates
the relationship between subject and culture. For Elias, the civilizing process transmits to
individual social norms and rules in the form of self-regulation and self-control of objects and
bodily functions. For Freud, the body operates the relationship between subject and culture. The
drive gives to subject the conditions of collectivization.
Keywords: body, transmission, civilizing process, drive.

Norbert Elias

In what way can we think about the affectation of the

relationship between individual and society? Should we
consider the individual as being influenced by the events and
changes in society or, on the contrary, is it society that suffers
the unique effects of each individual? Are we dealing with
independent and autonomous terms, but which mutually
influence each other? We find in the thought of the sociologist
Norbert Elias an alternative answer to these questions that
intends to overcome the dichotomy that is usually presented
between individual and society. For Elias, more than separate
terms, what acquires relevance is the juxtaposition that is
established between them. In this sense, "The Civilizing
Process" and "The Society of Individuals" are fundamental
works for

1 Psychoanalyst, member of APPOA, Master in Philosophy from PUCRS, PhD in Education from UFRGS. E-
mail: androlicos@gmail.com
2 Psychoanalyst, PhD professor at the Psychology Institute at USP and at the Postgraduate Program in Humanities,
Rights and Other Legitimacies. E-mail: pauloendo@uol.com.br
http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 17
TOPICAL ARTICLES

understand this project, because there the sociologist develops the thesis that the relationship
between individual and society is not sustained by the implication of one over the other, but of a
differentiated continuity, in which both are considered as different faces of the same structure.
The question from which the research of Norbert Elias departs is inserted into the
problematic of the relationship between individual psychological structures and social structures,
to the extent that certain disciplines, including sociology, tended to give weight to one of the
terms of the relationship, affirming "an impassable abyss between the individual and society"
(ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 15). However, this problem still arises today when we try to think about
the affectation, imbrication, juxtaposition or mutual determination of the relation between
individual and society.
If certain models of thought understand the individual as an autonomous and ahistorical
entity on the one hand and, on the other, the collective, the mass, society are preconized as
monads infenseless to singularity and the subjective processes that run through them, the lack of
thought formations limited to principles not yet overcome becomes evident.
In order to overcome the abyss that was built between one and the other, without falling
into a totalized structure, a loss must be inscribed. Our hypothesis, following Freud and Elias, is
that it is the loss, imposed by social rules to individuals, of a certain portion of the pulsional
satisfaction that is captured or questioned within pre-existent and symbolically determining
processes. The objects of the drive are repressed from the private sphere to circulate
symbolically in the public sphere. What sustains the imbrication of the relation between
individual and society, then, is what circulates in the space between them.
From these ideas, we present a dialogue between the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud
and the sociology of Norbert Elias that identifies, from both authors, a project of overcoming the
dichotomy between individual and society that sustains an operation of loss common to both
terms of this relationship. The civilizing process is the operation of transmission of a culture that
makes social rules and norms, at a given moment of external origin, inscribed in the individual
and start to operate in the form of self-control. Through the civilizing process, there is a
continuity between the personality structure and the social structure.
Likewise, the society, when transmitting its values to the individuals that compose it,
must give up the jouissance on the circulation of certain pulsional objects. And the one who
receives the transmission must also lose the psychic gain of the relation with these objects. It is a
cultural transmission that makes the society, under the form of control and social rules, to
inscribe in individuals, in the terms of Elias, as self-control and self-regulation, through
operations on the bodies, in their drives and affections. However, the inscription of this loss is
not done without the production of symptoms.

The dichotomy between individual and society according to Sigmund Freud

Certainly, Freud's first text, in which the specific object of analysis is the conditions of
the society of his time, is "The 'civilized' sexual morality and modern nervous disease", from
1908. However, he never stopped considering the psychic effects produced by extra-psychic
influences. The first time the debate between individual and society appears in Freud's work is in
"Draft N", attached to the letter Freud sent to his friend Wilhelm Fliess on May 31, 1897.
Rounded with the analysis of his dreams, with the theme of incest as a real provocation that
would form the structures of hysterical and obsessive neuroses - a point of view that would be
abandoned a few months later - and having already based his theory of psychoneuroses on the
mechanism of repression of sexuality, the debate about the tension that is established between
the register of sexuality and the social register is presented in the discussion about health as a
sacrifice that man makes to a portion of his freedom.
The horror that incest produces conditions the social organizations, according to this
passage of Freud, to maintain a sexual life with certain limitations. Thus, Freud affirms, "the
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
18

incest is antisocial, and culture consists of the progressive renunciation of it" (FREUD,
1897/2003, p. 3575). This statement by Freud establishes, already in 1897, that the basis of
society is based on the imposition of renunciation of jouissance. Every experience that makes
this refusal effective
to cultural interdiction is inscribed outside the social bond. Sigmund Freud
Freud begins the text "The
'civilized' sexual morality and
disease nervous modern"
presenting the positions from
some eminent observers
of the time, which claimed there was
a direct implication of life
civilized modern with o
growth from diseases
nerves. Explaining the antithesis
between the constitutive factors and
the effects caused from
society, exemplifies with the
The hypothesis that a person, reporting to his doctor, could well justify that, in his family, all
those who longed to grow more than their origins would allow, became ill of the nerves. In the
same way, it would be possible to observe that the descendants of peasants from poor families
who moved to the city with the intention of conquering a superior social and cultural position
fell ill.
These are views that support the idea that modern civilization causes the increase of
mental illnesses. To corroborate their hypotheses, they analyze the conditions of social life at the
beginning of the 20th century. And Freud presents the results: the extraordinary achievements of
modern times; the great discoveries; the increase of individual needs; the search for the
immediate realization of pleasure; the luxury that can be accessed by a larger amount of people;
the development of telecommunications; everything is hurry and hustle; people started to
participate more in political activities; the increasingly insecure urban life; the search for
pleasure; the devaluation of ethical principles. Even the performing and plastic arts, as well as
music, which became more agitated and noisier, are modern events that add neurotic diseases.
All these events, described by these critics of modernity, demanded from men greater
expenditure of energy, were made "at the expense of the nervous system" and by the mental
effort to keep up with the increasing social demands on the individual. Freud does not disagree
with these authors. But his position is that these criticisms are insufficient to explain the nervous
pathologies, as they ignore the most important etiological factor: "We may therefore consider the
sexual factor as the basic factor in the causation of the neuroses themselves" (FREUD,
1908/2003, p. 1251). And Freud makes it even clearer: "the harmful influence of civilization is
reduced mainly to the harmful repression of the sexual life of civilized peoples (or classes)
through the 'civilized' sexual morality which governs them" (FREUD, 1908/2003, p. 1251). If,
on the one hand, the social factors are 'harmful', insofar as they produce symptoms, on the other
hand, they participate in the process of repression, proper of the psychic structuring.
Shortly after, in the text "The scientific interest of psychoanalysis", from 1913, Freud
announces the principles that support his ideas about a social psychoanalysis. The fundament
that Freud starts from is the following: "Psychoanalysis establishes an intimate relationship
between those realizations of the individual and of society by postulating for both the same
dynamic source" (FREUD, 1913/2003, p. 1864). It is true that psychoanalysis started
investigating individual neurotic symptoms, "but in making these investigations, it could not fail
to treat the affective bases of the relation of the individual to society" (FREUD, 1913/2003, p.
1865). All individual psychology is

