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+The contrast between Individual Psychology and Social or Group[1]
+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. It
+is true that Individual Psychology is concerned with the individual man
+and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his
+instincts; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is
+Individual Psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this
+individual to others. 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 is at the
+same time Social Psychology as well--in this extended but entirely
+justifiable sense of the words.
+
+The relations of an individual to his parents and to his brothers and
+sisters, to the object of his love, and to his physician--in fact all
+the relations which have hitherto been the chief subject of
+psycho-analytic research--may claim to be considered as social
+phenomena; and in this respect they may be contrasted with certain other
+processes, described by us as 'narcissistic', in which the satisfaction
+of the instincts is partially or totally withdrawn from the influence of
+other people. The contrast between social and narcissistic--Bleuler
+would perhaps call them 'autistic'--mental acts therefore falls wholly
+within the domain of Individual Psychology, and is not well calculated
+to differentiate it from a Social or Group Psychology.
+
+The individual in the relations which have already been mentioned--to
+his parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the person he is in love
+with, to his friend, and to his physician--comes under the influence of
+only a single person, or of a very small number of persons, each one of
+whom has become enormously important to him. Now in speaking of Social
+or Group Psychology it has become usual to leave these relations on one
+side and to isolate as the subject of inquiry the influencing of an
+individual by a large number of people simultaneously, people with whom
+he is connected by something, though otherwise they may in many respects
+be strangers to him. Group Psychology is therefore concerned with the
+individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a
+profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of
+people who have been organised into a group at some particular time for
+some definite purpose. When once natural continuity has been severed in
+this way, it is easy to regard the phenomena that appear under these
+special conditions as being expressions of a special instinct that is
+not further reducible, the social instinct ('herd instinct', 'group
+mind'), which does not come to light in any other situations. But we may
+perhaps venture to object that it seems difficult to attribute to the
+factor of number a significance so great as to make it capable by itself
+or arousing in our mental life a new instinct that is otherwise not
+brought into play. Our expectation is therefore directed towards two
+other possibilities: that the social instinct may not be a primitive one
+and insusceptible of dissection, and that it may be possible to discover
+the beginnings of its development in a narrower circle, such as that of
+the family.
+
+Although Group Psychology is only in its infancy, it embraces an immense
+number of separate issues and offers to investigators countless
+problems which have hitherto not even been properly distinguished from
+one another. The mere classification of the different forms of group
+formation and the description of the mental phenomena produced by them
+require a great expenditure of observation and exposition, and have
+already given rise to a copious literature. Anyone who compares the
+narrow dimensions of this little book with the extent of Group
+Psychology will at once be able to guess that only a few points chosen
+from the whole material are to be dealt with here. And they will in fact
+only be a few questions with which the depth-psychology of
+psycho-analysis is specially concerned.
+
+Instead of starting from a definition, it seems more useful to begin
+with some indication of the range of the phenomena under review, and to
+select from among them a few specially striking and characteristic facts
+to which our inquiry can be attached. We can achieve both of these aims
+by means of quotation from Le Bon's deservedly famous work _Psychologie
+des foules_.[2]
+
+Let us make the matter clear once again. If a Psychology, concerned with
+exploring the predispositions, the instincts, the motives and the aims
+of an individual man down to his actions and his relations with those
+who are nearest to him, had completely achieved its task, and had
+cleared up the whole of these matters with their inter-connections, it
+would then suddenly find itself confronted by a new task which would lie
+before it unachieved. It would be obliged to explain the surprising
+fact that under a certain condition this individual whom it had come to
+understand thought, felt, and acted in quite a different way from what
+would have been expected. And this condition is his insertion into a
+collection of people which has acquired the characteristic of a
+'psychological group'. What, then, is a 'group'? How does it acquire the
+capacity for exercising such a decisive influence over the mental life
+of the individual? And what is the nature of the mental change which it
+forces upon the individual?
+
+It is the task of a theoretical Group Psychology to answer these three
+questions. The best way of approaching them is evidently to start with
+the third. Observation of the changes in the individual's reactions is
+what provides Group Psychology with its material; for every attempt at
+an explanation must be preceded by a description of the thing that is to
+be explained.
+
+I will now let Le Bon speak for himself. He says: 'The most striking
+peculiarity presented by a psychological group[3] is the following.
+Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be
+their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their
+intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts
+them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel,
+think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each
+individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of
+isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into
+being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of
+individuals forming a group. The psychological group is a provisional
+being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined,
+exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their
+reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from
+those possessed by each of the cells singly.' (p. 29.)[4]
+
+We shall take the liberty of interrupting Le Bon's exposition with
+glosses of our own, and shall accordingly insert an observation at this
+point. If the individuals in the group are combined into a unity, there
+must surely be something to unite them, and this bond might be precisely
+the thing that is characteristic of a group. But Le Bon does not answer
+this question; he goes on to consider the alteration which the
+individual undergoes when in a group and describes it in terms which
+harmonize well with the fundamental postulates of our own
+depth-psychology.
