Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) (Chapters I-IV)

The book’s first sentence evokes and challenges a common perception, namely, that the disciplines of “individual” and “social” psychology are sharply differentiated:

“The contrast between individual psychology and social or group [Masse] Psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely” (3)

In fact, Freud continues, all efforts to grasp the individual in isolation, to abstract from his or her “relations” with others, and to distinguish this individual from the subsequent “social” creature immersed in that ensemble of relations —these efforts are bound to fail:

“In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well” (3)

These words may surprise readers who regard Freud as the originator, and most uncompromising advocate, of so-called “intrapsychic” images of mind. For, given the occasion to directly address this controversy and articulate his considered view, Freud inclines toward the “interpersonal” or the “relational” — precisely the paradigms that in recent decades have been routinely counterposed to Freud’s thinking.

Not only does Freud question the distinction between individual and social psychology. He also rejects the distinction — drawn by Gustave Le Bon and others — between “interpersonal” reality (the individual restricted to intimate relations) and that of “society” or the “group.” He indicates straightaway, in fact, that the same psychoanalytic concepts will describe and explain both.

In this introductory sketch, then, Freud does little more than question several related distinctions. The separation of individual from social psychology is, he suggests, more conventional and pragmatic than scientific: strictly speaking, the human being is virtually unimaginable apart from his or her “relations,” at the very least to the family. Similarly, the manifestations of our “collective” lives are not as social thinkers before Freud regarded them — suis generis functions of the “group mind,” unprecedented by, and incommensurable with the thought, emotion, and behavior of independent individuals. On the contrary, Freud will argue in Group Psychology that these collective manifestations are continuous with antecedent forms.

In particular, the psychological “expressions” of a member in a numerically great group are not, as Le Bon believes, a qualitatively distinct datum. Hence they do not require novel explanatory concepts, unneeded at the level of “isolated” individuals or small ensembles such as the family. The same psychoanalytic concepts and mechanisms that illuminate the individual and family are, appropriately adapted, sufficient to the group psychologist’s needs.

To motivate these anticipatory gestures, Freud in Chapters II and III canvasses some well-known contemporaneous accounts of Massenpsychologie. He does this, not in order to invalidate or even amend their descriptions and typologies of collective life (Freud accepts these as uncontroversial), but rather to isolate a mystery unresolved in their writings — a mystery camouflaged by “magic words” such as “suggestion,” “influence,” “contagion,” and “imitation,” alongside more scientific-sounding phrases like “primitive induction of emotion.” In fact, these words and phrases are tautological, since they essentially re-describe the explanandum as explanans.

In an autobiographical aside, Freud recounts his mounting dissatisfaction with and even “resistance” to these explanatorily-idle incantations, “protesting against the view that suggestion, which explained everything, was itself to be exempt from explanation” (28). In other words, confronted with phenomena that appear uniquely characteristic of the group-mind and in no way derivable from ordinary human behavior (as individuals in isolation or in small cohorts), Le Bon, Sighele, and McDougal are compelled to postulate novel forces — suggestion, contagion, etc. — to account for the “alterations” conceived as radical. These observers have in mind such alterations as the steep decline of “intellectual functioning” of any individual once interpolated into a large group, as well as the dramatic “intensification of affect” in him or her. These changes, this literature continues, are so discrepant from the ordinary run of things that some novel mechanism, like mass hypnosis, is required to explain them. (Later on, in fact, Freud will turn precisely to clinical experience with patients under hypnosis to make his point. His interest in hypnosis evidently began around the time of his studies with Charcot.)

To be sure, this “alteration” may also take less objectionable directions. Stabler and more highly organized groups may well elevate the moral capabilities of its members, rather than merely disabling their intellectual functioning and relaxing their scruples. The action of group mind is not uniformly regressive; only the frenzied “crowd,” neither stable nor organized, reliably induces regression.

Until this point, Chapter IV, Freud’s text has been mainly expository. Now Freud’s voice becomes innovative and critical, and begins to introduce the psychoanalytic concepts that both demystify the outstanding mystery and, more generally, redeem the Introduction’s promissory note: that, fundamentally, human behavior — whether in isolation or in groups, and whether in groups small or large — is defined by continuity, even homogeneity. There is no stark distinction immanent to human behaviors, hence there is no demand to evolve an incommensurable stock of “forces” attributable to some levels of behavior, but not to others.

The fulcrum of Freud’s argument is the concept of libido — as close to a psychoanalytic master-concept as one could like, which at times appears to explain each and every piece of mental functioning. The group-manifestations that Le Bon and McDougal trace to extraordinary forces are for Freud more or less disguised expressions of love. There follows a brief “deduction” of libido, eros, love, and cognate terms from their narrowly sexual basis: “The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists…in sexual love with sexual union as its aim” (29). Freud does not expend himself deriving these connections, which depend upon psychoanalytic observation, but confines himself to stating the axiom and asking: how might libido, once credited as a universal element in human behavior, explain group-manifestations that initially appear exceptional? I will take up this question in the next entry.