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 19
TOPICAL ARTICLES

also a social psychology. This statement, however, can only be true if both share at least one
element in common. In social feelings are also found erotic elements, which, suffering the force
of repression, constitute the soul diseases.

knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of the individual greatly facilitated the

understanding of the great social institutions, because the neuroses were shown to be
attempts to solve individually the problems of understanding unsatisfied desires, which
should be solved socially by institutions (FREUD, 1913/2003, p. 1864).

Assuming that there is a common loss that forms psychic structures and social structures,
we place ourselves in the opposite direction of understanding a reciprocal implication of one
over the other. In the pendulum between the psychic register and the social field, psychoanalysis
recognizes that "the neuroses are associative in nature, and always tend to expel the individual
from society, substituting the safe monastic seclusion for the isolation of the disease" (FREUD,
1913/2003, p. 1865). The loneliness of neurosis marks the impulse to move away from social
ties.
Thus, it is evident that he establishes a relation between psychic structures and social
structures that have the same origin. Both are formations of the unconscious analogous to each
other, because the repressed content that cannot be inscribed in the social bond returns in the
form of symptoms. The resource of the psychic mechanism of analogy allows us to affirm that,
according to the different paths adopted for their solutions, conflicts lead to the creation of
neuroses and social institutions. When he wrote the text "Psychology of the masses and analysis
of the self", in 1921, his idea is quite clear: "we shall try to admit the hypothesis that in the
essence of the collective soul there exist also amorous relations, or to employ a neutral
expression, affective ties" (FREUD, 1921/2003, p. 2577). The unconscious is not found on either
side of the equation, but in between the singularity of the individual and the plurality of the
collective.
The analogy between a neurotic symptom and a social production is explained by the fact
that neuroses are formations that try to accomplish through particular means what cannot be
accomplished by collective means. Freud advances his research on the correspondence between
the fields of "individual psychology" and "social psychology" through the approximation
between both. More than an approximation, what he does is to affirm that the collective
recapitulates the mechanisms proper to the unconscious. To be able to say that every psychic
formation is also a social formation must take into consideration the logical relationship that is
established between individual and society. But the overcoming of this dichotomy is not done
without the production of remains.
Every individual symptom is also a remainder of the social relations. In the formation of
symptoms, we identify the repressions of this overcoming, because the neurosis makes the
individual an associate, keeping him away from social ties. Freud states: "Abandoned to himself,
the neurotic finds himself obliged to substitute the great collective formations from which he
was excluded. He creates his own world of imagination, his religion and his delirium" (FREUD,
1921/2003, p. 2609). The isolation in the neurotic symptoms is the way out of the social unrest.
For the resolution of psychic conflicts, the reinscription in social formations: "whenever
tendencies to collective formation are manifested, neurotic symptoms are attenuated or even
disappear" (FREUD, 1921/2003, p. 2608). And so the following paradox is structured. Life in
community is one of the sources of unrest, which can only be solved in the insertion in social
ties. To make the unrest possible is to insist on the impossible of reinscribing it.

Norbert Elias' overcoming of the dichotomy between individual and society.

In the second half of the 1930s, Norbert Elias was working on his work "The Civilizing
Process". A part of this book, which concerned the relationship between society and individuals,
was withdrawn from the original publication and only came to the public in 1987, with the
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
20

title "The Society of Individuals". Both works, however, support one of the central critical
elaborations of his thought, namely, to overcome the abysmal opposition that modern thought
establishes between the individual and objects, determining them as opposing and even
irreconcilable terms.
By effect of the distinction between what is one's own and what is alien, any idea that is
based on an unbridgeable chasm between individual and society somehow takes a position for or
against one side. Elias' position, in contrast, explicitly departs from this antithesis. Thus, he
projects in "The Society of Individuals": "But what if a better understanding of the relationship
between individual and society could only be achieved by breaking away from this alternative
either/or, by disarticulating the crystallized antithesis?" (ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p. 18). Neither
society nor the individual would receive greater importance than the other. Neither one would be
the end, nor the other the means. Community life would not be based only in a harmonious
acting under rules of conduct and individuals would not function only in a subjective morality,
isolated from their peers.
For Elias, each person is created by others that exist before him, necessarily appearing as
part of an association of people, of a "social whole". This, however, does not distinguish degrees
of importance between the individual and the social group to which he belongs. It only means
that neither society is greater than the individual, nor the individual is part of society, just as
neither the individual has greater or lesser value than its collective. Elias seeks a way to think of
individuals as inseparable from the relationship with the other, as well as to conceive society as
the result of a grouping of people.

concepts such as "individual" and "society" do not concern two objects that would exist
separately, but different, though inseparable, aspects of the same human beings, and that
both aspects (and human beings in general) habitually participate in a process of
structural transformation (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 220).

