"The principle of unification or interdependence sustains the immortal life of the species and the mortal life of the individual; the principle of separation or independence gives the individual his individuality and ensures his death.

"If death gives life individuality and if man is the organism which represses death, then man is the organism which represses his own individuality. Then our proud views of humanity as a species endowed with an individuality denied to lower animals turns out to be wrong. 

"But if the psychoanalytical doctrine of repression means anything, man never unfolds the mode of being which is proper to his species and given in his body. Repression generates the instinctual compulsion to change the internal nature of man and the external world in which he lives, thus giving man a history and subordinating the life of the individual to the historical quest of the species.

"History is made not by individuals but by groups; and the cliché-mongers repeat ad nauseam that man is by nature a social animal. It is intrinsic to the psychoanalytical point of view to assert the morbidity of human sociability, not just ''civilized" as opposed to "primitive" sociability or "class society" as opposed to "primitive communism, " but all of human sociability as we have known it.

"Freud's formulations of the Primal Father and the Primal Horde (in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego) may or may not be adequate explanations of the morbidity in group-formation. What is essential is the clinical pronouncement that sociability is a sickness.

"The essential point in the Freudian diagnosis of human sociability was seen by Róheim: men huddle into hordes as a substitute for parents, to save themselves from independence, from "being left alone in the dark."

"Society was not constructed, as Aristotle says, for the sake of life and more life, but from defect, from death and the flight from death, from fear of separation and fear of individuality. Thus Freud derives fear of "separation and expulsion from the horde" from castration anxiety, and castration anxiety from the fear of separation from the mother and the fear of death.

"Hence there are no social groups without a religion of their own immortality, and history-making is always the quest for group-immortality. Only an unrepressed humanity, strong enough to live-and-die, could let Eros seek union and let death keep separateness."

What is essential is the clinical pronouncement that sociability is a sickness.

"The essential point in the Freudian diagnosis of human sociability was seen by Róheim: men huddle into hordes as a substitute for parents, to save themselves from independence, from "being left alone in the dark." Society was not constructed, as Aristotle says, for the sake of life and more life, but from defect, from death and the flight from death, from fear of separation and fear of individuality.

"Thus Freud derives fear of "separation and expulsion from the horde" from castration anxiety, and castration anxiety from the fear of separation from the mother and the fear of death. Hence there are no social groups without a religion of their own immortality, and history-making is always the quest for group-immortality. Only an unrepressed humanity, strong enough to live-and-die, could let Eros seek union and let death keep separateness."