+
+'It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a group
+differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover
+the causes of this difference.
+
+'To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first
+place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, that
+unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in
+organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence. The
+conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its
+unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is
+scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the
+conscious[5] motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are
+the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main
+by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable
+common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which
+constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts
+there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind
+these secret causes there are many others more secret still, of which we
+ourselves are ignorant.[6] The greater part of our daily actions are the
+result of hidden motives which escape our observation.' (p. 30.)
+
+Le Bon thinks that the particular acquirements of individuals become
+obliterated in a group, and that in this way their distinctiveness
+vanishes. The racial unconscious emerges; what is heterogeneous is
+submerged in what is homogeneous. We may say that the mental
+superstructure, the development of which in individuals shows such
+dissimilarities, is removed, and that the unconscious foundations, which
+are similar in everyone, stand exposed to view.
+
+In this way individuals in a group would come to show an average
+character. But Le Bon believes that they also display new
+characteristics which they have not previously possessed, and he seeks
+the reason for this in three different factors.
+
+'The first is that the individual forming part of a group acquires,
+solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power
+which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he
+would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed
+to check himself from the consideration that, a group being anonymous,
+and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which
+always controls individuals disappears entirely.' (p. 33.)
+
+From our point of view we need not attribute so much importance to the
+appearance of new characteristics. For us it would be enough to say that
+in a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to
+throw off the repressions of his unconscious instincts. The apparently
+new characteristics which he then displays are in fact the
+manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the
+human mind is contained as a predisposition. We can find no difficulty
+in understanding the disappearance of conscience or of a sense of
+responsibility in these circumstances. It has long been our contention
+that 'dread of society [_soziale Angst_]' is the essence of what is
+called conscience.[7]
+
+'The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the
+manifestation in groups of their special characteristics, and at the
+same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which
+it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to
+explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order,
+which we shall shortly study. In a group every sentiment and act is
+contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily
+sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an
+aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely
+capable, except when he makes part of a group.' (p. 33.)
+
+We shall later on base an important conjecture upon this last statement.
+
+'A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the
+individuals of a group special characteristics which are quite contrary
+at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that
+suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is only
+an effect.
+
+'To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain
+recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various
+processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that,
+having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the
+suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts
+in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful
+investigations seem to prove that an individual immersed for some length
+of time in a group in action soon finds himself--either in consequence
+of the magnetic influence given out by the group, or from some other
+cause of which we are ignorant--in a special state, which much resembles
+the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds
+himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.... The conscious personality has
+entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and
+thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.
+
+'Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of
+a psychological group. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his
+case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that
+certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree
+of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake
+the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This
+impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of groups than in that
+of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the
+same for all the individuals of the group, it gains in strength by
+reciprocity.' (p. 34.)
+
+'We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the
+predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of
+suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical
+direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas
+into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the
+individual forming part of a group. He is no longer himself, but has
+become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.' (p. 35.)
+
+I have quoted this passage so fully in order to make it quite clear that
+Le Bon explains the condition of an individual in a group as being
+actually hypnotic, and does not merely make a comparison between the two
+states. We have no intention of raising any objection at this point, but
+wish only to emphasize the fact that the two last causes of an
+individual becoming altered in a group (the contagion and the heightened
+suggestibility) are evidently not on a par, since the contagion seems
+actually to be a manifestation of the suggestibility. Moreover the
+effects of the two factors do not seem to be sharply differentiated in
+the text of Le Bon's remarks. We may perhaps best interpret his
+statement if we connect the contagion with the effects of the individual
+members of the group upon one another, while we point to another source
+for those manifestations of suggestion in the group which are put on a
+level with the phenomena of hypnotic influence. But to what source? We
+cannot avoid being struck with a sense of deficiency when we notice that
+one of the chief elements of the comparison, namely the person who is to
+replace the hypnotist in the case of the group, is not mentioned in Le
+Bon's exposition. But he nevertheless distinguishes between this
+influence of fascination which remains plunged in obscurity and the
+contagious effect which the individuals exercise upon one another and by
+which the original suggestion is strengthened.
+
+Here is yet another important consideration for helping us to understand
+the individual in a group: 'Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms
+part of an organised group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder
+of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a
+crowd, he is a barbarian--that is, a creature acting by instinct. He
+possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the
+enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.' (p. 36.) He then dwells
+especially upon the lowering in intellectual ability which an individual
+experiences when he becomes merged in a group.[8]
+
+Let us now leave the individual, and turn to the group mind, as it has
+been outlined by Le Bon. It shows not a single feature which a
+psycho-analyst would find any difficulty in placing or in deriving from
+its source. Le Bon himself shows us the way by pointing to its
+similarity with the mental life of primitive people and of children (p.