They are not two isolated elements, they are not in a relationship of subordination of the
major over the minor, nor are they harmonic and stable structures. The dichotomous thought that
places an insurmountable barrier between individual and society usually assumes the former as
an independent being, self-sufficient and closed in itself. On the other hand, society is
characterized as "something complete in itself, of a formation of clear outlines, of a perceptible
form and a discernible and more or less visible structure" (ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p. 20). We
commonly find in academic thought a character marked by this closed structure. In Philosophy,
for example, the philosophical subject exists a priori and in excellence. It is not someone who
has passed through the process of development proper to human nature and its society. It is the
homo philosophicus which, looked at more closely, can be found in different versions: homo
œconomicus, psychologicus, sociologicus and pœdagogicus. They are above all ideal characters,
static and universally replicable.
Identified in the figure of homo clausus, it establishes a critique of all fields of
knowledge that define the individual as an autonomous being, whose structure is independent
and isolated from the objects and context of which he is part. This is how Elias describes it: "his
core, his being, his true self appear equally as something in him that is separated by an invisible
wall from everything external, including all other human beings" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 238).
But the nature of that wall never came into question for these disciplines. The distinction
between continent and content, between inside and outside, departs as if individual and society -
or thought and body - were like a vessel whose wall contains within it the true being and as if the
skin were the boundary between what is inside and outside.

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 21
TOPICAL ARTICLES

Moving in the opposite direction to totalizing positions, Elias proposes an

interrelationship of open individuals, with a certain degree of freedom for change, forming a web
of invisible ties, equally open, called 'society'.

The image of man as a 'closed personality' is replaced here by the 'open personality',
which possesses a greater or lesser degree (but never absolute or total) of autonomy vis-
à-vis that of other persons and which, in fact, throughout life is fundamentally oriented
towards other persons and dependent on them. The network of interdependence between
human beings is what binds them together (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 249).

The idealized conception of a static society composed by isolated members disappears.

Rather, what is shown are social networks that undergo constant transformations and changes
through the action of the civilizing process, social learning, education, socialization and
reciprocal social needs. The social web is nothing but a plurality of numerous people
interdependent in relation to their functions.
Nor does Elias think of society as having clear contours, complete in itself, with all
structures visible: "Considered as totalities, social structures are more or less incomplete: from
wherever they are seen, they remain open in the temporal sphere towards the past and the future"
(ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p. 20). To conceive of the incompleteness of the social structure implies
recognizing its condition as a dynamic structure, in constant change, in which each person
assumes a certain place, has a specific function, property or task in relation to others.
The anteriority of the social network in which the individual is born determines the
choice of changes in his functions. Each individual emerges within a context of "invisible ties",
of dependence on others and of others equally dependent on him. These ties form a network in
which each individual can circulate in a limited way. It is not of the free choice of an individual
to change his position in the ties with others, being only liable to move to those functions that
would be previously determined by the structure of relations in which he was formed.

By birth, it is embedded in a functional complex of well-defined structure; it must

conform to it, mould itself according to it, and perhaps develop further on the basis of it.
Even his freedom of choice among the pre-existing functions is quite limited. It depends
largely on where he is born and grows up in this human web, on the functions and
situation of his parents and, consistent with that, on the schooling he receives (ELIAS,
1939a/1994, p. 21).

É as fruit of the history of relationships that extends the plane that sustains the position
from which the individual is enunciated, and it is this history that determines the function that
each one will occupy in the network of human relationships. They are like traces of a memory
that transcends the individual and in him the past history is actualized. The individual emerges
within a network of relations pre-existing to his birth, but, at the same time, neither does the
functional context exist outside the individuals, insofar as it is about functions that a person
exerts over others.
The network of interdependencies refers to the functions that each individual has in
relation to the functions of other individuals. What is established, therefore, is not exactly an
association between individuals, but relations between functions. Nor is it about ties originated
by the particular will of each one. It was not from the free decision of many, as in a social
contract, that this functional network emerged.

Thus, each singular person is really imprisoned; he is imprisoned by living in permanent

functional dependence on others; he is a link in the chains that link other persons, just as
all the others, directly or indirectly, are links in the chains that bind them. (...) And it is
this network of functions that people perform in relation to each other
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
22

others, it and nothing else, that we call 'society'. It represents a special kind of sphere.
Its structures are what we call "social structures" (ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p. 23).

The regularities of relations do not arise either in function of a social entity, which
presents itself as supra-individual, nor should they be sought in the consciousness of individuals,
as beings that would be, in themselves, independent of where they are inserted. Its structure is
found between the parts, between the complex of functions that they assume in relation to each
other and to the whole. One must begin to think, then, no longer in terms of the antithesis of
isolated entities and totalized structures, but in terms of relations and functions.
É It is interesting to note the importance of psychoanalysis in and for the reading of
Elias, especially with regard to the function of the other in the constitution of the individual. In
the text "Mass Psychology and Analysis of the I", Freud states that "in the individual soul life
appears integrated always, effectively, 'the other', as model, object, helper or opponent"
(FREUD, 1921/2003, p. 2563), and, with this, shows that psychoanalysis inscribes the otherness
in the subjective structure. Due to the nature of the drives and the condition of helplessness that a
child appears in the world makes it develop only within historical and social ties. Also for Elias,
an individual can only exist while constituted in the relationship with others.

Then one finds - by adopting a broader dynamic point of view, rather than a static
conception - that the vision of an impassable wall between one human being and all
others, between the internal and external worlds, evaporates and is replaced by the
vision of an incessant and irreducible intertwining of individual beings, in which
everything that gives their animal substance the quality of human beings, especially
their psychic self-control and individual character, takes on the form that is specific to
them in and through relation to others (ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p. 35).

