Summary
Written in 1921 while WW1 was fresh on his mind, Freud investigates the psychology of groups. Little did he know, one of the most notorious groups in history was just a few years from rising to power, ultimately forcing him to flee to London in 1938, where he would die of cancer. The book starts with a summary and critique of contemporary Gustave Le Bon’s work on group psychology and then investigates past where Le Bon’s work ends.
Thoughts
It has long been acknowledged that the individual takes less responsibility when part of a group. The personal identity gets enveloped by the whole. Groups often take on the attributes of children in that they are prone to the strongest emotions. As Freud describes, “impulsive, changeable, and irritable. It is controlled almost exclusively by the unconscious.” This type of behavior can lift individuals to heights of heroism they would never have achieved alone, but also to similar extreme levels of cruelty.
We all have ideals which are amalgamations of our various heroes, saints, reformers, etc. In normal life, this ideal operates with no real object explicitly identified. In a group, the leader often is one that is close enough to our personal ideal that they take its place in the member’s mind. To Freud, this initial tie with the leader is foundational, as the leader often embodies the group’s collective ego ideal, the internalized set of aspirations and standards. When it comes to psychoanalysis, some claims it makes can be met with differing levels of incredulity, but the lens it provides to understand group dynamics seems undeniably insightful. Having participated in and observed many groups, I can attest that their leaders often hold a stronger sway over their followers than would be expected given the material circumstances. To Freud, that is because the ego ideal that was initially part of you has become identified with the leader, or put another way, you have invested yourself in the image of the leader. Two things result from this: first, it allows many people to align ideals in one direction. Secondly, it exteriorizes your ideal, providing the necessary space between you and your ideal to keep you engaged. One might imagine a scenario in which a person could eventually subsume their ideal ego into their own ego, but if it is invested in an exterior object, that event will obviously never occur.
Freud interestingly compares this situation to being in love. It often occurs that the one we fall in love with is initially another object of transference. They are someone that appears to have what you lack; you feel “completed” by them. This scenario, in love, often does not have the space required to survive what has become known as the “honeymoon phase,” but what Freud points out is that the very difference between leader and follower provides the psychic space required for this identification to persist for as long as the group does.
As a bonus tidbit, Freud also compares groups and hypnosis. He makes some observations about the process of hypnotism and how it requires the hypnotist to become the sole object of their subject’s attention. This section produces a quote with the certainty that only Freud could make:
Ferenczi has made the true discovery that when a hypnotist gives the command to sleep, which is often done at the beginning of hypnosis, he is putting himself in the place of the subject’s parents…. Now the command to sleep in hypnosis means nothing more nor less than an order to withdraw all interest from the world and to concentrate it upon the person of the hypnotist. And it is so understood by the subject; for in this withdrawal of interest from the outer world lies the psychological characteristic of sleep, and the kinship between sleep and the state of hypnosis is based upon it.
People often think that psychoanalysis is centered around “fixing” problems, but it would be better understood as attempting to mechanistically explain things that we think of as problems. The psychoanalytic movement is as open to the same analysis as it levels against the church and army. The hope, perhaps, is the statement of faith that “the truth will set you free.”