By the end of the nineteenth century, while Freud and his followers were developing a complex theory of individual development and pathology, other thinkers were focusing on the massive social disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. In doing so, they were compelled to look at the connection between individual maladjustment and social forces.

Emil Durkheim, considered the founder of scientific sociology, tried to understand the unconscious sources of social existence as Freud was trying to understand the unconscious sources of personal existence. For Durkheim, society is the source of morality, personality, and life itself at the human level. It is something on which we all depend, whether or not we know it. Durkheim saw modern societies as being sick, and a sign of the sickness was not only the rising suicide rate but also the appearance of what he termed "pessimistic philosophies” [1].

George Mead, another social philosopher of the late nineteenth century, saw human group life as an essential condition for the emergence of consciousness. He described the dialectical relationship between the individual and society, pointing out the development of individuality and the development of social institutions are both part of human evolutionary experience. Individuals change and are changed by social institutions [2]. Another sociologist, Charles Cooley declared  in 1909 that  human nature cannot  exist separately  in an individual but is, in fact a "group-nature” a "social  mind” and  that  wherever  there  is an  individual aspect of human function there must also be a social fact [3]. 

In 1920, William McDougall asserted  that "We can only understand the life of individuals and  the life of societies,  if we consider them  always in relation to one another ... each man is an individual only in an incomplete sense" (p.6) [4]. It was McDougall that wrote about the "groupmind".