Freud - Complete Works (635 page)

  
¹
It may perhaps also be assumed that the
sons, when they were driven out and separated from their father,
advanced from identification with one another to homosexual
object-love, and in this way won freedom to kill their
father.

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   But we expect even more of this
derivation of the group from the primal horde. It ought also to
help us to understand what is still incomprehensible and mysterious
in group formations - all that lies hidden behind the enigmatic
words ‘hypnosis’ and ‘suggestion’. And I
think it can succeed in this too. Let us recall that hypnosis has
something positively uncanny about it; but the characteristic of
uncanniness suggests something old and familiar that has undergone
repression.¹ Let us consider how hypnosis is induced. The
hypnotist asserts that he is in possession of a mysterious power
that robs the subject of his own will; or, which is the same thing,
the subject believe it of him. This mysterious power (which is even
now often described popularly as ‘animal magnetism’)
must be the same power that is looked upon by primitive people as
the source of taboo, the same that emanates from kings and
chieftains and makes it dangerous to approach them (
mana
).
The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in possession of this power;
and how does he manifest it? By telling the subject to look him in
the eyes; his most typical method of hypnotizing is by his look.
But it is precisely the
sight
of the chieftain that is
dangerous and unbearable for primitive people, just as later that
of the Godhead is for mortals. Even Moses had to act as an
intermediary between his people and Jehovah, since the people could
not support the sight of God; and when he returned from the
presence of God his face shone - some of the
mana
had been
transferred on to him, just as happens with the intermediary among
primitive people.²

  
¹
Cf. ‘The "Uncanny”’
(1919
h
).

  
²
See
Totem and Taboo
and the sources
there quoted.

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   It is true that hypnosis can also
be evoked in other ways, for instance by fixing the eyes upon a
bright object or by listening to a monotonous sound. This is
misleading and has given occasion to inadequate physiological
theories. In point of fact these procedures merely serve to divert
conscious attention and to hold it riveted. The situation is the
same as if the hypnotist had said to the subject: ‘Now
concern yourself exclusively with my person; the rest of the world
is quite uninteresting.’ It would of course be technically
inexpedient for a hypnotist to make such a speech; it would tear
the subject away from his unconscious attitude and stimulate him to
conscious opposition. The hypnotist avoids directing the
subject’s conscious thoughts towards his own intentions, and
makes the person upon whom he is experimenting sink into an
activity in which the world is bound to seem uninteresting to him;
but at the same time the subject is in reality unconsciously
concentrating his whole attention upon the hypnotist, and is
getting into an attitude of
rapport
, of transference on to
him. Thus the indirect methods of hypnotizing, like many of the
technical procedures used in making jokes, have the effect of
checking certain distributions of mental energy which would
interfere with the course of events in the unconscious, and they
lead eventually to the same result as the direct methods of
influence by means of staring or stroking.¹

  
¹
This situation, in which the
subject’s attitude is unconsciously directed towards the
hypnotist, while he is consciously occupied with monotonous and
uninteresting perceptions, finds a parallel among the events of
psycho-analytic treatment, which deserves to be mentioned here. At
least once in the course of every analysis a moment comes when the
patient obstinately maintains that just now positively nothing
whatever occurs to his mind. His free associations come to a stop
and the usual incentives for putting them in motion fail in their
effect. If the analyst insists, the patient is at last induced to
admit that he is thinking of the view from the consulting-room
window, of the wall-paper that he sees before him, or of the
gas-lamp hanging from the ceiling. Then one knows at once that he
has gone off into the transference and that he is engaged upon what
are still unconscious thoughts relating to the physician; and one
sees the stoppage in the patient’s associations disappear, as
soon as he has been given this explanation.

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   Ferenczi has made the true
discovery that when a hypnotist gives the command to sleep, which
is often done at the beginning of hypnosis, he is putting himself
in the place of the subject’s parents. He thinks that two
sorts of hypnotism are to be distinguished: one coaxing and
soothing, which he considers is modelled on the mother, and another
threatening, which is derived from the father. Now the command to
sleep in hypnosis means nothing more nor less than an order to with
draw all interest from the world and to concentrate it on the
person of the hypnotist. And it is so understood by the subject;
for in this withdrawal of interest from the external world lies the
psychological characteristic of sleep, and the kinship between
sleep and the state of hypnosis is based on it.

   By the measures that he takes,
then, the hypnotist awakens in the subject a portion of his archaic
heritage which had also made him compliant towards his parents and
which had experienced an individual re-animation in his relation to
his father; what is thus awakened is the idea of a paramount and
dangerous personality, towards whom only a passive-masochistic
attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be
surrendered, - while to be alone with him, ‘to look him in
the face’, appears a hazardous enterprise. It is only in some
such way as this that we can picture the relation of the individual
member of the primal horde to the primal father. As we know from
other reactions, individuals have preserved a variable degree of
personal aptitude for reviving old situations of this kind. Some
knowledge that in spite of everything hypnosis is only a game, a
deceptive renewal of these old impressions, may, however, remain
behind and take care that there is a resistance against any too
serious consequences of the suspension of the will in hypnosis.