The individual is not exactly conditioned to what is external to him, because this external
influence is not opposed to what is internal to him. The overcoming of the individual/society
dichotomy results in the structure of interweaving of functions and places within a set. The units
are functional fragments of this network of relations. For example, a baby's gestures are not
products of its organism, nor of its environment, nor of the interaction between the distinct
spheres of "inside" and "outside".
Whatever the structure or the part of the individual that we cut out of its whole - the
psychic functions such as ego, unconscious, and even the body itself - we must take into
consideration that they are functions that are in relation to other persons and things. For Elias,
the intermingling of individual and society must necessarily be thought of in terms of functions
that determine relations: "The structures of the human psyche, the structures of human society
and the structures of human history are inextricably complementary and can only be studied
together" (ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p. 38). It is not possible to apprehend the individual as isolated,
but only through the relations he establishes with others. We must, therefore, keep in mind the
dimension of the among individuals, so that the psychic structure is not alien to society, but finds
in them its main substratum.
To think the imbrication between individual and society does not imply the annulment of
the singularity of each one of the terms. What inscribes the individual in society is the
association between his desires with other people's desires, his dependence on others and the
dependence they have on him. It is a network of interdependence, in which the center is neither
the individual, the "I", nor the social, the "we". It is a structure that breaks with the logic of
content and continent: "What is shaped by society also shapes in turn: it is the individual's self-
regulation in relation to others that sets limits to their self-regulation" (ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p.
52). Thus, Norbert Elias intends to provoke a "Copernican revolution" in sociology, going
against

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 23
TOPICAL ARTICLES

the geocentric significance of relations and shifting the starting point of thought from one who
looks from the inside out.
We will now see how the cultural transmission is sustained in an operation of loss. The
inscription of social norms and rules in the individual leads him/her to have to abandon certain
modes and patterns of behavior, renouncing a form of pulsional satisfaction that placed him/her in a
particular relationship with certain objects. In order to inscribe a new social register, the one who
receives the new values and demands needs to renounce certain modes of satisfaction. The
transmission of a culture implies the creation of a new social structure from a loss.

The body as articulator of the relation subject and culture.

The use of certain words can seemingly be insignificant, but it inserts the one who speaks
into a certain model of thought. The language reveals our position and from it follow
consequences that need to be developed. When we refer to the term "individual", we think that
the traces of the split of the unconscious are not inscribed in it. We are then led to represent the
"individual", since psychoanalysis, as the instance that enunciates the knowledge of its place in
relation to the other, and to make a shift to "subject", as the place of the unconscious effects of
this discourse, of the production of a knowledge that is not known.
On the other hand, the notion of "society", as proposed in the debate with Norbert Elias,
has also suffered displacements of meaning. With Freud's first works, we kept this term,
sometimes following the psychoanalyst's ink, but also insofar as we think that he was not yet
concerned with developing a "psychoanalytic theory of culture". Norbert Elias helps us to think
this proposition when working the difference between "civilization" and "culture". From his
analysis, society is presented as a social institution that approaches the concept of civilization as
an institution that constitutes the sphere of ethics, together with the family and the State. Culture,
in turn, helps to answer the question, "What is, really, our identity?" (ELIAS, 1939a/1994, p.
25). This term implies the establishment of the human nature itself, as we will see below.
Asking about the affections of the relationship between individual and society within the
framework of psychoanalysis moves us to the question between subject and culture. In what way
are the affections of this relationship? Certain operators articulate these terms in the same
structure, so that a differentiated continuity is established between them. The inscription of the
subject in culture is done through an operation on the bodies. The transmission of culture
inscribes the loss of a pulsional object, common to both terms of the relationship.
The body, through its orifices and holes, enables the overcoming of the opposition
between subject and culture, establishing a way of being, at the same time, "inside" and
"outside". The limits of the body blur the boundaries between self and other. Both individual
pathos and social structures are effects of the same civilizing processes. In order for the subject
to establish ties with the other, he or she must repress that which cannot be part of the collective
sphere. The more rigorous control over the impulses, which in a previous time had external
origins, is internalized in the individual himself as self-control managed by the superego, now
responsible for the redrawing of boundaries, recognizing the limits of the self and the other
through identification and prohibition. It is the superego who makes the recognition between
what is one's own and what is foreign, between what is public and private.
According to Freud, the differentiation between self and other is not established from the
beginning. Gradually the child builds what concerns himself, the dimensions of his body, and
what is outside and constitutes the external world. Let us see, then, how this process of
establishing the boundaries between the self and the other, between what is "inside" and what is
"outside", works.
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
24

For Freud, the bipartition between subjectivity (internal world) and objectivity (external
world) is not given since the beginning of the subjective formation. As he states in the text "The
Negative", the distinction between the real existence of an object inside or outside the individual
is a second time of the function of thought. Insofar as psychic representations arise through the
perceptions coming from bodily sensibility, the first time of subjectivity is one of
indifferentiation between the self and the other, between the "inside" and the "outside". In this
mythical moment, the representation was sufficient guarantee of the existence of the reality of
the represented object: "the mere existence of a representation constituted a guarantee of the
reality of what was represented. The antithesis between subjective and objective did not exist
from the beginning" (FREUD, 1925/2003, p. 2885). Thus, the child will register in its memory
the traces of objects that produced pleasure and displeasure, attributing to them qualities of good
and bad. As, according to Freud, the psychism is governed by the logic of the pleasure principle,
initially everything that is good must be seized, inscribed within itself, and everything that is evil
must be removed, thrown out. It is as if the self expressed itself by the pulsional language: I
would like to eat this or I would like to spit it out.
Thus, the first difference is inscribed between what is "inside" and what is "outside. The
confirmation of the existence in reality of the objects that brought satisfaction to the child will
occur only in a second time. This happens under the condition that these objects that once
produced satisfaction are no longer present, they are lost objects. In this moment of loss of the
pulsional object, the "I" will seek to confirm the real existence of these objects. But, Freud
continues, "the reproduction of a perception as a representation is not always faithful; it can be
modified by omissions or altered by the fusion of several elements" (1925/2003, p. 2885).
Thought, therefore, cannot find the perception of this first object of satisfaction, but only finds it
again as representation.
Since these objects of departure are already absent, and since the repetition of a
perception does not fully correspond to its representation, thought cannot claim to find these
objects, but only to meet them again. As an effect of the impossibility of this encounter, thought
brings up the representations of objects that have been perceived by sensibility and that are not
present in reality. The condition for the division between subjective and objective, therefore,
"consists in the fact that objects, which once brought real satisfaction, have been lost"
(1925/2003, p. 2885). This process allows us to understand how this operation of extraction of
the object occurs, also showing how the subject has inscribed in himself this object that, at the
same time, is his own and alien to him.
Now, it is not possible to represent this relationship between "inside" and "outside" me
and the other, except as an incomplete relationship. It is an operation of loss that does not result
only from the perception of a lack, as when a hungry child faces the absence of the mother's
breast. It occurs through a process of alternation between presence and absence. This báscula
between the extremes of excess and lack gives support to the relations between bodies and
subjective relations. In psychoanalysis, to say about the symbolic condition of an object is to
take it as representation. The pulsional objects, which satisfy the demands of the body, are lost,
insofar as the thing itself is no longer there. We cannot talk about body and drive without
considering, therefore, an operation of loss. The pulsional objects organize and establish
contours and orifices to the body.
As well as the pulsional body is the condition of link between subjects, the corporal
borders (mouth, anus, eyes, ear) enable the collectivization of this body. In this sense, we can
only say that there is a relation between subjects, insofar as the body is surrounded by orifices
that establish contact with others. These holes allow the circulation of pulsional objects (the
voice, the look, the food, the feces), objects that are not properties only of each one, nor
properties only of the other, but circulate among them. Pulsional objects are related to body
orifices. For them to inscribe

