Motivated by concerns of increased social division in South Africa, this project investigates the identifications and affective network of belonging of the country’s most privileged sector - white English-speaking South Africans. While sociological and discourse analytic studies have explored the prevailing self-representations of this group, what remains still to be developed is a ‘libidinal economy of the mass’ able to investigate the particular psychical investments of this group, and to link subjective identifications with a network of belonging. This project explore such issues of belonging and identification - and thereby issues of social division – by gathering a series of 50 interviews, many captured on video, of white South Africans of differing backgrounds. To encourage talk on social identification and belonging, interviews will accordingly take place both in participants’ familiar locations (homes, neighborhoods) and at sites of cross-racial public interaction (shared and/or recreational spaces underwritten by values of ‘the nation’). The aim will thus be to track both longstanding historical discourses of belonging and the potential of newly-emerging points of subjective investment in South Africa. The semi-structured interviews will be analyzed by psychoanalytic discourse analysis and will be linked to a conceptual frame derived from psychoanalysis. Freudian group psychology pin-points those trajectories of affect – discourses and affects of identification here being intractably interwoven – that prove indispensible in constituting a group. These include: 1) an idealized regime of self-representations; 2) the factor of a symbolic legacy; 3) the supposition of a lost/utopian object; and 4) shared forms of suffering or enjoyment. Collectively these nodal-points outline a ‘libidinal economy of the mass’ which links discourses and affective ties. The functioning of this economy – its particular dynamics, patterns and repetitions – will be characterized by means of recourse to psychoanalytic notions (as hysterical, neurotic, perverse, melancholic, etc. in nature).