Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) (Chapters VII-Conclusion)
Chapters VII and VIII unites Freud’s reflections with an additional pair of concepts drawn from psychology— identification and hypnosis — that promise to throw additional light on the main theme. As Freud conceives it, “identification” constitutes a second, virtually separate mechanism of “emotional tie” alongside “object-cathexis” (45). Thus immediate (i.e. sexual) and mediated (i.e. “love”) object-cathexes are, from the beginning of life, complemented by another type of bond. Indeed, Freud makes this “other” bond originary: “identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (46).
What are the characteristics of identification? Freud expresses it this way: “Identification endeavors to mould a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a model” (48). The boy who wishes and attempts to resemble his father, to incorporate the latter’s admired capacities and traits, with a view to eventually replacing him (46), illustrates the still-narcissistic thrust of this tie. Identification conveys a wish to model oneself after the object, hence (in Freud’s words) to be that object, while the subsequent “cathexis” indicates the wish to have that object (47).
We will find shortly that, as the “earliest and original form of emotional tie” (48), identification constitutes an enduring basis of “regression." This appears to be the fate of all “original” things and situations in Freud’s thought: subsequent achievements are relatively precarious, threatened with regression to what is earlier and primary. Above all, the achievement of object-cathexis may at any time succumb to this regressive dynamic, in which the love-object is once again “converted” into material for introjection. (One might compare “Mourning and Melancholia’s” somewhat different account of “identification.”)
Chapter VIII compares the mental state of love — specifically, “being in love” or romantic infatuation — with the mental condition induced by hypnosis. Freud’s objective is to deepen our understanding of the well-established “hypnotic” action of groups upon their members, though an examination of its genesis. Here Freud introduces the notorious distinction between two types of “object cathexis.” The first is “directly sexual,” and for this reason admits of direct, complete satisfaction — it creates no enduring “tie” with the object, but exhausts itself in sexual consummation. The second type of cathexis is a later, “aim inhibited” precipitate of the first: incapable of full satisfaction, this cathexis does generate enduring ties, functions of the merely partial satisfaction they afford.
Romantic infatuation is precisely an “aim inhibited”cathexis in full blossom. In these instances, a “direct” wish to possess a parent — the aim-uninhibited cathexis — was renounced and repressed under threat from the other, “rival” parent. This cathexis now unconsciously underlies the adult’s romantic life. In successful cases, at puberty one is able to “synthesize” the two currents of objective-cathexis — the directly sexual, and its “aim inhibited” sequel. (The latter is by definition laden with the dynamics of repression. It is after all a disguised form of a drive whose prospects for satisfaction were “consciously” disclaimed.) But a powerful romantic infatuation is, Freud more than hints, a product of failure to achieve such a balanced synthesis. “The depth to which anyone is in love, as contrasted with his pure sensual desire, may be measured by the size of the share taken by the aim-inhibited instincts of affection” (55-56).
In such a case, that is, the “ratio” of aim-uninhibited to aim-inhibited drives tips decisively in favor the latter, all but eliminating the primary factor in its genesis and, indeed, any possibility of even partial satisfaction: hence the “unhappiness” of infatuation. The object of this intense, aim-inhibited love is increasingly “etherealized”; desire is divested, at least consciously, of sensual “impurities,” and “the illusion is produced that the object has come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits” (56). The whole attitude is typified by distortion, exaggeration, denial — above all, “overvaluation…the loved object enjoys a certain amount of freedom from criticism…all its characteristics are valued more highly than those of people who are not loved” (56).
In particular: “The tendency which falsified judgment in this respect is that of idealization” (56). The lover’s intense, unsatisfiable longing is carried by “narcissistic libido” (56) — in quintessential cases, we are struck by how patently “the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal…We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego” (56). The love choice becomes a “roundabout…means of satisfying our narcissism” (56). Paradoxically, however, at its highest, most aim-inhibited pitch, love becomes utterly self-abnegating:
“[T]he ego becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The object has, so to speak, consumed the ego.” (56-57)
Freud continues: “The object has been put in the place of the ego ideal” (57). The external love-object is now invested with the qualities and function of my internal “ego ideal,” including not only certain perfections I aspire to embody, but also the claims and criticisms of “conscience,” to which I have until now been subjected. (Later in his development, Freud will ascribe these last functions to the “superego.”) To just this degree, in other words, my intrapsychic ego ideal has been evacuated, projected into some piece of the external world.