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 25
TOPICAL ARTICLES

a social circuit, it is necessary that they receive exchange value, creating a common circulation
space. They function as articulators of the subject with the collective, of the private with the
public. Thus, the main characteristic of these objects is to be, at the same time, "internal" and
"external", what is "inside" and what comes from "outside".
Just as the breast is part of the mother's body, it is also taken by the child as his property.
Similarly, the child's feces is addressed to the maternal demand at the moment of the pulsional
cutout of its anal orifice. Regarding the look and the voice, these are the first external marks to
the child that shape and constitute its body. The differentiation between the mother's gaze and
the child's gaze, initially not established, is a boundary that remains fluid. It is only through the
gaze of the other that the child can situate his own gaze. In the same way, his voice appears as an
echo, as if it had been produced from outside.
When we speak in terms of psychic structuring, the image is fundamental to give support
to the body. The look of the other is what delimits our body and our own look, so that we cannot
know with certainty the place where we are looked at, nor the place from where we look. In this
pulsional circuit of object exchanges, the body is presented as sustaining the relations with the
similar and with the social. Insofar as a repressive operation affects these objects, it separates
and unites at the same time, installing through a loss a common space between subjects. The
body, beyond being private property, is the condition of collectivity.
Elias adopts this interpretation of Freudian propositions. The bodily functions assume
the value of condition of social circulation, insofar as the civilizing process operates in the way
people relate to each other through their bodily objects. Thus, spit, feces and urine, the
relationship with food, the look on the naked body, sex and aggressiveness - all these elements
chosen by Elias to represent the civilizing process - are the conditions of relationship between
the self and the other, the singular and the collective, the internal and the external. The
imbrication of the subject with culture is a relationship operated by the body.
Norbert Elias, following Freudian project of articulating subjective and social processes
through a common element, shows us, in works such as "The Civilizing Process" and "The
Society of Individuals", that the civilizing process marks the human body in its course to
produce changes in conduct and feelings, through which social prohibitions, external restrictions,
are transformed into self-control, into self-restrictions. The drives and affections are converted
into feelings of shame and fear, which regulate psychic life, the organs of the body, and behavior
in general. Thus, the tendency of the civilizing process is, according to Elias, to "make all bodily
functions more intimate, to enclose them in particular enclaves, to place them behind closed
doors" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 188). The standard of shame is raised and, from this, certain
functions and talks about the body occurring in the presence of other people become repulsive
practices.
The historical patterns of behavior and affections controlled by social structures slowly
re-enact themselves, through the civilizing process, instanced in each human being. We should
not, however, think of a direct transposition from one to the other. But we must keep in mind
that we cannot talk about subject without social inscription, as well as we cannot talk about
collectivity without singularity. The pulsional life of a child is shaped by gestures and words of
its environment. The pressures and coercions that were initially "external" to them become
something "internal". There is, therefore, a law of internalization proper of the civilizing process
which is fundamental to both sociogenesis and psychogenesis.

This increasingly becomes an inner automatism, the imprint of society on the inner
being, the superego (...). The social pattern to which the individual had initially been
forced to conform by external constraint is finally reproduced, more smoothly or less, in
his inner self through a self-control that operates even against his conscious desires
(ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p.135).
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
26

Civilization is the effect of the men's repressing of the drives, the body, the need and the
desire. However discrete they may be, the inscription of social rules in the subjects produces
changes in the personality, in the pulsional manifestations and in the desires of each one. Elias
states: "The structure of the personality of the individual as a whole necessarily and constantly
changes with the social code of behavior and the structure of society" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p.
189).
The use that Norbert Elias makes of psychoanalysis in "The Civilizing Process" derives
from the fact that Freud also sought to move away from the dichotomy between individual and
society, between subject and culture. Thus, for example, we see the supereu and the recalcitrance
as marks of the suspension of this opposition. Through the civilizing process, the corporal
productions are increasingly modeled by social rules, by the company of other people, in the
relationship with the similar. The body is the element that enables the articulation between the
spheres of subjectivity and collectivity. The collectivization of the body is done through its
orifices and holes, marking the continuous borders of the subjective and objective spaces.

The civilizing process as an operator of culture transmission.

