Abstract. It is argued that ideals emerge in the course of the individuation-separation process, preserving the narcissism of primary Thingness. Ideals form an essential part of social structure, as opposed to communitas, where individtiation is suspended. The anthropological distinction between social structure and communitas is reformulated in psvchoanalvtic terms. Structure and communitas are shown to correspond to two alternative organizations of narcissism. Ideals and mythsfigure among the manifestations of the narcissism of struktur In the last section, certain explanations of the discourse of ideals are drawn from the preceding account. While the premises of the follawing reflections are broadly Kleinian, acanian concepts are supplemented, not on the basis of any definite synthesis but towards a piecemeal reconciliation.

Ihe concept of ideals plays a minor role in analytical moral philosophy. This neglect is indicative of some general shortcomings of this school of thought. While analytical philosophy lacks historical consclousness, ideals force us to reflect upon concrete historical processes and changing human aspirations. Ideals bridge the artificial boundaries - taken for granted by analytical philosophy -- between 'popular' and philosophical morality and between politics and morality. Ideals also bridge the gap between the normative and the descriptive, since they permeate human self-conceptions. Such conceptions always involve idealization; the historical horizon, within which society's self-image is embedded, is suffused with idealizations.

The concept of ideals is fundamental for anthropology, as every culture has its own 'ideals of the noble'. lt is fundamental for psychoanalysis because ideals provide a key to understanding the structure of the human subject. As Charles Taylor argues (1985), the self can articulate itself only in relation to what he calls 'strong evaluations', that is, goals 'outside' the self that are taken to be categorically superior. In his essay 'On the Necessity of Ideals' Harry Frankfurt argues that true autonomy and individuality, as opposed to abstract freedom, assume volitional necessity, the necessity of ideals. Ideals are at. once forins of love and 'reflexive evaluative attitudes' which constitute volitional necessity and true autonomy:

A person ... is subject to a necessity that in absolute limit. And this necessity is unequivocally constitutive of his nature or essence as a volitional being ... lf someone loves nothing, it follows that he has no ideals. Now an ideal is a limit. A person’s ideals are concerns that he cannot bring himself to betray ... lf someone has no ideals, there is nothing that he cannot bring himself to do. Moreover, since nothing is necessary to him, there is nothing that he can be said essentially to be. (Frankfurt, 1999, pp. 112,114)

Like analytical moral philosophy, moral psychology has hardly dwelled on ideals. However, the concept of ideals may be as fundamental to moral psychology as the concept of guilt or of development towards the ability to universalize. Klein observed that a basic sense of goodness and badness antedates guilt. Even if guilt itself is situated at a very early stage, as it was by Klein, goodness and badness of self and other are experienced even earlier. Klein did not elaborate on the ethical significance of these fundamental senses of goodness and badness. However, they seem to underlie one's own, others' and the world's goodness and badness, which are expressed in different systems of ideals.

Taylor's 'strong evaluations', like Frankfurt's 'ideals', can never be fully realized. The subject is constituted in Relation to a constitutive limit, a lack which may testify for a loss or a deprivation or a death. Names of the unachievable, ideals represent the constitutive limit that makes individuation and membership in social structure possible. (Individuation, which is a strenuous psychological achievement, can ordy be preserved in social structures. Social structures, for their part, depend on the availability of a sufficient quantity of well-individuated persons for their prosperity. Each occupant of a structural position preserves his/her own individuation by being related within structure to other well-individuated persons. Individuation is a collective achievement.) Ideals, which emerge in the process of individuation, count among the building blocks of social structure.

In the following section, the anthropological distinction between structure and communitas will be introduced. I propose to supplement Victor Tumer's well-known formulation of this distinction with several points, including the earlier claim that ideals form an essential part of social structure while they are absent in communitas. lt is impossible to understand ideals without understanding social structures. A transcendent - that is, separate and absent - realm of ideals is one of the building blocks of structure.