+40).
+
+A group is impulsive, changeable and irritable. It is led almost
+exclusively by the unconscious.[9] The impulses which a group obeys may
+according to circumstances be generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but
+they are always so imperious that no personal interest, not even that of
+self-preservation, can make itself felt (p. 41). Nothing about it is
+premeditated. Though it may desire things passionately, yet this is
+never so for long, for it is incapable of perseverance. It cannot
+tolerate any delay between its desire and the fulfilment of what it
+desires. It has a sense of omnipotence; the notion of impossibility
+disappears for the individual in a group.[10]
+
+A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no
+critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in
+images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise
+with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement
+with reality is never checked by any reasonable function
+[_Instanz_].[11] The feelings of a group are always very simple and very
+exaggerated. So that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.[12]
+
+It goes directly to extremes; if a suspicion is expressed, it is
+instantly changed into an incontrovertible certainty; a trace of
+antipathy is turned into furious hatred (p. 56).[13]
+
+Inclined as it itself is to all extremes, a group can only be excited by
+an excessive stimulus. Anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it
+needs no logical adjustment in his arguments; he must paint in the most
+forcible colours, he must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing
+again and again.
+
+Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and
+is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant
+as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be
+slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of
+weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence.
+It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters.
+Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion
+from all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition
+(p. 62).
+
+In order to make a correct judgement upon the morals of groups, one must
+take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in
+a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel,
+brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as
+relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification.
+But under the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high
+achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to
+an ideal. While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost
+the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent. It is
+possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by
+a group (p. 65). Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always
+far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high
+above his as it may sink deep below it.
+
+Some other features in Le Bon's description show in a clear light how
+well justified is the identification of the group mind with the mind of
+primitive people. In groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side
+by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the
+logical contradiction between them. But this is also the case in the
+unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics, as
+psycho-analysis has long pointed out.[14]
+
+A group, further, is subject to the truly magical power of words; they
+can evoke the most formidable tempests in the group mind, and are also
+capable of stilling them (p. 117). 'Reason and arguments are incapable
+of combating certain words and formulas. They are uttered with solemnity
+in the presence of groups, and as soon as they have been pronounced an
+expression of respect is visible on every countenance, and all heads are
+bowed. By many they are considered as natural forces, as supernatural
+powers.' (p. 117.) It is only necessary in this connection to remember
+the taboo upon names among primitive people and the magical powers which
+they ascribe to names and words.[15]
+
+And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand
+illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is
+unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly
+influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident
+tendency not to distinguish between the two (p. 77).
+
+We have pointed out that this predominance of the life of phantasy and
+of the illusion born of an unfulfilled wish is the ruling factor in the
+psychology of neuroses. We have found that what neurotics are guided by
+is not ordinary objective reality but psychological reality. A
+hysterical symptom is based upon phantasy instead of upon the repetition
+of real experience, and the sense of guilt in an obsessional neurosis is
+based upon the fact of an evil intention which was never carried out.
+Indeed, just as in dreams and in hypnosis, in the mental operations of a
+group the function for testing the reality of things falls into the
+background in comparison with the strength of wishes with their
+affective cathexis.[16]
+
+What Le Bon says on the subject of leaders of groups is less exhaustive,
+and does not enable us to make out an underlying principle so clearly.
+He thinks that as soon as living beings are gathered together in certain
+numbers, no matter whether they are a herd of animals or a collection of
+human beings, they place themselves instinctively under the authority
+of a chief (p. 134). A group is an obedient herd, which could never live
+without a master. It has such a thirst for obedience that it submits
+instinctively to anyone who appoints himself its master.
+
+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 astonishment
+and respect. It would seem to arouse a feeling like that of fascination
+in hypnosis (p. 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 everything 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 (p. 159).
+
+We cannot feel that Le Bon has brought the function of the leader and
+the importance of prestige completely into harmony with his brilliantly
+executed picture of the group mind.
+
+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.[17] 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.[18] 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 the 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.' (p. 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.
+
+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 genius in intellectual
+creation, as is shown above all by language itself, as well as by
+folk-song, folk-lore 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, or 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 formations 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_,[19] starts out from the same
+contradiction that has just been mentioned, and finds a solution for it
+in the factor of organisation. In the simplest case, he says, the
+'group' possesses no organisation 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 organisation, and that precisely in these
+simple groups many of the fundamental facts of Collective Psychology can
+be observed with special ease (p. 22). Before the members of a random
+crowd of people can constitute something in the nature of a group in the
+psychological sense of the word, 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' (p. 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.
