Freud - Complete Works (628 page)

   Although in this way the needs of
a group carry it half-way to meet the leader, yet he too must fit
in with it in his personal qualities. He must himself be held in
fascination by a strong faith (in an idea) in order to awaken the
group’s faith; he must possess a strong and imposing will,
which the group, which has no will of its own, can accept from him.
Le Bon then discusses the different kinds of leaders, and the means
by which they work upon the group. On the whole he believes that
the leaders make themselves felt by means of the ideas in which
they themselves are fanatical believers.

   Moreover, he ascribes both to the
ideas and to the leaders a mysterious and irresistible power, which
he calls ‘prestige’. Prestige is a sort of domination
exercised over us by an individual, a work or an idea. It entirely
paralyses our critical faculty, and fills us with wonderment and
respect. It would seem to arouse a feeling like that of
‘fascination’ in hypnosis (ibid., 148). He
distinguishes between acquired or artificial and personal prestige.
The former is attached to persons in virtue of their name, fortune
and reputation, and to opinions, works of art, etc., in virtue of
tradition. Since in every case it harks back to the past, it cannot
be of much help to us in understanding this puzzling influence.
Personal prestige is attached to a few people, who become leaders
by means of it, and it has the effect of making everyone obey them
as though by the operation of some magnetic magic. All prestige,
however, is also dependent upon success, and is lost in the event
of failure (ibid., 159).

   Le Bon does not give the
impression of having succeeded in bringing the function of the
leader and the importance of prestige completely into harmony with
his brilliantly executed picture of the group mind.

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III

OTHER
ACCOUNTS OF COLLECTIVE MENTAL LIFE

We have made use of Le Bon’s description
by way of introduction, because it fits in so well with our own
psychology in the emphasis which it lays upon unconscious mental
life. But we must now add that as a matter of fact none of that
author’s statements bring forward anything new. Everything
that he says to the detriment and depreciation of the
manifestations of the group mind had already been said by others
before him with equal distinctness and equal hostility, and has
been repeated in unison by thinkers, statesmen and writers since
the earliest periods of literature.¹ The two theses which
comprise the most important of Le Bon’s opinions, those
touching upon the collective inhibition of intellectual functioning
and the heightening of affectivity in groups, had been formulated
shortly before by Sighele.² At bottom, all that is left over
as being peculiar to Le Bon are the two notions of the unconscious
and of the comparison with the mental life of primitive people, and
even these had naturally often been alluded to before him.

   But, what is more, the
description and estimate of the group mind as they have been given
by Le Bon and the rest have not by any means been left undisputed.
There is no doubt that all the phenomena of the group mind which
have just been mentioned have been correctly observed, but it is
also possible to distinguish other manifestations of group
formation, which operate in a precisely opposite sense, and from
which a much higher opinion of the group mind must necessarily
follow.

   Le Bon himself was prepared to
admit that in certain circumstances the morals of a group can be
higher than those of the individuals that compose it, and that only
collectivities are capable of a high degree of unselfishness and
devotion. ‘While with isolated individuals personal interest
is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely
prominent.’ (Le Bon, trans. 1920, 65.) Other writers adduce
the fact that it is only society which prescribes any ethical
standards at all for the individual, while he as a rule fails in
one way or another to come up to its high demands. Or they point
out that in exceptional circumstances there may arise in
communities the phenomenon of enthusiasm, which has made the most
splendid group achievements possible.

  
¹
See Kraskovic (1915), particularly the
bibliography.

  
²
See Moede (1915).

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   As regards intellectual work it
remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of
thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are
only possible to an individual working in solitude. But even the
group mind is capable of creative genius in the field of
intelligence, as is shown above all by language itself, as well as
by folk-song, folklore and the like. It remains an open question,
moreover, how much the individual thinker or writer owes to the
stimulation of the group in which he lives, and whether he does
more than perfect a mental work in which the others have had a
simultaneous share.

   In face of these completely
contradictory accounts, it looks as though the work of group
psychology were bound to come to an ineffectual end. But it is easy
to find a more hopeful escape from the dilemma. A number of very
different structures have probably been merged under the term
‘group’ and may require to be distinguished. The
assertions of Sighele, Le Bon and the rest relate to groups of a
short-lived character, which some passing interest has hastily
agglomerated out of various sorts of individuals. The
characteristics of revolutionary groups, and especially those of
the great French Revolution, have unmistakably influenced their
descriptions. The opposite opinions owe their origin to the
consideration of those stable groups or associations in which
mankind pass their lives, and which are embodied in the
institutions of society. Groups of the first kind stand in the same
sort of relation to those of the second as a high but choppy sea to
a ground swell.

   McDougall, in his book on
The
Group Mind
(1920
a
), starts out from the same
contradiction that has just been mentioned, and finds a solution
for it in the factor of organization. In the simplest case, he
says, the ‘group’ possesses no organization at all or
one scarcely deserving the name. He describes a group of this kind
as a ‘crowd’. But he admits that a crowd of human
beings can hardly come together without possessing at all events
the rudiments of an organization, and that precisely in these
simple groups some fundamental facts of collective psychology can
be observed with special ease (McDougall, 1920
a
, 22). Before
the members of a random crowd of people can constitute something
like a group in the psychological sense, a condition has to be
fulfilled: these individuals must have something in common with one
another, a common interest in an object, a similar emotional bias
in some situation or other, and (‘consequently’, I
should like to interpolate) ‘some degree of reciprocal
influence’ (ibid., 23). The higher the degree of ‘this
mental homogeneity’, the more readily do the individuals form
a psychological group, and the more striking are the manifestations
of a group mind.

