Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) (Chapters V-VI)

Here Freud begins to derive the “group mind” and its seemingly unique qualities from the psychoanalytic master-concept of libido. “We will try our fortune, then, with the supposition that love relationships…also constitute the essence of the group mind [Massenseele]” (31). Chapters V and VI carry forward the argument by, first, reviewing several group types — Church and Army — that illustrate Freud’s “bonding” hypothesis in a perspicuous way; and, second, addressing the uneasy relation of “love” to its inescapable shadow, “feelings of aversion and hostility” (42), which taint even the most loving relations with ambivalence. (Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” contains an extensive description of this ambivalence.)

Freud’s reflections on the Church and Army center on the forms of bonding each displays. Notwithstanding their real differences, the elementary emotional bonds holding them in place are essentially identical. Both are examples of “highly organized, lasting, and artificial groups” (32). Groups that lack these qualities — that are disorganized and unstable, that arise and dissolve spontaneously — scarcely qualify as groups at all. A group presupposes the condition of being held together.

The most striking characteristic shared by Church and Army — what for Freud accounts for their basic “morphologies” — is the “parental” figuration. In either case, “the same illusion holds good of there being a head…who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love. Everything depends upon this illusion” (33). By “everything,” Freud means the continuing existence of the group. Somehow, the “belief” of the group members that they are loved by their leader — paraphrased, provocatively and without elaboration, as an “illusion” — generates in turn their own feelings of attachment, first to the leader and then to one another. This belief represents a necessary, albeit insufficient condition for the perpetuation of these groups. (Here Freud flags the possibility of “leaderless” (40) groups, hinting that “leading ideas” may assume the functions of leaders per se.)

The leaders in whose vital “love” the group members believe are Christ and the Commander-in-Chief. Each is construed, consciously or unconsciously, as a “kind elder brother” or “substitute father” (33) who cares about and looks after the welfare of everyone in his charge. Only on the basis of this original, primary “bond” — between leader and led — can there arise the secondary bond among the group members themselves. These member become united with one another, that is, by virtue of the unity each has individually established with a common leader.

Thus Freud remarks: “Believers call themselves bothers in Christ, that is, brothers through the love which Christ has for them” (33). As perfunctory evidence for these claims, Freud cites incidents of social disintegration — for example, when the members of an Army panic, dissolve their commitments, and turn on one another. Inevitably, Freud argues, this development is catalyzed by the antecedent rupture of the bond between these members and their leader (or more metaphorical “leading idea”), either because that leader has died, or abandoned his charge, or has retracted his “love” (or the basis for trusting it). Under these conditions, in which the principal, “parental” bond is broken, the secondary, “sibling” bonds quickly expire (38).

In this way, Freud has begun to ground the perplexing manifestations of group-mentality in the psychoanalytic theory of libido. The manifestations cited in the literature as suis generis, that is, “suggestibility,” “emotional contagion,” and the like — these may be explained, Freud suggests, as the predictable result of a specific libidinal distribution. In particular, the susceptibility of the individual to radical “alteration" by the group — the reduction of his intellect, and intensification of his affect, until they match the spirit of the group — can be understood along these lines:

“It would appear as though we were on the right road towards an explanation of the principal phenomenon of group psychology — the individual's lack of freedom in a group. If each individual is bound in two directions by such an intense emotional tie, we shall find no difficulty in attributing to that circumstance the alteration and limitation which have been observed in his personality” (35)

Common to the diverse manifestations of group-mentality is, fundamentally, the “impairment” of individual agency and integrity. But it is precisely libido, Eros, that most plainly activates this impairment. In other words, just this impairment illustrates Freud’s central thesis: “The essence of a group lies in the libidinal ties existing in it” (35).

In fact, Freud continues, “love for oneself knows only one barrier — love for others, love for objects” (43). Love, that is, is “the civilizing factor” (44) that checks every individual’s inborn “narcissism.” But our capacity to suspend this narcissism or “self love” — a precondition both of intimate relations and generic group membership — is finally limited. The mixed success of groups in maintaining themselves is a function of this limitation.