+
+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 (p. 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' (p. 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 emotional state is calculated
+automatically to arouse the same emotion in the person who perceives
+them. The greater the number of people in whom the same emotion 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 emotion. But in so doing he increases the excitement of
+the other people, who had produced this effect upon him, and thus the
+emotional 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 coarser and simpler emotions are the more apt to spread
+through a group in this way (p. 39).
+
+This mechanism for the intensification of emotion is favoured by some
+other influences which emanate from groups. A group impresses the
+individual with a sense of unlimited power and of 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 mystery 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 (p. 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 emotion 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 'unorganised' 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 judgment, 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.' (p. 45.)
+
+Since McDougall contrasts the behaviour of a highly organised group with
+what has just been described, we shall be particularly interested to
+learn in what this organisation 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; the former, if the same individuals persist in the group for
+some time; and the latter, 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 specialisation and differentiation of the functions of its
+constituents.
+
+According to McDougall, if these conditions are fulfilled, the
+psychological disadvantages of the group formation 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
+'organisation' 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 kept apart from his rivals. Owing to his
+entry into an 'unorganised' group he had lost this distinctiveness for a
+time. If we thus recognise 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,[20] to the effect that the tendency towards the formation
+of groups is biologically a continuation of the multicellular character
+of all the higher organisms.
+
+We started from the fundamental fact that an individual in a group is
+subjected through its influence to what is often a profound alteration
+in his mental activity. His emotions become extraordinarily intensified,
+while his intellectual ability becomes markedly reduced, both processes
+being evidently in the direction of an approximation to the other
+individuals in the group; and this result can only be reached by the
+removal of those inhibitions upon his instincts which are peculiar to
+each individual, and by his resigning those expressions of his
+inclinations which are especially his own. We have heard that these
+often unwelcome consequences are to some extent at least prevented by a
+higher 'organisation' of the group; but this does not contradict the
+fundamental fact of Group Psychology--the two theses as to the
+intensification of the emotions and the inhibition of the intellect in
+primitive groups. Our interest is now directed to discovering the
+psychological explanation of this mental change which is experienced by
+the individual in a group.
+
+It is clear that rational factors (such as the intimidation of the
+individual which has already been mentioned, that is, the action of his
+instinct of self-preservation) do not cover the observable phenomena.
+Beyond this what we are offered as an explanation by authorities upon
+Sociology and Group Psychology is always the same, even though it is
+given various names, and that is--the magic word 'suggestion'. Tarde
+calls it 'imitation'; but we cannot help agreeing with a writer who
+protests that imitation comes under the concept of suggestion, and is in
+fact one of its results.[21] Le Bon traces back all the puzzling
+features of social phenomena to two factors: the mutual suggestion of
+individuals and the prestige of leaders. But prestige, again, is only
+recognizable by its capacity for evoking suggestion. McDougall for a
+moment gives us an impression that his principle of 'primitive induction
+of emotion' might enable us to do without the assumption of suggestion.
+But on further consideration we are forced to perceive that this
+principle says no more than the familiar assertions about 'imitation' or
+'contagion', except for a decided stress upon the emotional factor.
+There is no doubt that something exists in us which, when we become
+aware of signs of an emotion in someone else, tends to make us fall into
+the same emotion; but how often do we not successfully oppose it, resist
+the emotion, and react in quite an opposite way? Why, therefore, do we
+invariably give way to this contagion when we are in a group? Once more
+we should have to say that what compels us to obey this tendency is
+imitation, and what induces the emotion in us is the group's suggestive
+influence. Moreover, quite apart from this, McDougall does not enable us
+to evade suggestion; we hear from him as well as from other writers that
+groups are distinguished by their special suggestibility.
+
+We shall therefore be prepared for the statement that suggestion (or
+more correctly suggestibility) is actually an irreducible, primitive
+phenomenon, a fundamental fact in the mental life of man. Such, too, was
+the opinion of Bernheim, of whose astonishing arts I was a witness in
+the year 1889. But I can remember even then feeling a muffled hostility
+to this tyranny of suggestion. When a patient who showed himself
+unamenable was met with the shout: 'What are you doing? _Vous vous
+contresuggestionnez!_', I said to myself that this was an evident
+injustice and an act of violence. For the man certainly had a right to
+counter-suggestions if they were trying to subdue him with suggestions.