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   The most remarkable and also the
most important result of the formation of a group is the
‘exaltation or intensification of emotion’ produced in
every member of it (ibid., 24). In McDougall’s opinion
men’s emotions are stirred in a group to a pitch that they
seldom or never attain under other conditions; and it is a
pleasurable experience for those who are concerned, to surrender
themselves so unreservedly to their passions and thus to become
merged in the group and to lose the sense of the limits of their
individuality. The manner in which individuals are thus carried
away by a common impulse is explained by McDougall by means of what
he calls the ‘principle of direct induction of emotion by way
of the primitive sympathetic response’ (ibid., 25), that is,
by means of the emotional contagion with which we are already
familiar. The fact is that the perception of the signs of an
affective state is calculated automatically to arouse the same
affect in the person who perceives them. The greater the number of
people in whom the same affect can be simultaneously observed, the
stronger does this automatic compulsion grow. The individual loses
his power of criticism, and lets himself slip into the same affect.
But in so doing he increases the excitement of the other people,
who had produced this result in him, and thus the affective charge
of the individuals becomes intensified by mutual interaction.
Something is unmistakably at work in the nature of a compulsion to
do the same as the others, to remain in harmony with the many. The
cruder and simpler emotional impulses are the more apt to spread
through a group in this way (ibid., 39).

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   This mechanism for the
intensification of affect is favoured by some other influences
which emanate from groups. A group impresses the individual as
being an unlimited power and an insurmountable peril. For the
moment it replaces the whole of human society, which is the wielder
of authority, whose punishments the individual fears, and for whose
sake he has submitted to so many inhibitions. It is clearly
perilous for him to put himself in opposition to it, and it will be
safer to follow the example of those around him and perhaps even
‘hunt with the pack’. In obedience to the new authority
he may put his former ‘conscience’ out of action, and
so surrender to the attraction of the increased pleasure that is
certainly obtained from the removal of inhibitions. On the whole,
therefore, it is not so remarkable that we should see an individual
in a group doing or approving things which he would have avoided in
the normal conditions of life; and in this way we may even hope to
clear up a little of the obscurity which is so often covered by the
enigmatic word ‘suggestion’.

   McDougall does not dispute the
thesis as to the collective inhibition of intelligence in groups
(ibid., 41). He says that the minds of lower intelligence bring
down those of a higher order to their own level. The latter are
obstructed in their activity, because in general an intensification
of affect creates unfavourable conditions for sound intellectual
work, and further because the individuals are intimidated by the
group and their mental activity is not free, and because there is a
lowering in each individual of his sense of responsibility for his
own performances.

   The judgement with which
McDougall sums up the psychological behaviour of a simple
‘unorganized’ group is no more friendly than that of Le
Bon. Such a group ‘is excessively emotional, impulsive,
violent, fickle, inconsistent, irresolute and extreme in action,
displaying only the coarser emotions and the less refined
sentiments; extremely suggestible, careless in deliberation, hasty
in judgement, incapable of any but the simpler and imperfect forms
of reasoning; easily swayed and led, lacking in self-consciousness,
devoid of self-respect and of sense of responsibility, and apt to
be carried away by the consciousness of its own force, so that it
tends to produce all the manifestations we have learnt to expect of
any irresponsible and absolute power. Hence its behaviour is like
that of an unruly child or an untutored passionate savage in a
strange situation, rather than like that of its average member; and
in the worst cases it is like that of a wild beast, rather than
like that of human beings.’ (ibid., 45.)

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   Since McDougall contrasts the
behaviour of a highly organized group with what has just been
described, we shall be particularly interested to learn in what
this organization consists, and by what factors it is produced. The
author enumerates five ‘principal conditions’ for
raising collective mental life to a higher level.

   The first and fundamental
condition is that there should be some degree of continuity of
existence in the group. This may be either material or formal:
material, if the same individuals persist in the group for some
time; and formal, if there is developed within the group a system
of fixed positions which are occupied by a succession of
individuals.

   The second condition is that in
the individual member of the group some definite idea should be
formed of the nature, composition, functions and capacities of the
group, so that from this he may develop an emotional relation to
the group as a whole.

   The third is that the group
should be brought into interaction (perhaps in the form of rivalry)
with other groups similar to it but differing from it in many
respects.

   The fourth is that the group
should possess traditions, customs and habits, and especially such
as determine the relations of its members to one another.

   The fifth is that the group
should have a definite structure, expressed in the specialization
and differentiation of the functions of its constituents.

   According to McDougall, if these
conditions are fulfilled, the psychological disadvantages of group
formations are removed. The collective lowering of intellectual
ability is avoided by withdrawing the performance of intellectual
tasks from the group and reserving them for individual members of
it.

   It seems to us that the condition
which McDougall designates as the ‘organization’ of a
group can with more justification be described in another way. The
problem consists in how to procure for the group precisely those
features which were characteristic of the individual and which are
extinguished in him by the formation of the group. For the
individual, outside the primitive group, possessed his own
continuity, his self-consciousness, his traditions and customs, his
own particular functions and position, and he kept apart from his
rivals. Owing to his entry into an ‘unorganized’ group
he had lost this distinctiveness for a time. If we thus recognize
that the aim is to equip the group with the attributes of the
individual, we shall be reminded of a valuable remark of
Trotter’s,¹ to the effect that the tendency towards the
formation of groups is biologically a continuation of the
multicellular character of all the higher organisms.²