   The uncanny and coercive
characteristics of group formations, which are shown in the
phenomena of suggestion that accompany them, may therefore with
justice be traced back to the fact of their origin from the primal
horde. The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father;
the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has
an extreme passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has
a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal, which
governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal. Hypnosis has a good
claim to being described as a group of two. There remains as a
definition for suggestion: a conviction which is not based upon
perception and reasoning but upon an erotic tie.¹

  
¹
It seems to me worth emphasizing the fact
that the discussions in this section have induced us to give up
Bernheim’s conception of hypnosis and go back to the
naïf
earlier one. According to Bernheim all hypnotic
phenomena are to be traced to the factor of suggestion, which is
not itself capable of further explanation. We have come to the
conclusion that suggestion is a partial manifestation of the state
of hypnosis, and that hypnosis is solidly founded upon a
predisposition which has survived in the unconscious from the early
history of the human family.

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XI

A
DIFFERENTIATING GRADE IN THE EGO

If we survey the life of an individual man of
to-day, bearing in mind the mutually complementary accounts of
group psychology given by the authorities, we may lose the courage,
in face of the complications that are revealed, to attempt a
comprehensive exposition. Each individual is a component part of
numerous groups, he is bound by ties of identification in many
directions, and he has built up his ego ideal upon the most various
models. Each individual therefore has a share in numerous group
minds - those of his race, of his class, of his creed, of his
nationality, etc. - and he can also raise himself above them to the
extent of having a scrap of independence and originality. Such
stable and lasting group formations, with their uniform and
constant effects, are less striking to an observer than the rapidly
formed and transient groups from which Le Bon has made his
brilliant psychological character sketch of the group mind. And it
is just in these noisy ephemeral groups, which are as it were
superimposed upon the others, that we are met by the prodigy of the
complete, even though only temporary, disappearance of exactly what
we have recognized as individual acquirements.

   We have interpreted this prodigy
as meaning that the individual gives up his ego ideal and
substitutes for it the group ideal as embodied in the leader. And
we must add by way of correction that the prodigy is not equally
great in every case. In many individuals the separation between the
ego and the ego ideal is not very far advanced; the two still
coincide readily; the ego has often preserved its earlier
narcissistic self-complacency. The selection of the leader is very
much facilitated by this circumstance. He need often only possess
the typical qualities of the individuals concerned in a
particularly clearly marked and pure form, and need only give an
impression of greater force and of more freedom of libido; and in
that case the need for a strong chief will often meet him half-way
and invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise
perhaps have had no claim. The other members of the group, whose
ego ideal would not, apart from this, have become embodied in his
person without some correction, are then carried away with the rest
by ‘suggestion’, that is to say, by means of
identification.

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   We are aware that what we have
been able to contribute towards the explanation of the libidinal
structure of groups leads back to the distinction between the ego
and the ego ideal and to the double kind of tie which this makes
possible - identification, and putting the object in the place of
the ego ideal. The assumption of this kind of differentiating grade
in the ego as a first step in an analysis of the ego must gradually
establish its justification in the most various regions of
psychology. In my paper on narcissism I have put together all the
pathological material that could at the moment be used in support
of this differentiation. But it may be expected that when we
penetrate deeper into the psychology of the psychoses its
significance will be discovered to be far greater. Let us reflect
that the ego now enters into the relation of an object to the ego
ideal which has been developed out of it, and that all the
interplay between an external object and the ego as a whole, with
which our study of the neuroses has made us acquainted, may
possibly be repeated upon this new scene of action within the
ego.

   In this place I shall only follow
up one of the consequences which seem possible from this point of
view, thus resuming the discussion of a problem which I was obliged
to leave unsolved elsewhere.¹ Each of the mental
differentiations that we have become acquainted with represents a
fresh aggravation of the difficulties of mental functioning,
increases its instability, and may become the starting-point for
its breakdown, that is, for the onset of a disease. Thus, by being
born we have made the step from an absolutely self-sufficient
narcissism to the perception of a changing external world and the
beginnings of the discovery of objects. And with this is associated
the fact that we cannot endure the new state of things for long,
that we periodically revert from it, in our sleep, to our former
condition of absence of stimulation and avoidance of objects. It is
true, however, that in this we are following a hint from the
external world, which, by means of the periodical change of day and
night, temporarily withdraws the greater part of the stimuli that
affect us. The second example of such a step, pathologically more
important, is subject to no such qualification. In the course of
development we have effected a separation of our mental existence
into a coherent ego and into an unconscious and repressed portion
which is left outside it; and we know that the stability of this
new acquisition is exposed to constant shocks. In dreams and in
neuroses what is thus excluded knocks for admission at the gates,
guarded though they are by resistances; and in our waking health we
make use of special artifices for allowing what is repressed to
circumvent the resistances and for receiving it temporarily into
our ego to the increase of our pleasure. Jokes and humour, and to
some extent the comic in general, may be regarded in this light.
Everyone acquainted with the psychology of the neuroses will think
of similar examples of less importance; but I hasten on to the
application I have in view.