+Later on my resistance took the direction of protesting against the view
+that suggestion, which explained everything, was itself to be preserved
+from explanation. Thinking of it, I repeated the old conundrum:[22]
+
+Now that I once more approach the riddle of suggestion after having kept
+away from it for some thirty years, I find there is no change in the
+situation. To this statement I can discover only a single exception,
+which I need not mention, since it is one which bears witness to the
+influence of psycho-analysis. I notice that particular efforts are being
+made to formulate the concept of suggestion correctly, that is, to fix
+the conventional use of the name.[24] And this is by no means
+superfluous, for the word is acquiring a more and more extended use and
+a looser and looser meaning, and will soon come to designate any sort of
+influence whatever, just as in English, where 'to suggest' and
+'suggestion' correspond to our _nahelegen_ and _Anregung_. But there has
+been no explanation of the nature of suggestion, that is, of the
+conditions under which influence without adequate logical foundation
+takes place. I should not avoid the task of supporting this statement by
+an analysis of the literature of the last thirty years, if I were not
+aware that an exhaustive inquiry is being undertaken close at hand which
+has in view the fulfilment of this very task.
+
+Instead of this I shall make an attempt at using the concept of _libido_
+for the purpose of throwing light upon Group Psychology, a concept which
+has done us such good service in the study of psycho-neuroses.
+
+Libido is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions. We call
+by that name the energy (regarded as a quantitative magnitude, though
+not at present actually mensurable) of those instincts which have to do
+with all that may be comprised under the word 'love'. The nucleus of
+what we mean by love naturally consists (and this is what is commonly
+called love, and what the poets sing of) in sexual love with sexual
+union as its aim. But we do not separate from this--what in any case
+has a share in the name 'love'--on the one hand, self-love, and on the
+other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity
+in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas.
+Our justification lies in the fact that psycho-analytic research has
+taught us that all these tendencies are an expression of the same
+instinctive activities; in relations between the sexes these instincts
+force their way towards sexual union, but in other circumstances they
+are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though
+always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity
+recognizable (as in such features as the longing for proximity, and
+self-sacrifice).
+
+We are of opinion, then, that language has carried out an entirely
+justifiable piece of unification in creating the word 'love' with its
+numerous uses, and that we cannot do better than take it as the basis of
+our scientific discussions and expositions as well. By coming to this
+decision, psycho-analysis has let loose a storm of indignation, as
+though it had been guilty of an act of outrageous innovation. Yet
+psycho-analysis has done nothing original in taking love in this 'wider'
+sense. In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, the
+'_Eros_' of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love force,
+the libido, of psycho-analysis, as has been shown in detail by
+Nachmansohn and Pfister;[25] and when the apostle Paul, in his famous
+epistle to the Corinthians, prizes love above all else, he certainly
+understands it in the same 'wider' sense.[26] But this only shows that
+men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they
+profess most to admire them.
+
+Psycho-analysis, then, gives these love instincts the name of sexual
+instincts, a _potiori_ and by reason of their origin. The majority of
+'educated' people have taken their revenge by retorting upon
+psycho-analysis with the reproach of 'pan-sexualism'. Anyone who
+considers sex as something mortifying and humiliating to human nature is
+at liberty to make use of the more genteel expressions 'Eros' and
+'erotic'. I might have done so myself from the first and thus have
+spared myself much opposition. But I did not want to, for I like to
+avoid concessions to faint-heartedness. One can never tell where that
+road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by
+little in substance too. I cannot see any merit in being ashamed of sex;
+the Greek word 'Eros', which is to soften the affront, is in the end
+nothing more than a translation of our German word _Liebe_ [love]; and
+finally, he who knows how to wait need make no concessions.
+
+We will try our fortune, then, with the supposition that love
+relationships (or, to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties)
+also constitute the essence of the group mind. Let us remember that the
+authorities make no mention of any such relations. What would correspond
+to them is evidently concealed behind the shelter, the screen, of
+suggestion. Our hypothesis finds support in the first instance from two
+passing thoughts. First, that a group is clearly held together by a
+power of some kind: and to what power could this feat be better ascribed
+than to Eros, who holds together everything in the world? Secondly, that
+if an individual gives up his distinctiveness in a group and lets its
+other members influence him by suggestion, it gives one the impression
+that he does it because he feels the need of being in harmony with them
+rather than in opposition to them--so that perhaps after all he does it
+'_ihnen zu Liebe_'.[27]
+
+We may recall from what we know of the morphology of groups that it is
+possible to distinguish very different kinds of groups and opposing
+lines in their development. There are very fleeting groups and extremely
+lasting ones; homogeneous ones, made up of the same sorts of
+individuals, and unhomogeneous ones; natural groups, and artificial
+ones, requiring an external force to keep them together; primitive
+groups, and highly organised ones with a definite structure. But for
+reasons which have yet to be explained we should like to lay particular
+stress upon a distinction to which the authorities have rather given too
+little attention; I refer to that between leaderless groups and those
+with leaders. And, in complete opposition to the usual practice, we
+shall not choose a relatively simple group formation as our point of
+departure, but shall begin with highly organised, lasting and artificial
+groups. The most interesting example of such structures are
+churches--communities of believers--and armies.
