Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Summary

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, 1921) asks why a person in a crowd, a church or an army thinks, feels and acts differently from the same person alone. Freud opens by denying any sharp line between individual and social psychology: in every mind someone else is always present, as model, object, helper or opponent. He then quotes at length from Gustave Le Bon's Psychology of Crowds (1895), with its picture of the crowd as impulsive, credulous and hungry for a strong master, and from William McDougall's The Group Mind (1920), which distinguishes the primitive crowd from the organised group that recovers some of the individual's powers. Freud's own claim is that these authors described the phenomena well but explained them with empty words such as 'suggestion' and 'contagion'. What really holds a group together, he argues, is love in his broad technical sense (libido), mostly 'inhibited in its aim'. To show it he chooses two highly organised 'artificial' groups, the Catholic Church and the army, each sustained by the illusion of a head (Christ, the Commander-in-Chief) who loves every member equally. Each member is tied to the leader and, through him, to the others; when the tie to the leader breaks, as in a military panic, the mutual ties dissolve as well. The central chapters supply the mechanism. Identification, the earliest emotional tie, lets a person take another into himself; melancholia, in which the ego rages against a lost object it has absorbed, reveals within the ego a critical faculty Freud calls the ego ideal. Being in love and hypnosis show what happens when an outside object is put in the ego ideal's place: criticism falls silent and the beloved or the hypnotist can do no wrong. A primary group, Freud concludes, is a number of people who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and so identify with one another. Against Wilfred Trotter's 'herd instinct' he proposes that man is a horde animal, and he links the group to his earlier hypothesis of a primal father who ruled a horde of sons. Later sections treat the ego ideal's periodic overthrow in festivals and in mania, the poet who first invented the heroic myth, and the antagonism between neurosis and group membership. The book is useful to students for its sharp analysis of mass movements, propaganda and loyalty, written just before the totalitarian movements of the 1920s and 1930s that later readers saw foreshadowed in it. It is equally useful as an object of critique. Freud treats the Church as a psychological structure and religious belief as an illusion, and his primal horde is a speculative myth with no historical evidence. A Christian reader can grant his acute observations about crowds and leaders while asking whether shared love of a true good differs from the surrender of conscience that he describes.

Plot or Argument

• I. Every psychology is social

  Freud argues that individual psychology is from the first also social, since parents, siblings, beloved and physician enter every mental life. The real question is why people in large numbers show reactions they would not show alone, and whether a special 'social instinct' is needed to explain them.

• II. Le Bon's crowd

  A long exposition of Le Bon: the group mind as a provisional being with new qualities; the individual's sense of invincible power, contagion and hypnotic suggestibility; the crowd's impulsiveness, credulity, extremism and reverence for illusion and prestige. Freud likens these traits to the mental life of children, primitive peoples and neurotics, but finds Le Bon weakest on the leader.

• III. McDougall and other accounts

  Freud reviews McDougall's 'principle of direct induction of emotion' and his five conditions by which an organised group can rise above the crowd, along with earlier observers who credited groups with achievements such as language and folk-song. He reads McDougall's conditions as attempts to restore to the group the individual's lost characteristics.

• IV. Suggestion and libido

  Rejecting 'suggestion' as an explanation that itself needs explaining (with the old Christopher riddle about who carries the carrier), Freud proposes that love relationships, in the broad sense of libido that includes friendship and devotion to ideas, constitute the essence of the group mind.

• V. The Church and the army

  In both artificial groups each member is bound to a head imagined as loving all equally, and through him to the others. Panic, illustrated by Nestroy's parody in which 'the general has lost his head', is the dissolution of those ties. Freud argues that a religious group under strain turns its hostility outward toward unbelievers.

• VI. Hostility held in check

  Using Schopenhauer's freezing porcupines, Freud notes the aversion that lingers in every close relationship and the readiness of neighbouring towns and peoples to despise one another. In a group this intolerance vanishes toward fellow members, which Freud attributes to a new libidinal tie.

• VII. Identification and the ego ideal

  Identification is the earliest form of emotional tie: in the Oedipus complex, in neurotic symptoms, and in shared emotional situations such as the boarding-school girls who catch one another's hysterical fits. Melancholia reveals a split ego in which a critical agency, the ego ideal (conscience, self-observation, dream censorship), rages against the part that has absorbed a lost object.

• VIII. Being in love and hypnosis

  In intense love the object is overvalued, criticism is silenced and the object takes the place of the ego ideal. Hypnosis is a love relation without sexual aim, a group of two. This yields Freud's formula: a primary group is a number of individuals who have substituted one object for their ego ideal and identified with one another in the ego.

• IX. The herd instinct

  Freud weighs Trotter's theory of a gregarious instinct and counters that group feeling arises from rivalry turned into identification among siblings who must share a parent's love. Social justice in this sense means that each renounces something so that others must renounce it too. He corrects Trotter: man is a horde animal led by a chief.