At this point, Freud makes one of his abrupt, speculative leaps in argumentation, bridging the gap that had evidently opened up between the book’s main topic and these more restricted, psychoanalytically familiar reflections into which Freud has plunged the reader. All along, in fact, this chapter has established continuity between the action of love and hypnosis. The same self-abnegating delegation of one’s ego ideal to another occurs in both cases. In the one case, the ego ideal is projected onto the love-object; in the other, the hypnotist. In both cases, the ego is afterwards as submissive to the externalized embodiment of its ideal — the object’s wishes, demands, and critical judgments — as it was formerly to its internal ideal, its “conscience.” And now, finally, the chapter’s last sentence states the relevance of this mechanism for group psychology: “A primary group…is a number of individuals who have put one and same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (61).
This formula unites in one place the ideas we encountered in earlier chapters with his present concern. For it is now unmistakable that the “tie” between individual and leader is in the the nature of an (aim-inhibited) “object-cathexis,” while the tie between the individual and his “peers” is a secondary “identification.” And these two libidinal operations, together with their logical relation, finally account for the “hypnotic” manifestations of groups: the vulnerability of individuals to conformism; the relaxation of their moral scruples; and the corruption of their power of judgment to match the “group “mind’s.”
Chapter IX presents Freud’s considered view of the so-called “herd instinct,” en route to his revival of that “scientific myth” of the primal horde, elaborated in Chapter X. In a now recognizable pattern, Freud’s reception of the idea is equivocal. He accepts the credibility of the herd instinct as an empirical touchstone, as earlier he acknowledged the relative validity of group “suggestibility.” But he rejects the irreducible status that others have accorded to it. In fact, this gregariousness or sociability is a relatively late acquisition. The herd instinct is further reducible, since it is explicable as a reaction-formation to a more primary situation, first in time, characterized by envy, rivalry, and mutual mistrust — which, because of the threat it poses, must be repressed, denied, and guarded against.
This is one, prominent Nietzschean thread. The herd instinct, like the ideals of justice and equality that partially constitute it, is a sort of compromise resignedly struck by the weak in response to their failure to secure their original, ambitious aims. (66) The following chapter is perhaps best understood as a prolongation of this motif: Freud’s picture of the primal horde simply fills in some of the relevant details of human “prehistory” and the human being’s innate “constitution” — two qualities which are never, in any case, tidily distinguished for Freud.
Freud’s scientific myth — he amiably accepts the appellation “just-so story” (69) from one of his critics — alleges a “transformation of the paternal horde into a community of brothers” (69). There is a parallel here. The infantile constellation is preserved, in the timeless unconscious of the adult, very much intact, exerting undreamt influence on the course of life — a situation that may always be abruptly restored, at a touch, by the pull of regression, in response to internal or external strain. In the same way, the template of the primal horde that Freud divines in our archaic history endures through all later social developments as a permanent core — no matter how revolutionary or progressive these developments may appear to us. And, though frequently obscured, this core is always ready to explode into undisguised savagery. Freud is perfectly candid about this parallel:
“Just as primitive man survives potentially in every individual, so the primal horde may arise once more out of any random collection; in so far as men are habitually under the sway of group formation we recognize in it the survival of the primal horde. We must conclude that the psychology of groups is the oldest human psychology” (70)
Having begun, it seems, from a place of scientific agnosticism, Freud’s account of group mentality and behavior is now increasingly darkened by Hobbesian and Nietzschean shadows. Power and violence (or at least its threat); the wish for unrestricted mastery and supremacy over others, ostensibly native to every individual (one actually realized by the father of the ancient primal horde, owing to his natural, terrifying strength); the genealogical origin of moral ideals like justice and equality in the primary affect of envy (from which they sprout as “reaction formations”) — Freud’s examination of the evidence, with the assistance a psychoanalytic frame of reference, leads him unerringly in the direction of disenchantment: the reduction of the higher to the lower, the noble to the base and all-too-human.
Chapter XI, “A Differentiating Grade of the Ego,” is dedicated mainly to fresh conjectures about the “psychogenesis” of individual neurosis, especially depression and manic-depression, and how these illnesses may follow the vagaries of “ego” and “ego ideal,” in their greater and lesser distance from one another. A greater distance signifies a self-mortifying depression; yet when all distance has been overcome — when, that is, the ego ideal’s critical monitoring and negative judgment have been suspended entirely — then mania results: “[I]t cannot be doubted that in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together”(82). The special value of this chapter for our reflections is its tantalizingly brief paragraph connecting the jubilant, carnivalesque atmosphere of certain social traditions with this problematic. Freud suggests that, in all likelihood, these traditions respond therapeutically to a psychic situation characterized by a great discrepancy between ego and ego ideal, one that borders on neurosis. “It is quite conceivable that the separation…cannot be borne for long…and has to be temporarily undone” (81). Such an institutionalized, “periodical infringement of the prohibition” (81), sanctioned within certain bounds, spared individuals from neurosis by — consistent with Freud’s dynamic model of psycho-energics — releasing damned up libidinal forces and restoring the ego to health, whereupon it “might…once again feel satisfied with itself” (81).