+
+A church and an army are artificial groups, that is, a certain external
+force is employed to prevent them from disintegrating and to check
+alterations in their structure. As a rule a person is not consulted or
+is given no choice, as to whether he wants to enter such a group; any
+attempt at leaving it is usually met with persecution or with severe
+punishment, or has quite definite conditions attached to it. It is quite
+outside our present interest to enquire why these associations need such
+special safeguards. We are only attracted by one circumstance, namely
+that certain facts, which are far more concealed in other cases, can be
+observed very clearly in those highly organised groups which are
+protected from dissolution in the manner that has been mentioned. In a
+church (and we may with advantage take the Catholic Church as a type) as
+well as in an army, however different the two may be in other respects,
+the same illusion holds good of there being a head--in the Catholic
+Church Christ, in an army its Commander-in-Chief--who loves all the
+individuals in the group with an equal love. Everything depends upon
+this illusion; if it were to be dropped, then both Church and army would
+dissolve, so far as the external force permitted them to. This equal
+love was expressly enunciated by Christ: 'Inasmuch as ye have done it
+unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' He
+stands to the individual members of the group of believers in the
+relation of a kind elder brother; he is their father surrogate. All the
+demands that are made upon the individual are derived from this love of
+Christ's. A democratic character runs through the Church, for the very
+reason that before Christ everyone is equal, and that everyone has an
+equal share in his love. It is not without a deep reason that the
+similarity between the Christian community and a family is invoked, and
+that believers call themselves brothers in Christ, that is, brothers
+through the love which Christ has for them. There is no doubt that the
+tie which unites each individual with Christ is also the cause of the
+tie which unites them with one another. The like holds good of an army.
+The Commander-in-Chief is a father who loves all his soldiers equally,
+and for that reason they are comrades among themselves. The army differs
+structurally from the Church in being built up of a series of such
+groups. Every captain is, as it were, the Commander-in-Chief and the
+father of his company, and so is every non-commissioned officer of his
+section. It is true that a similar hierarchy has been constructed in the
+Church, but it does not play the same part in it economically; for more
+knowledge and care about individuals may be attributed to Christ than
+to a human Commander-in-Chief.[28]
+
+It is to be noticed that in these two artificial groups each individual
+is bound by libidinal[29] ties on the one hand to the leader (Christ,
+the Commander-in-Chief) and on the other hand to the other members of
+the group. How these two ties are related to each other, whether they
+are of the same kind and the same value, and how they are to be
+described psychologically--these questions must be reserved for
+subsequent enquiry. But we shall venture even now upon a mild reproach
+against the authorities for not having sufficiently appreciated the
+importance of the leader in the psychology of the group, while our own
+choice of a first object for investigation has brought us into a more
+favourable position. It would appear as though we were on the right road
+towards an explanation of the principal phenomenon of Group
+Psychology--the individual's lack of freedom in a group. If each
+individual is bound in two directions by such an intense emotional tie,
+we shall find no difficulty in attributing to that circumstance the
+alteration and limitation which have been observed in his personality.
+
+A hint to the same effect, that the essence of a group lies in the
+libidinal ties existing in it, is also to be found in the phenomenon of
+panic, which is best studied in military groups. A panic arises if a
+group of that kind becomes disintegrated. Its characteristics are that
+none of the orders given by superiors are any longer listened to, and
+that each individual is only solicitous on his own account, and without
+any consideration for the rest. The mutual ties have ceased to exist,
+and a gigantic and senseless dread [_Angst_] is set free. At this point,
+again, the objection will naturally be made that it is rather the other
+way round; and that the dread has grown so great as to be able to
+disregard all ties and all feelings of consideration for others.
+McDougall has even (p. 24) made use of the case of panic (though not of
+military panic) as a typical instance of that intensification of emotion
+by contagion ('primary induction') upon which he lays so much emphasis.
+But nevertheless this rational method of explanation is here quite
+inadequate. The very question that needs explanation is why the dread
+has become so gigantic. The greatness of the danger cannot be
+responsible, for the same army which now falls a victim to panic may
+previously have faced equally great or greater danger with complete
+success; it is of the very essence of panic that it bears no relation to
+the danger that threatens, and often breaks out upon the most trivial
+occasions. If an individual in panic dread begins to be solicitous only
+on his own account, he bears witness in so doing to the fact that the
+emotional ties, which have hitherto made the danger seem small to him,
+have ceased to exist. Now that he is by himself in facing the danger,
+he may surely think it greater. The fact is, therefore, that panic dread
+presupposes a relaxation in the libidinal structure of the group and
+reacts to it in a justifiable manner, and the contrary view--that the
+libidinal ties of the group are destroyed owing to dread in the face of
+the danger--can be refuted.
