News from another world – that was my first impression when this lecture, typeset, lay before me for the ceremony of recognition. The concrete social general – who would still name it today, now that we can grasp it thanks to the bridging of the gap between the virtual and the real, with the removal of the barriers of space and time? Who would even ask about it, after the religion of the market seems to sacramentally guarantee it along with the emotions that validate its arrival? But then the tide turned. Nothing had passed. The questions posed 25 years ago may have been buried, but that did not make them any less relevant. The concept of the concrete social general, rightly placed in the title of this lecture by the editor, resonates with the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, as discussed by social scientists and philosophers.