We may juxtapose the social experience with the transitional experience in which reality is never examined or questioned. The transitional experience, according to Winnicott, is a continuation of the relation to the mother, serving to control the child’s feelings of loss and avoid depressive anxiety.

To deprive human beings of the social experience would thus have the same anxiety-arousing significance as to deprive the child of the transitional object.

The transitional experience brings us to reconsider the relationship between the original dual unity and the pluralistic unity of the group experience.

On the basis of oral symbolism in the primitive world of magic, Geza Roheim formulated the theory that “society is a repetition of the original society, of the dual unity of mother and child.”  Milk, symbolized by blood, is the bond, and “oral aggression is the prototype of crime.”

The fact that initiation rites constitute severance of the relationship with the mother and at the same time admission to the society of adult males supports Roheim’s idea that group formation is a mystical attempt to restore the dual unity of mother and child. 

The group would appear to arise acting as a symbiotic-narcissistic bond whereby that which is meaningful acquires meaning by being shared with the other or others in a narcissistic pluralism--rather than acquiring meaning in relation to something different and separate from the self.

In the group experience, the separate from the self is felt as incompatible with the group system of validation and is elaborated in the following sequence: separate therefore different, therefore alien, and therefore enemy.

The fact that the social experience is controlled by a plural unity causes the social experience to coincide with itself as a criterion of its own validity. This kind of autistic situation is connected with the problem of—for lack of a better word--the psychotic dimensions of group life, which finds its most clamorous realization in the war phenomenon.

As the awakening destroys the dream, so the impossibility of social reality becoming such except by coinciding with itself causes anything presenting itself as “other” to be experienced as a threat to the symbiotic-narcissistic unity.

To the extent that a symbiotic-narcissistic logical system can avail itself of reality only because it coincides with itself as a criterion of its own validity, any situation presenting itself as “other than the self” is perceived as a threat to or destruction of the reality of the self. Thus, killing the “other than the self” coincides with affirmation of the reality of the self.