+
+The contention that dread in a group is increased to enormous
+proportions by means of induction (contagion) is not in the least
+contradicted by these remarks. McDougall's view meets the case entirely
+when the danger is a really great one and when the group has no strong
+emotional ties--conditions which are fulfilled, for instance, when a
+fire breaks out in a theatre or a place of amusement. But the really
+instructive case and the one which can be best employed for our purposes
+is that mentioned above, in which a body of troops breaks into a panic
+although the danger has not increased beyond a degree that is usual and
+has often been previously faced. It is not to be expected that the usage
+of the word 'panic' should be clearly and unambiguously determined.
+Sometimes it is used to describe any collective dread, sometimes even
+dread in an individual when it exceeds all bounds, and often the name
+seems to be reserved for cases in which the outbreak of dread is not
+warranted by the occasion. If we take the word 'panic' in the sense of
+collective dread, we can establish a far-reaching analogy. Dread in an
+individual is provoked either by the greatness of a danger or by the
+cessation of emotional ties (libidinal cathexes[30]
+[_Libidobesetzungen_]); the latter is the case of neurotic dread.[31] In
+just the same way panic arises either owing to an increase of the common
+danger or owing to the disappearance of the emotional ties which hold
+the group together; and the latter case is analogous to that of neurotic
+dread.[32]
+
+Anyone who, like McDougall (l.c.), describes a panic as one of the
+plainest functions of the 'group mind', arrives at the paradoxical
+position that this group mind does away with itself in one of its most
+striking manifestations. It is impossible to doubt that panic means the
+disintegration of a group; it involves the cessation of all the feelings
+of consideration which the members of the group otherwise show one
+another.
+
+The typical occasion of the outbreak of a panic is very much as it is
+represented in Nestroy's parody of Hebbel's play about Judith and
+Holofernes. A soldier cries out: "The general has lost his head!" and
+thereupon all the Assyrians take to flight. The loss of the leader in
+some sense or other, the birth, of misgivings about him, brings on the
+outbreak of panic, though the danger remains the same; the mutual ties
+between the members of the group disappear, as a rule, at the same time
+as the tie with their leader. The group vanishes in dust, like a Bologna
+flask when its top is broken off.
+
+The dissolution of a religious group is not so easy to observe. A short
+time ago there came into my hands an English novel of Catholic origin,
+recommended by the Bishop of London, with the title _When It Was Dark_.
+It gave a clever and, as it seems to me, a convincing picture of such a
+possibility and its consequences. The novel, which is supposed to
+relate to the present day, tells how a conspiracy of enemies of the
+figure of Christ and of the Christian faith succeed in arranging for a
+sepulchre to be discovered in Jerusalem. In this sepulchre is an
+inscription, in which Joseph of Arimathaea confesses that for reasons of
+piety he secretly removed the body of Christ from its grave on the third
+day after its entombment and buried it in this spot. The resurrection of
+Christ and his divine nature are by this means disposed of, and the
+result of this archaeological discovery is a convulsion in European
+civilisation and an extraordinary increase in all crimes and acts of
+violence, which only ceases when the forgers' plot has been revealed.
+
+The phenomenon which accompanies the dissolution that is here supposed
+to overtake a religious group is not dread, for which the occasion is
+wanting. Instead of it ruthless and hostile impulses towards other
+people make their appearance, which, owing to the equal love of Christ,
+they had previously been unable to do.[33] But even during the kingdom
+of Christ those people who do not belong to the community of believers,
+who do not love him, and whom he does not love, stand outside this tie.
+Therefore a religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love,
+must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
+Fundamentally indeed every religion is in this same way a religion of
+love for all those whom it embraces; while cruelty and intolerance
+towards those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.
+However difficult we may find it personally, we ought not to reproach
+believers too severely on this account; people who are unbelieving or
+indifferent are so much better off psychologically in this respect. If
+to-day that intolerance no longer shows itself so violent and cruel as
+in former centuries, we can scarcely conclude that there has been a
+softening in human manners. The cause is rather to be found in the
+undeniable weakening of religious feelings and the libidinal ties which
+depend upon them. If another group tie takes the place of the religious
+one--and the socialistic tie seems to be succeeding in doing so--, then
+there will be the same intolerance towards outsiders as in the age of
+the Wars of Religion; and if differences between scientific opinions
+could ever attain a similar significance for groups, the same result
+would again be repeated with this new motivation.
+
+We have hitherto considered two artificial groups and have found that
+they are dominated by two emotional ties. One of these, the tie with the
+leader, seems (at all events for these cases) to be more of a ruling
+factor than the other, which holds between the members of the group.
