Freud - Complete Works (633 page)

   This happens especially easily
with love that is unhappy and cannot be satisfied; for in spite of
everything each sexual satisfaction always involves a reduction in
sexual overvaluation. Contemporaneously with this
‘devotion’ of the ego to the object, which is no longer
to be distinguished from a sublimated devotion to an abstract idea,
the functions allotted to the ego ideal entirely cease to operate.
The criticism exercised by that agency is silent; everything that
the object does and asks for is right and blameless. Conscience has
no application to anything that is done for the sake of the object;
in the blindness of love remorselessness is carried to the pitch of
crime. The whole situation can be completely summarized in a
formula:
The object has been put in the place of the ego
ideal
.

   It is now easy to define the
difference between identification and such extreme developments of
being in love as may be described as ‘fascination’ or
‘bondage’. In the former case the ego has enriched
itself with the properties of the object, it has
‘introjected’ the object into itself, as Ferenczi
expresses it. In the second case it is impoverished, it has
surrendered itself to the object, it has substituted the object for
its own most important constituent. Closer consideration soon makes
it plain, however, that this kind of account creates an illusion of
contradistinctions that have no real existence. Economically there
is no question of impoverishment or enrichment; it is even possible
to describe an extreme case of being in love as a state in which
the ego has introjected the object into itself. Another distinction
is perhaps better calculated to meet the essence of the matter. In
the case of identification the object has been lost or given up; it
is then set up again inside the ego, and the ego makes a partial
alteration in itself after the model of the lost object. In the
other case the object is retained, and there is a hypercathexis of
it by the ego and at the ego’s expense. But here again a
difficulty presents itself. Is it quite certain that identification
presupposes that object-cathexis has been given up? Can there be no
identification while the object is retained? And before we embark
upon a discussion of this delicate question, the perception may
already be beginning to dawn on us that yet another alternative
embraces the real essence of the matter, namely,
whether the
object is put in the place of the ego or of the ego ideal
.

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3806

   From being in love to hypnosis is
evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree
are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same
compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist as
towards the loved object. There is the same sapping of the
subject’s own initiative; no one can doubt that the hypnotist
has stepped into the place of the ego ideal. It is only that
everything is even clearer and more intense in hypnosis, so that it
would be more to the point to explain being in love by means of
hypnosis than the other way round. The hypnotist is the sole
object, and no attention is paid to any but him. The fact that the
ego experiences in a dreamlike way whatever he may request or
assert reminds us that we omitted to mention among the functions of
the ego ideal the business of testing the reality of things.¹
No wonder that the ego takes a perception for real if its reality
is vouched for by the mental agency which ordinarily discharges the
duty of testing the reality of things. The complete absence of
impulsions which are uninhibited in their sexual aims contributes
further towards the extreme purity of the phenomena. The hypnotic
relation is the unlimited devotion of someone in love, but with
sexual satisfaction excluded; whereas in the actual case of being
in love this kind of satisfaction is only temporarily kept back,
and remains in the background as a possible aim at some later
time.

  
¹
Cf. Freud (1917
d
). - There seems,
however, to be some doubt whether the attribution of this function
to the ego ideal is justified. The point requires thorough
discussion.

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3807

   But on the other hand we may also
say that the hypnotic relation is (if the expression is
permissible) a group formation with two members. Hypnosis is not a
good object for comparison with a group formation, because it is
truer to say that it is identical with it. Out of the complicated
fabric of the group it isolates one element for us - the behaviour
of the individual to the leader. Hypnosis is distinguished from a
group formation by this limitation of number, just as it is
distinguished from being in love by the absence of directly sexual
trends. In this respect it occupies a middle position between the
two.

   It is interesting to see that it
is precisely those sexual impulsions that are inhibited in their
aims which achieve such lasting ties between people. But this can
easily be understood from the fact that they are not capable of
complete satisfaction, while sexual impulsions which are
uninhibited in their aims suffer an extraordinary reduction through
the discharge of energy every time the sexual aim is attained. It
is the fate of sensual love to become extinguished when it is
satisfied; for it to be able to last, it must from the beginning be
mixed with purely affectionate components - with such, that is, as
are inhibited in their aims - or it must itself undergo a
transformation of this kind.

   Hypnosis would solve the riddle
of the libidinal constitution of groups for us straight away, if it
were not that it itself exhibits some features which are not met by
the rational explanation we have hitherto given of it as a state of
being in love with the directly sexual trends excluded. There is
still a great deal in it which we must recognize as unexplained and
mysterious. It contains an additional element of paralysis derived
from the relation between someone with superior power and someone
who is without power and helpless - which may afford a transition
to the hypnosis of fright which occurs in animals. The manner in
which it is produced and its relationship to sleep are not clear;
and the puzzling way in which some people are subject to it, while
others resist it completely, points to some factor still unknown
which is realized in it and which perhaps alone makes possible the
purity of the attitudes of the libido which it exhibits. It is
noticeable that, even when there is complete suggestive compliance
in other respects, the moral conscience of the person hypnotized
may show resistance. But this may be due to the fact that in
hypnosis as it is usually practised some knowledge may be retained
that what is happening is only a game, an untrue reproduction of
another situation of far more importance to life.

