Mass Psychology and Other Writings

"People often think of psychoanalysis as a theory of the individual – a lot of Freud’s early ideas and writing does indeed emerge from his struggle to make sense of the individual patients he treats. But there is also this other dimension, which is about groups and institutions. Indeed, some of Freud’s papers read like stories about the problems of group hatred, loyalty and love within the psychoanalytical movement itself. He writes this paper on group or mass psychology after World War I. It was a time when many writers tried to come to terms with the industrialised mass slaughter and to think about what drove nationalism and militarism in the first place. For Freud, the Great War confirmed some of his own ideas about human destructiveness and repetition. It was viewed as evidence of the power of the irrational. A concern with human destructiveness and aggression and the constant propensity to the repetition of pathology was to be a central feature of his thought in the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the most famous and controversial – even then – work in this genre before 1914 had been Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind in the 1890s. He argued that an ever more pressing phenomenon needed to be understood: The power of burgeoning populations, and above all the mass electorate’s propensity to regress to infantile functioning and to be swayed by instincts and passions. Le Bon did sometimes tend to write as though an “elite” might be able to master this crowd, and there was more than a whiff of condescension. Freud was familiar with the literature of the crowd, but he also sought to move beyond it. His book engages with Le Bon but Freud is not satisfied with ideas of feral relapse, or at least not in the idea, familiar in Le Bon and his contemporaries, of some special kind of entity that was nothing less than a special “crowd mind”. Freud suggested how, within the crowd, processes in the unconscious of individuals are made manifest, or given opportunities – that there is an exposure of something that exists in each of us individually rather than some special thing called “the mass mentality”. He thinks of it more in terms of ordinary longings, desires and identifications. Up until this work, you had the two separate ideas of the individual and of the crowd. Freud makes the point, however, that in a way it is a false distinction. It misunderstands the fact that the individual is also constituted out of social relationships in the first place. Inside our minds, he argued, there is always someone else involved – an “I”, a first person singular, is made out of a “we”: For example, internalised representations of and identifications with parents, among others. Increasingly psychoanalysis explored this complex drama going on inside minds, and the ego’s relationships with others inside ourselves. Here it came to be argued that there is always an unconscious relationship inside us to an “object” or rather a host of objects. It could be an internalised version of another person or, in a more primitive form, bits and pieces of a person or certain qualities. This complication of the relationship of “self” and “other” in this book is well described in Jacqueline Rose’s introduction to a recent re-translation of the book."