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THE HUMAN MOLECULE
How One Thing Leads to Another, in which a theory of human particle social physics of interactions is loosely outlined, English chemist and physicist Philip Ball states, in comment on Heilbroner’s volition argument, that ‘Heilbroner is, of course, right to say that humans make choices whereas particles do not.’ The fact that a modern chemist-physicist does not see the deeper picture of human operation leads one to the conclusion that very few people in modern times understand their own existence. During these years, another to have conceived of an intricate type of social atom theory was Romanian-born American group psychotherapist Jacob Moreno. In the early 1900s, Moreno began to develop his interest or rather curiosity in psychology by observing and joining in children’s play in the gardens of Vienna, Austria. At the time, he was a student of philosophy and mathematics and had not yet entered into medical school. In his observations, according to his wife Zerka, ‘he was impressed by the great amount of spontaneity in children and became aware that human beings become less spontaneous as they age’.3 The question he asked himself was why does this occur? This question stuck with him in the following years, and later stimulated him to develop a theory of interaction spontaneity in group settings. In a partial solution, developed during his years as a medical student at the University of Vienna, which he completed in 1917, he began to reject the many of the points of Freudian theory, such as conceiving of the mind in isolation or as analyzing people in isolation in an office, and instead sought to develop a dynamic-evolving social structure theory based on energy psychological interactions in group settings. Soon thereafter, he developed the conception of sociometry, a quantitative method for measuring social relationships, a term he derived from the Latin socius meaning companion, and metrum meaning measure. He defined sociometry as ‘the inquiry into the evolution and organization of groups and the position of individuals within them.’ In particular, ‘as the science of group organization, it attacks the problem not from the outer structure of the group, the group surface, but from the inner structure.’ Moreover, ‘sociometric explorations reveal the hidden structures that give a group its form: the alliances, the subgroups, the hidden beliefs, the forbidden agenda’s, the ideological agreements, the ‘stars’ of the show, etc.’ In 1951, building on these views, Moreno outlined a social atom theory in which, using a crude structure of the physical atom in gases, fluids, and solids as a basic metaphorical model of social structure and group interaction, he defined the social atom as a four-level hierarchical structure, with the individual at its center, comprised of the acquaintanceship atom (all the people of whom one is aware), the collective atom (groups to which the person belongs), the individual atom (loosely, one’s close friends), and the psychological atom (those persons essential to one’s psychological well-being).4 In modern terms, we might think of Moreno’s model as a social matrix of people bonded into, simultaneously, levels of weak, intermediate, and strong relationships, in a three-dimensional psychological structure.