We are used to referring to people and peoples as if they were less civilized, when we
feel bad when we notice them using certain bodily functions in public that are not socially
accepted or when we hear and see things that concern their private lives. Starting from the
proposal of overcoming the antithesis between individual and society, as presented in the text
"The Society of Individuals", the question around which the two volumes of the work "The
Civilizing Process", by Norbert Elias, revolve, seeks to understand how and why certain changes
produced transformations in the patterns of civility, both in the scope of social relations and in
psychic processes.
In the introduction he writes in 1968, Elias presents the objectives of this work:

this study helps to solve the vexed problem of the connection between individual
psychological structures (the so-called personality structures) and the forms created by
large numbers of interdependent individuals (the social structures). It does so because
it approaches both types of structures not as fixed, as is generally the case, but as
changeable, as interdependent aspects of the same long-term development (ELIAS,
1939b/1990, p. 217).

From the idea of civilizing process, the conception of society as a static entity composed
of isolated members disappears and begins to understand it through constant transformations and
changes. Elias' study of the civilizing process aims to demonstrate the formation of "possible
links between the long-term change in personality structures toward consolidation and
differentiation of emotional controls, and the long-term change in social structure toward a
higher level of differentiation and integration" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 216). It is, therefore, the
same operation that produces effects both in psychic structures and in social structures.
Norbert Elias begins "The Civilizing Process" seeking to differentiate the meanings of
culture and civilization according to the country and time in which these terms appeared. Thus,
he presents the distinctions between the terms Kultur, in German, and culture, in French, and
Zivilisation, in German, and civilisation, in French. According to the sociologist, what can
usually be said about the concept of Zivilisation is that it refers to different elements, such as:

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 27
TOPICAL ARTICLES

the level of technology, the type of manners, the development of scientific knowledge,
religious ideas and customs. It can refer to the type of dwellings or
à the way men and women live together, the way punishment is determined by the
judicial system, or the way food is prepared. Strictly speaking, there is nothing that
cannot be done in a "civilized" or "uncivilized" way (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 23).

The German concept of Zivilisation can refer to political, economic, religious, technical,
moral, intellectual, artistic, behavioural or affective facts. But there are divergences, according to
Elias, in the way English, French and German peoples refer to themselves. "The word by which
the Germans interpret themselves, which more than any other expresses to them pride in their
own achievements and their own being, is Kultur" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 24). Kultur, for
Germans, does not imply the establishment of boundaries and spaces, but definitions of their
own nature, of the essence of this people.

While the concept of civilization includes the function of giving expression to a

continuously expansionist tendency of colonizing groups, the concept of Kultur reflects
the self-consciousness of a nation that had to ceaselessly and anew seek and constitute
its borders, both in the political and spiritual sense, and repeatedly ask itself, "What
really is our identity?" (ELIAS, 1939b/1994, p. 25).

To speak of civilization, qualifying a society by its civility or incivility, serves to

establish limits. A Western country of the 21st century considers itself more "civilized" than an
indigenous tribe of the same century or than the ancient Greek state, justifying that it would
have, for example, more technological weapons or a greater capacity to accumulate energy.
When Elias states that the term civilisation describes "the level of their technology, the nature of
their manners, the development of their scientific culture or worldview" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p.
23) he gives prominence to pronouns indicating possession of something. A civilized people
possess. And this always leads to a position of differentiation in relation to another uncivilized or
barbaric people, who do not possess. It is a concept that values identity and, as an effect of this
comparison, produces the tendency of overcoming and domination.
Until the 19th century, the process of civilization was considered complete and therefore
could already be forgotten. As a standard of self-affirmation, it sought the identity of men with
others. He who was civilized intended to transform the other according to his own model.
"While the concept of civilization includes the function of giving expression to a continuously
expansionist tendency of colonizing groups, the concept of Kultur reflects the self-consciousness
of a nation" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 25). Thus, the German concept Kultur helps to clarify the
identity of a people, and in answering the question "what is really German?" - which, according
to Elias, long ago ceased to be a matter for the French and English - lies the peculiar element of
its essence and the traits that constitute it.
According to Elias, in the period between the 17th-18th centuries, the social barriers of
France's court society established that the homme civilisé represented the ideal of society, the
homme honnête, cultured, polished. In this sense, the German concept of Zivilisation closely
resembled the French term civilisation. Words like politesse and civilité, for example, expressed
"the self-image of the European upper class in comparison with others, whom its members
considered simpler or more primitive" and, through it, "this class felt different from all those
whom they judged simpler and more primitive" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 54). The idea of
"civilized man" derives from the barriers and distancing imposed by the social structure. Its
opposition with that of "simple man" - whose maximum expression figures in the savage - would
indicate that a society has managed to reach the state of civilization.
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
28

