Roheim’s thesis that the social relation takes the place of the relation to the mother (in the sense that man tends to maintain as a fiction that which he cannot preserve as a reality) allows us to say that the individual’s experience in the group has a significance that tends to be illusory. Since it is aimed at denying her loss, the illusory recovery of the lost mother in the group is related to what we have called manic elaboration of mourning.

The participation of individuals in a collective experience would seem to rest on a relation to a fantasy presence which constitutes the invisible presence of the maternal imago as the illusory body of the group which unites individuals as its real members.

While in interindividual relations the body of the other forms a concrete basis for our mental representation, in the group, individuals relate to a “mystical body” as a mental presence that is not traceable to concrete individuals who physically form the group. A fictive body, but one that is experienced through the mobilization of feelings and anxieties which were originally experienced by the individual in his concrete relation to his mother.