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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Ch. V

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