What constitutes the social experience is the use on the part of the subject of other subjects co-present in the collective experience. The validity of the social experience is the fact that it is verified by the process of co-participation rather than by reality testing.

It follows that the social phenomenon often is devoid of rational validity. But this does not mean it has no validity.  The social phenomenon is a mode of experience whose value arises from it being shared by individuals belonging to a group, i.e., whose criterion of truth is sharing.

Facing death as a fact of nature, we verify the reality of a dead body as part of the physical world, offering evidence of its existence which we can compare with evidence gathered by other individuals verifying that the dead body is a part of the external world. Our relation to others establishes the objective physical reality, ascertaining whether someone is dead or alive. The process of verification makes use of evidence in the external world, which we perceive as a reality separate from us. 

In the dream, the problem of whether it corresponds to objective reality does not arise. The dreamer is not concerned about ascertaining whether or not his dream corresponds to reality. Only when we awaken does the dream appears as an illusory reality.

Similarly, only when the individual removes himself from the group experience does he recognize its differential features compared to individual experience subject to reality testing. What we call objective reality takes shape as an experience of single subjects placing themselves in relation to something separate from themselves.

The social experience acquires its character as truth by being shared by subjects belonging to a group without subjects referring to a neutral element presenting itself as external reality. 

Just as the dream experience is not subject to reality testing, so the social experience places itself in a psychic dimension beyond reality testing. The fact that we are not required to carry out reality testing does not mean, however, that this experience is valueless. On the contrary, the social experience is of fundamental importance to human beings, so much so that to be deprived of this experience would expose us to the same frustration aroused by the deprivation of dreams.

In contrast with the dream experience, the social experience takes place in waking life. Reality testing is replaced by a validation system governed by interhuman relations.

What is shared by a group contains an autonomous source of validity independent of reality testing. “Group Mind” implies an alteration of the ego in the sense that functions delegated to reality testing are put, as it were, in parentheses (instead of being inhibited, as during sleep).

Whereas during sleep the inhibition of reality occurs in a subject who has interrupted relations with other subjects, the suspension of reality testing taking place in the social experience occurs in individuals who are awake and whose mutual relations, aimed at sharing the experience, become the source of its validity with no need for other verification.

This is why the social experience, though containing illusory elements, gives a stable impression of reality in comparison with dreams. While the dreamer, on awakening, separates himself from the dream and finds before him a real world, an individual attempting to separate himself from—awaken from the strongly cathected social experience—would find himself assailed by an anxiety of exclusion that would have the characteristics of the child’s original fear of separation from the mother.