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WorkSigmund Freud

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

What binds a crowd to its leader, and a church or an army to its head, is the same tie that binds a lover.

by Sigmund Freud139 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse
First published
(aged 65)
Original language
German

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Overview

Thirty years after this book appeared, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno presented his 1951 essay on the pattern of fascist propaganda as a reading of it. Sigmund Freud had not been writing about fascism. He started from The Crowd by the French writer Gustave Le Bon, which he quotes at length. Freud accepts Le Bon's description: a person in a crowd loses his individuality and becomes suggestible, as if hypnotised. But Le Bon, he points out, never says what holds the crowd together. Freud's answer is love, in his wide sense of the word. He takes two organised groups, the Catholic Church and the army, and shows that each rests on one illusion — that a head, Christ or the commander, loves every member equally; drop it, and both fall apart. Prussian militarism, he adds, was as blind to psychology as German science, and may have learned the lesson in the war, when war neuroses ate away at the German army. A group of this kind, he concludes, is a number of people who have put one and the same person in the place of their ideal of themselves, and therefore identify with one another — the same surrender of judgement found in being in love and in hypnosis. In a chapter on the primal horde he reaches back to Totem and Taboo and casts the leader as the feared father of prehistory. The Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag published the book in Vienna in 1921, and James Strachey's English translation followed the next year.

Key concepts

What does Freud mean by identification?

Identification is the earliest form of emotional tie to another person: wanting to be like someone, as a small boy wants to be like his father, rather than wanting to have them. Freud finds three forms: this original one, a later one that replaces a lost or forbidden love by becoming like the person, and one based on any shared quality, which lets strangers in a group feel alike.

How wide is Freud's idea of love?

Very wide. Love, for Freud, has sexual love at its core, but it also takes in love of oneself, of parents and children, friendship, love of humanity, and devotion to things and abstract ideas. All of these, he argues, express the same drive, sometimes turned away from its sexual aim. That breadth is what lets him call love the bond of groups.

What are aim-inhibited drives?

They are sexual drives that have been held back from their aim of sexual union while keeping their force and their attachment. Tenderness between parents and children, friendship, and the ties between members of a group are of this kind. Because they never reach full satisfaction, Freud notes, they create especially lasting bonds, unlike passion, which spends itself.

What makes McDougall's organised group different from a crowd?

Organisation, McDougall argued, lifts a group above the level of a mob. He lists conditions such as continuity, a clear idea of the group's own nature and purpose, contact with other groups, traditions, and a division of functions among members. Freud reads these as ways of giving the group the features of an individual that the crowd had taken away.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What Happens to a Person in a Crowd

Why does someone in a crowd think and feel what they never would alone? Freud accepts the old descriptions and asks the question they leave open.

Le Bon and McDougall agree that a crowd lowers intelligence and heightens emotion, and that its members catch feelings from one another as if hypnotised. Freud quotes them at length, then objects that 'suggestion', the word everyone uses, is itself never explained. Crowds can also create, as language and folk song show, and an organised group behaves differently from a mob. Against Trotter's herd instinct he proposes that humans are horde animals, needing not only one another but a single chief, whose loss sets off panic.

  • crowd psychology
  • mass psychology
  • group psychology
  • collective psychology
  • suggestion
  • social influence
  • individuality
  • emotion
  • hypnosis

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Love Holds the Group Together

If not suggestion, what binds people into a group? Freud's answer is love, in a sense wide enough to include a soldier's tie to his officer and a believer's to Christ.

Church and army are Freud's test cases. Each rests on the illusion that one head loves every member equally, and each falls apart when the tie is cut. People, like Schopenhauer's porcupines, cannot bear much closeness, and neighbours dislike each other over small differences; within a group that hostility vanishes, replaced by ties of love whose sexual aim has been held back. The same bond makes a religion harsh to outsiders, and the nursery's envy, turned into a demand for equal treatment, becomes the group's sense of justice.

  • libido
  • love
  • social bonds
  • social cohesion
  • religion
  • authority
  • leadership
  • family
  • morality

Enter a dialogue

The Leader Takes the Ideal's Place

How exactly does one person come to rule the inner life of many? The chapters on identification and on being in love give the book its formula.

Identification, Freud argues, is the earliest tie to another person, a wish to be like them rather than to have them. In being in love the beloved slides into the place of one's own ideal and criticism falls silent; hypnosis is the same surrender with the sexual aim removed. A primary group, then, is a number of people who have put one and the same person in place of their ideal and so identify with one another. The leader is the primal father of the horde, still feared and still desired.

  • ego ideal
  • identification
  • narcissism
  • hypnosis
  • melancholia
  • object relations
  • ego

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
139
distinct concepts
189
by passages held, corpus-wide
#436

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “libido” and “sexuality”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
libidosexuality8
crowd psychologyunconscious7
group psychologyidentification7
group psychologyleadership6
libidolove6
crowd psychologyleadership4
identificationleadership4
identificationlove4
leadershiplibido4
lovesexuality4
crowd psychologylibido3
crowd psychologysexuality2
identificationlibido2
sexualityunconscious2
crowd psychologyidentification1
group psychologylibido1
group psychologylove1
group psychologysexuality1
identificationsexuality1
identificationunconscious1
leadershiplove1
leadershipunconscious1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse) you are here DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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