When analyzing the social structures of countries like France and Germany, in the
passage from decentralized power (represented in the figure of the medieval warrior) to the
centralization of power in the formation of national states, Norbert Elias diverges from the
thought he calls "semi-metaphysical", which understands social structures as static, without
being subjected to constant transformations. And, for Elias, not only sociology, but also other
disciplines tend to reduce the processes of individuals and societies to a state of unchanging
equilibrium, homeostatically preserved.
However, civilization is not a state but a process. It occurs not in the short term, through
small revolutions or acts of violence, but in the long term, in everyday speech and action. Only if
social structures are conceived as a process can one think of their conditions of imbrication with
psychic structures and affirm that certain changes are capable of provoking transformations in
both structures. If the emphasis moves away from the staticity of the term civilization and falls
on the idea of civilizing process, it is because in the latter is sustained the interweaving of
changes in the structures of man with changes in the structures of society.
The social changes of the civilizing process do not occur through violent acts or political
crises. They are not made by revolutions interspersed between stable times of calm, nor by
isolated individuals or collective movements. And it is not by chance that Elias, in "The
Civilizing Process", focuses not only on sociological and philosophical theories, but mainly on
behavioral manuals, books of literature and poetry. Based on these references, the sociologist
investigates the customs and ways of speaking, hygiene habits, dress and table manners, the rules
by which a child should be educated at a certain time and even the routine of a medieval knight.
Thinking that social movements interfere in the personality structure leads Elias to study
the small events. What rules him is not what is evident to the eyes of any researcher, but subjects
that at first would not be worthy of scientific interest. They are banal situations of everyday life,
such as the behavior at the table, the way of using domestic utensils like fork, spoon, napkins
and plate. In his research interests are the habits of sniffing, spitting and blowing one's nose, as
well as the procedures for sleeping and the exposure of the naked body to another person. The
introduction of the knife as an instrument for eating, for example, implied unconscious thoughts
that led to the creation of several taboos, or rather, conditioned new social rules, such as the one
that prohibits, socially speaking, taking the knife to the mouth, pointing it toward another person
or holding it with the right hand for longer than necessary.
In the same perspective, the introduction of the use of the fork at the table, around the
seventeenth century, also had little to do with fear of disease or hygiene problems. For Elias,
more than a hygienic health issue, it was the feeling of repugnance that led people to abandon
the habit of eating with their hands for the "civilized" behavior of using the fork. This utensil,
then, is nothing more than a practical resolution of the feeling of disgust and the associations
produced when one picks up greasy food and sauces with one's hands. Habits that are apparently
considered natural were forged little by little by pressure and coercion of the people around. It
was a daily rule, for example, in Germany in the sixteenth century, to see the complete nudity of
people in the streets of the cities, who undressed in their homes and walked in that condition
towards the bath houses. The sight of the naked body was incomparably more common than in
our century. The use of the camisole, for example, was an implement in the process of
civilization on the unconcerned about showing the body after bathing.
Why does Elias turn to this specific type of question? What do they reveal of a culture?
Through the notion of civilizing process, Elias is thinking about a form of transmission of norms
and rules that operate in a certain time and space. The tradition that

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 29
TOPICAL ARTICLES

é transmitted between generations or between different cultures takes place in the incidence of a
repressing on the body and on the pulsional objects (the look, the food, the excrements, the
voice). As an effect, forms of self-regulation are created that show, through the feelings of
disgust, shame and fear, the effectuation of this operation, which gives the conditions to the
interconnection of the changes of the social-historical processes with the psychic processes.
The civilizing process marks in the individual rules of behavior that seek to restrict to
private life certain body practices that were done collectively. What we see, in this sense, is the
triumph of intimacy over public life. But we must have in perspective that this process of making
intimate and private what was once public and collective, necessarily produces remains to be
elaborated.
As Paulo Endo states in his article "A future without origin: transmission, authority and
violence", tradition occurs as an effect of the loss of a condition of jouissance and what is
transmitted from it is the impossibility of this encounter with the other. The transmission of
culture carries with it, since its origin in this renunciation of jouissance, an impossible that, in the
establishment of human social organizations, cannot be realized, thought or said.
Through Freud, we recognize that civilization is a symptom of culture. Psychoanalysis
shows that social institutions, which participate in the civilizing process raising the degree of
civility, carry with them the reverse of what they transmit. We follow Paulo Endo in the
sequence of his article: "the success of institutions is due, in good part, to their ability to keep
secret their unacknowledged darkness" (ENDO, 2011, p. 74). The transmission of culture must
inscribe the forgetfulness of its conflicts, making it impossible to remember its foundation point,
that is, the repressing of an incestuous desire. We cite Endo again:

Every institution is, therefore, and by definition, a transmitter of patterns and behaviors
without knowing, knowing or clarifying their genesis, their origin or their function.
What institutions transmit also reflects their recalcitrant and symptomatic vocation, and
not only the highest values of culture. They arise and become necessary there where the
ego - instance of attachment - has failed; and what they transmit and pass on are also the
remains of disconnected drive that remain making symptoms, as we have seen, in the
very definition of culture and civilization (ENDO, 2011, p. 75).

The unveiling of the unconscious by Freud pointed out that both in the psychic processes
and in the social processes there remain contents that cannot be spoken about, contents of
silences and secrets. But, as the social norms affect the way to relate with the body, this
individual body, which in a certain moment was placed in the social circuit, little by little gains
an individual dimension, as a collective body. There is a transformation from the private body to
the public body, effect of the civilizing process, which at the same time enables its inscription in
the social bonds.
The relations inscribe a certain social standard that pressures the subject to regulate
himself with it. Elias's thesis, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, is that this external
restriction builds an internal automatism directed to self-control of desires and emotions. In this
way, everything that is spoken and done socially - and whose responses are feelings of disgust,
shame and guilt - will gradually be transferred and re-enacted in the private life of each human
being. New patterns of behavior and new controls over desires and emotions are gradually
established, restricting the freedom that each person had to behave in front of others according to
their impulses and conditioning the body to function in a self-regulated manner.
And, thus, an invisible wall is created between the bodies. The spaces of "collective
intimacy" are little by little restricted when in presence of the other. Everything that has to do
with urges and with bodily functions, which in a certain epoch suffered little social control, is
slowly being displaced to the private sphere, hidden from the reach of other people's eyes, nose
and mouth.
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
30

With the advance of civilization the life of human beings becomes more and more
divided between an intimate and a public sphere, between secret and public behavior.
And this division
é accepted as so natural, it becomes such a compulsive habit that it is barely perceived
by consciousness (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 188).

The corporal objects that circulated in the bond with the other, in this network of social
interdependence, are repressed by the civilizing process to the private sphere of each individual.
There is, then, the devaluation of these objects and the production of a loss. In their places, what
arise are symptomatic formations. The effect of the creation of substitutive objects, derived from
the loss of pulsional objects, tries to reestablish the model of past social relationship. The
substitution of objects is done through the formation of symptoms, through the maintenance of a
model of past relation in a present time.
Now, the civilizing process is about those changes that tend "toward consolidation and
differentiation of emotional controls" as well as "a higher level of differentiation and integration"
in society. The long-term changes that take place in the structure of society are linked to the
long-term changes in the structures of personality, both in the direction of a higher level of
differentiation and integration, through the control of emotions and state controls. But with this
process, the pattern of shame rises, the mastery of emotions becomes more delicate, and talking
about or remembering bodily functions in the presence of other people becomes increasingly
embarrassing. The social proximity between people, which makes them more dependent on each
other, also builds a socially accepted armor of control over the body.
It seems fundamental to us to highlight that Norbert Elias identifies in the body the
actions of the civilizing process. And the rest that is produced from this operation shows the
memory of the traces of social relations that have been modified throughout its history.