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3808

   But after the preceding
discussions we are quite in a position to give the formula for the
libidinal constitution of groups, or at least of such groups as we
have hitherto considered - namely, those that have a leader and
have not been able by means of too much ‘organization’
to acquire secondarily the characteristics of an individual.
A
primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put
one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have
consequently identified themselves with one another in their
ego
. This condition admits of graphic representation:

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3809

IX

THE
HERD INSTINCT

We cannot for long enjoy the illusion that we
have solved the riddle of the group with this formula. It is
impossible to escape the immediate and disturbing recollection that
all we have really done has been to shift the question on to the
riddle of hypnosis, about which so many points have yet to be
cleared up. And now another objection shows us our further
path.

   It might be said that the intense
emotional ties which we observe in groups are quite sufficient to
explain one of their characteristics - the lack of independence and
initiative in their members, the similarity in the reactions of all
of them, their reduction, so to speak, to the level of group
individuals. But if we look at it as a whole, a group shows us more
than this. Some of its features - the weakness of intellectual
ability, the lack of emotional restraint, the incapacity for
moderation and delay, the inclination to exceed every limit in the
expression of emotion and to work it off completely in the form of
action - these and similar features, which we find so impressively
described in Le Bon, show an unmistakable picture of a regression
of mental activity to an earlier stage such as we are not surprised
to find among savages or children. A regression of this sort is in
particular an essential characteristic of common groups, while, as
we have heard, in organized and artificial groups it can to a large
extent be checked.

   We thus have an impression of a
state in which an individual’s private emotional impulses and
intellectual acts are too weak to come to anything by themselves
and are entirely dependent for this on being reinforced by being
repeated in a similar way in the other members of the group. We are
reminded of how many of these phenomena of dependence are part of
the normal constitution of human society, of how little originality
and personal courage are to be found in it, of how much every
individual is ruled by those attitudes of the group mind which
exhibit themselves in such forms as racial characteristics, class
prejudices, public opinion, etc. The influence of suggestion
becomes a greater riddle for us when we admit that it is not
exercised only by the leader, but by every individual upon every
other individual; and we must reproach ourselves with having
unfairly emphasized the relation to the leader and with having kept
the other factor of mutual suggestion too much in the
background.

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3810

   After this encouragement to
modesty, we shall be inclined to listen to another voice, which
promises us an explanation based upon simpler grounds. Such a one
is to be found in Trotter’s thoughtful book on the herd
instinct (1916), concerning which my only regret is that it does
not entirely escape the antipathies that were set loose by the
recent great war.

   Trotter derives the mental
phenomena that are described as occurring in groups from a herd
instinct (‘gregariousness’), which is innate in human
beings just as in other species of animals. Biologically, he says,
this gregariousness is an analogy to multicellularity and as it
were a continuation of it. (In terms of the libido theory it is a
further manifestation of the tendency which proceeds from the
libido and which is felt by all living beings of the same kind, to
combine in more and more comprehensive units.¹) The individual
feels incomplete if he is alone. The fear shown by small children
would seem already to be an expression of this herd instinct.
Opposition to the herd is as good as separation from it, and is
therefore anxiously avoided. But the herd turns away from anything
that is new or unusual. The herd instinct would appear to be
something primary, something which cannot be split up.

   Trotter gives as the list of
instincts which he considers as primary those of self-preservation,
of nutrition, of sex, and of the herd. The last often comes into
opposition with the others. The feelings of guilt and of duty are
the peculiar possessions of a gregarious animal. Trotter also
derives from the herd instinct the repressive forces which
psycho-analysis has shown to exist in the ego, and from the same
source accordingly the resistances which the physician comes up
against in psycho-analytic treatment. Speech owes its importance to
its aptitude for mutual understanding in the herd, and upon it the
identification of the individuals with one another largely
rests.

¹
See
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
.

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3811

   While Le Bon is principally
concerned with typical transient group formations, and McDougall
with stable associations, Trotter has chosen as the centre of his
interest the most generalized form of assemblage in which man, that
x
v
o
n
p
o
l
i
t
i
c
s
n
, passes his life, and he
gives us its psychological basis. But Trotter is under no necessity
of tracing back the herd instinct, for he characterizes it as
primary and not further reducible. Boris Sidis’s attempt, to
which he refers, at tracing the herd instinct back to
suggestibility is fortunately superfluous as far as he is
concerned; it is an explanation of a familiar and unsatisfactory
type, and the converse proposition - that suggestibility is a
derivative of the herd instinct - would seem to me to throw far
more light on the subject.