• X. The group and the primal horde

  Drawing on his Totem and Taboo hypothesis, Freud identifies the leader with the primal father of the horde and reads hypnosis and the uncanny power of a leader as a revival of the sons' relation to that father. The group wants to be governed by unrestricted force and has an extreme passion for authority.

• XI. A differentiating grade in the ego

  Because the separation between ego and ego ideal is fragile, it is periodically suspended: in festivals such as the Saturnalia and carnival, and pathologically in the swings between melancholia and mania, where in mania ego and ideal fuse in triumph and in melancholia the ideal condemns the ego.

• XII. Postscript

  Five supplementary notes: the difference between identification and putting an object in place of the ego ideal; the poet who freed himself from the group by inventing the heroic myth; the relation between aim-inhibited and directly sexual ties; why neurosis and being in love both detach a person from groups, and why religion protected against neurosis; and a closing comparison of love, hypnosis, group formation and neurosis.

Characters

• Sigmund Freud, author

  Reads earlier crowd theorists closely and then supplies his own libidinal explanation, often marking where he goes beyond the evidence.

• Gustave Le Bon, authority discussed

  French author of Psychologie des foules (1895), whose vivid description of the crowd mind Freud quotes at length in Chapter II.

• William McDougall, authority discussed

  British psychologist whose The Group Mind (1920) contrasts the unorganised crowd with the organised group; Freud reviews his conditions for raising group life.

• Wilfred Trotter, authority discussed

  English surgeon whose Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War proposed a gregarious instinct; Freud answers that man is a horde animal.

• The leader, central figure of the analysis

  Christ in the Church, the Commander-in-Chief in the army, the hypnotist, and in Freud's speculative history the primal father; the object members put in place of their ego ideal.

• The first epic poet, figure in Freud's speculative myth

  In the Postscript, the individual who broke from the group in imagination and invented the hero who slays the father, thereby creating the first ego ideal.

Lessons

• Why the crowd thinks with one mind

  Le Bon, as Freud quotes him, describes the person in a crowd as feeling invincible, credulous, quick to extremes and unable to tolerate delay. Freud accepts much of this description but insists it explains nothing until we see the emotional ties underneath. Students can test both men's claims against crowds they have seen, from stadiums to online pile-ons.

  • Which features of Le Bon's crowd have you observed yourself, and which seem exaggerated?
  • Freud says words like 'suggestion' and 'contagion' name the problem without solving it. Is his alternative, libido, a better explanation or only a different word?
  • What habits of mind help a person keep his own judgment inside an excited group?

• Church and army as test cases

  Freud picks the Church and the army because their structure is visible: one head, imagined as loving each member equally, binds the members to one another. His account of panic, when the leader falls and every man runs for himself, is vivid. His treatment of the Church is reductive: he speaks of Christ's love as an 'illusion' while quoting Matthew 25, and he concludes that a religion of love must be hard toward outsiders. Students should state his argument fairly and then test it against the text of the Gospel he cites.

  • Why does Freud choose highly organised groups rather than spontaneous crowds as his starting point?
  • Freud quotes 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren'. Does his reading of that verse account for its whole meaning?
  • Is Freud right that a religion of love is necessarily hard toward those outside it? What would count as evidence for or against?

• The ego ideal and the surrender of conscience

  Freud's key concept is the ego ideal, a critical faculty within the self that observes, judges and censors. In being in love, in hypnosis and in the group, an outside object takes its place, and then 'conscience has no application' to what is done for the beloved or the leader. This gives a precise account of how ordinary people can do in a movement what they would condemn alone.

  • Trace how Freud moves from melancholia to being in love to hypnosis to the group. What does each step add?
  • How does Freud's 'ego ideal' differ from the classical and Christian idea of conscience as knowledge of a moral law not of our making?
  • Can loyalty to a leader or cause ever be good without becoming the surrender Freud describes? What makes the difference?

• Herd or horde?

  Against Trotter's gregarious instinct Freud proposes that group feeling grows from envy turned into a demand for equality: siblings who cannot each have a parent's whole love settle for all having the same. Man, he says, is a horde animal ruled by a chief. The argument is a sharp account of resentment and of the wish to be ruled, but its support in the primal-horde myth is speculative.

  • What is the difference between Freud's 'horde' and Trotter's 'herd', and why does it matter for politics?
  • Freud derives a sense of justice from the rule that if I may not have something, no one may. Is that the origin of justice, or one of its counterfeits?
  • How much weight can an argument bear when it rests on a hypothesis about prehistory that cannot be checked?

Context

Freud wrote in Vienna after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and the German Empire, amid revolutions, mass demonstrations and the dissolution of defeated armies, when the behaviour of crowds and the loyalty of soldiers were pressing questions. Crowd psychology was already a recognised field: Le Bon's book of 1895, Gabriel Tarde's work on imitation and Scipio Sighele's on criminal crowds had made the irrational crowd a commonplace of European social thought, often with a conservative fear of democracy. The war had also given new prominence to Trotter's herd instinct and McDougall's group mind. Freud's contribution was to tie these discussions to psychoanalytic concepts he had developed for individual patients, especially narcissism, identification and the ego ideal.