An instinctive tendency that appears today at most in the unconscious, in dreams, in the
private sphere, or more consciously only in closed places, that is, the interest in bodily
secretions, shows itself here at an earlier stage of the historical process, with more
clarity and frankness, in a form that today is "normally' visible only in children (ELIAS,
1939b/1990, p. 153).

The formation of fear, of the feeling of repugnance and shame, play a fundamental role in
the effects of the connection between changes in the social structure and in the psychic structure
and constitution. They are forms that on a first level, indicate the fear of social degradation, of
inferiority over another person, showing that an internal conflict has been established in the
individual. It diminishes the fear of external origin and increases the internal anguishes,
generated by the person himself. What used to be feared, nowadays has either disappeared or has
been internalized for the person him/herself.
Historically, Norbert Elias (1939c/1990) situates, in the passage from the late Middle
Ages to the early Renaissance, the operation of the civilizing process that establishes the
difference between "inside" and "outside" public and private, individual and society. Marking on
the body the social rules, this long-term process led to an increase of emotional control, of
containment of spontaneous sensations, establishing a distancing between the natural processes
of the subject's own body. The transformation from external control to internal control led to the
situation in which "many affective impulses can no longer be experienced as spontaneously as
before," so that emotional self-controls are placed "between the spontaneous and emotional
impulses, on the one hand, and the skeletal muscles, on the other, more effectively preventing
the former from commanding the latter (that is, putting them into action) without the permission
of these control mechanisms" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 246).

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf
 31
TOPICAL ARTICLES

The civilizing process acts directly on everything related to the body, its limits, edges and
holes, its remains and products. But as a body is always in relation to another body, the idea of
civilization designates a process has reached a level of differentiation and integration between
individual and society, subject and culture. Thus, at the same time that the civilizing process is
the possibility of this bond, enhancing the degree of interdependence between the subjects, it is
also the condition of its estrangement, in the creation of an "invisible wall between the bodies",
at the moment in which the bodies approach the eyes, noses and ears. Through the civilizing
process, new relations between men are established, divided between private public sphere and
private sphere. People start to "mold themselves to others" more freely, due to the increasing
tendency to observe and coerce each other.

Forced to live in a new way in society, people become more sensitive to the pressures of
others. Not abruptly, but quite slowly, the code of behavior becomes stricter and the
degree of consideration expected of others increases (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 91).

For Elias, social changes that produce transformations both in the structures of societies
and in the structures of individuals, relate to this control over what one can do or not in relation
to others. The increase of the pressure that people exert on each other, the social control that
establishes habits on behaviors and emotions causes "a change to occur slowly: the compulsion
to police one's own behavior increases" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 93). A new social dynamic
produces a new psychic condition. It is a new form of power relations, in which the social
imperative slowly becomes an individual imperative.
But this social change cannot be just any social change. It must fall specifically on some
aspect that involves both the individual and society. The control of emotions and behavior, the
regulation of drives, the use of domestic tools and utensils, the adjustment on how to behave in front
of others, the orders "do this or don't do that", all these social censures are, for Elias, examples of
changes in the social structure. And, thus, the civilizing process inscribes fears and anxieties in the
private, intimate dimension of each one, which, in a past historical moment and in children's lives,
were manifested through external factors.
The self-regulation established by the civilizing process, in the form of supereu as an
instance that acts as a self-control modulates the behavior to be socially desirable, makes that
"the same appears to the mind of the individual to result from his free will and to be in the
interest of his own health or human dignity" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 153). What is apparently
internal, actually has an external origin. Norbert Elias, with this hypothesis, believes to have
managed to suspend the invisible wall between the individual and society. But, not only that,
Elias also presupposes to resolve the tension generated between the bodily impulses, "socially
inadmissible" and "the pattern of social demands".
What remains of this supposed harmonization is a conflicted psychic structure. "It is quite
possible that there have always been neuroses," he asserts. "But the neuroses we see everywhere
today are a specific historical form of conflict that needs a psychogenetic and sociogenetic
elucidation" (ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 153). The civilizing process comes to put behind the
consciousness, becoming more and more integrated into the individual in the form of a
regulating psychic instance. It separates public life from private life, what is done in intimacy
with what can be done between men, with what is or is not publicly desirable. "The pressure to
restrain your impulses and the sociogenetic shame that surrounds them - these are so completely
transformed into habits that we cannot resist them even when we are alone in the private sphere"
(ELIAS, 1939b/1990, p. 189). The tendency of this process, therefore, transforms what is
"external" into "internal," closing them behind the doors of consciousness.
 TOPICAL ARTICLES
32

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

ELIAS, N. (1939a/1994). The Society of Individuals. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor.
______. (1939b/1990). The Civilizing Process. Volume 1: A History of Customs. Rio de
Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor.
______. (1939c/1990). The Civilizing Process. Volume 2: State Formation and Civilization.
Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor.
ENDO, P. (2011). "A future without origin: transmission, authority and violence". In: APPOA
(eds.). Autoridade e violência. Porto Alegre: APPOA.
FREUD, S. (1897/2003). "Manuscript N". Obras Completas. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.
______. (1908/2003). "La moral sexual "cultural" y la nervosidad moderna". Obras Completas.
Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.

_______.(1913/2003)."Multipleinteresdelpsicoanalisis".ObrasCompletas. Madrid:
Biblioteca Nueva.
_______. (1921/2003). "Psicologia de las masas y analisis del yo". Obras Completas. Madrid:
Biblioteca Nueva.
_______. (1925/2003). "La negación". Obras Completas. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.

Received: 26/7/14
Approved: 10/13/14

http://www.uva.br/trivium/edicoes/edicao-ii-ano-vi/artigos-tematicos/artigo-tematico-3.pdf