Composition

Freud began notes on group psychology in 1919 and finished the book in 1921; it was published that year in Vienna by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. The library's text is James Strachey's authorised English translation, published in London and Vienna in 1922 by the International Psycho-Analytical Press. The book sits between Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923), and its 'differentiating grade in the ego' anticipates the later super-ego.

Reception

The book became a standard text in social psychology and political theory. Later readers, including members of the Frankfurt School, saw in its account of the leader and the ego ideal an anticipation of fascist mass movements. Critics have objected to its reliance on Le Bon's unflattering portrait of crowds, to the unprovable primal-horde hypothesis, and to its reduction of religious community to libidinal ties. Its analysis of identification and idealisation continues to be cited in discussions of charisma, cults and propaganda.

Comparisons

• A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

  The lectures introduce libido, narcissism and transference as clinical concepts for individual patients; Group Psychology applies the same vocabulary to churches, armies and crowds, treating the group's leader as the patient treats the physician.

• Leviathan

  Hobbes argues that frightened individuals rationally authorise a sovereign to escape the war of all against all; Freud describes members who put a leader in the place of their own conscience out of love, not calculation, and both explain why people want to be ruled.

• Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  Written immediately after the 1920 book, Group Psychology largely sets aside the death instinct and works with Eros as the force that binds people together, an idea Freud names in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and here applies to social ties.

• The Ego and the Id

  The ego ideal described here as a 'differentiating grade in the ego' becomes, two years later, the super-ego of The Ego and the Id.

• Civilization and Its Discontents

  Freud's 1930 essay extends this book's remarks on the contempt closely related towns and peoples feel for one another into a full account of aggression, and treats civilization as Eros binding people together against it.

• The Origins of Totalitarianism

  Arendt's history of the mass movements that Freud's readers later saw foreshadowed here stresses loneliness, ideology and terror more than libidinal ties to a leader, offering a historical counterweight to his psychological model.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Primarily a work of social psychology, but it contains clinical material of interest to psychiatry and its history. Chapter VII uses melancholia, with its self-reproach and introjection of a lost object, to establish the ego ideal, restating the argument of Mourning and Melancholia (1917). Chapter VIII treats hypnosis, central to nineteenth-century psychiatry from Charcot and Bernheim, as a love relation and a 'group of two'. Chapter XI offers a psychoanalytic reading of cyclical melancholia and mania, distinguishing cases thought spontaneous from psychogenic ones, at a time when Kraepelin's manic-depressive insanity was the dominant psychiatric category. The Postscript claims that neurosis and group membership are antagonistic and that religious belief protected against neurosis; these are Freud's interpretations, not established findings.

• Ch. VII

  Identification in hysterical symptoms, including contagion of a fit among girls in a boarding school after one receives a letter; melancholia as introjection of the lost object and the cruelty of the critical faculty toward the ego.

  Hysteria Melancholia Depression Grief Psychology Unconscious
• Ch. VIII and Ch. X

  Hypnosis compared with being in love and with the group; the hypnotist as heir to the primal father; two kinds of hypnosis, soothing and threatening.

  Psychology Unconscious Psychiatry History
• Ch. XI

  Cyclical oscillation between melancholia and mania explained as the ego ideal's temporary fusion with or harsh rule over the ego; spontaneous versus psychogenic melancholias.

  Melancholia Depression Mania
• Postscript, D

  Neurosis as disintegrating group ties like being in love; group formation said to diminish neuroses; the neurotic replacing group formations with private systems of imagination.

  Neurosis Anxiety Psychology Unconscious
• Ch. V

  Military panic as the dissolution of libidinal ties, with discussion of McDougall's account of fear spreading through a group.

  Neurosis Anxiety

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Freud says that in a group the leader takes the place of each member's ego ideal. Write an essay on whether St Paul's 'Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ' (1 Corinthians 11:1) describes the same thing or something different.

• Fiction

  Write a short story about a soldier in a retreating army at the moment word spreads that the general is dead, showing from inside how the ties Freud describes give way, or hold.

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue in which Le Bon, McDougall and Freud each explain the same street riot, with each speaker pressing the others on what their key term actually explains.

• Classroom

  Collect three examples of modern advertising or political messaging and analyse each using Freud's ideas of prestige, identification and the leader as ego ideal, then note one thing his model misses.

Further Reading

• The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon

  The book Freud quotes throughout Chapter II.

• Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud

  Source of the primal-horde hypothesis used in Chapter X.

• The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud

  Develops the ego ideal into the super-ego.

• Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, Wilfred Trotter

  The herd-instinct theory Freud answers in Chapter IX.

• The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

  A historical account of mass movements to set beside Freud's psychology.

• Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay

  Situates the book in Freud's postwar work.