+
+Now much else remains to be examined and described in the morphology of
+groups. We should have to start from the ascertained fact that a mere
+collection of people is not a group, so long as these ties have not been
+established in it; but we should have to admit that in any collection of
+people the tendency to form a psychological group may very easily become
+prominent. We should have to give our attention to the different kinds
+of groups, more or less stable, that arise spontaneously, and to study
+the conditions of their origin and of their dissolution. We should above
+all be concerned with the distinction between groups which have a
+leader and leaderless groups. We should consider whether groups with
+leaders may not be the more primitive and complete, whether in the
+others an idea, an abstraction, may not be substituted for the leader (a
+state of things to which religious groups, with their invisible head,
+form a transition stage), and whether a common tendency, a wish in which
+a number of people can have a share, may not in the same way serve as a
+substitute. This abstraction, again, might be more or less completely
+embodied in the figure of what we might call a secondary leader, and
+interesting varieties would arise from the relation between the idea and
+the leader. The leader or the leading idea might also, so to speak, be
+negative; hatred against a particular person or institution might
+operate in just the same unifying way, and might call up the same kind
+of emotional ties as positive attachment. Then the question would also
+arise whether a leader is really indispensable to the essence of a
+group--and other questions besides.
+
+But all these questions, which may, moreover, have been dealt with in
+part in the literature of Group Psychology, will not succeed in
+diverting our interest from the fundamental psychological problems that
+confront us in the structure of a group. And our attention will first be
+attracted by a consideration which promises to bring us in the most
+direct way to a proof that libidinal ties are what characterize a
+group.
+
+Let us keep before our eyes the nature of the emotional relations which
+hold between men in general. According to Schopenhauer's famous simile
+of the freezing porcupines no one can tolerate a too intimate approach
+to his neighbour.[34]
+
+The evidence of psycho-analysis shows that almost every intimate
+emotional relation between two people which lasts for some
+time--marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and
+children[35]--leaves a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility,
+which have first to be eliminated by repression. This is less disguised
+in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a
+subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come
+together in larger units. Every time two families become connected by a
+marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than
+the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other's most jealous
+rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt.
+Closely related races keep one another at arm's length; the South German
+cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of
+aspersion upon the Scotchman, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We
+are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an
+almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the
+German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured.
+
+When this hostility is directed against people who are otherwise loved
+we describe it as ambivalence of feeling; and we explain the fact, in
+what is probably far too rational a manner, by means of the numerous
+occasions for conflicts of interest which arise precisely in such
+intimate relations. In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which
+people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize
+the expression of self-love--of narcissism. This self-love works for the
+self-assertion of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence
+of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved
+a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration. We do not know
+why such sensitiveness should have been directed to just these details
+of differentiation; but it is unmistakable that in this whole connection
+men give evidence of a readiness for hatred, an aggressiveness, the
+source of which is unknown, and to which one is tempted to ascribe an
+elementary character.[36]
+
+But the whole of this intolerance vanishes, temporarily or permanently,
+as the result of the formation of a group, and in a group. So long as a
+group formation persists or so far as it extends, individuals behave as
+though they were uniform, tolerate other people's peculiarities, put
+themselves on an equal level with them, and have no feeling of aversion
+towards them. Such a limitation of narcissism can, according to our
+theoretical views, only be produced by one factor, a libidinal tie with
+other people. Love for oneself knows only one barrier--love for others,
+love for objects.[37] The question will at once be raised whether
+community of interest in itself, without any addition of libido, must
+not necessarily lead to the toleration of other people and to
+considerateness for them. This objection may be met by the reply that
+nevertheless no lasting limitation of narcissism is effected in this
+way, since this tolerance does not persist longer than the immediate
+advantage gained from the other people's collaboration. But the
+practical importance of the discussion is less than might be supposed,
+for experience has shown that in cases of collaboration libidinal ties
+are regularly formed between the fellow-workers which prolong and
+solidify the relation between them to a point beyond what is merely
+profitable. The same thing occurs in men's social relations as has
+become familiar to psycho-analytic research in the course of the
+development of the individual libido. The libido props itself upon the
+satisfaction of the great vital needs, and chooses as its first objects
+the people who have a share in that process. And in the development of
+mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the
+civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to
+altruism. And this is true both of the sexual love for women, with all
+the obligations which it involves of sparing what women are fond of, and
+also of the desexualised, sublimated homosexual love for other men,
+which springs from work in common. If therefore in groups narcissistic
+self-love is subject to limitations which do not operate outside them,
+that is cogent evidence that the essence of a group formation consists
+in a new kind of libidinal ties among the members of the group.
+
+But our interest now leads us on to the pressing question as to what may
+be the nature of these ties which exist in groups. In the
+psycho-analytic study of neuroses we have hitherto been occupied almost
+exclusively with ties that unite with their objects those love instincts
+which still pursue directly sexual aims. In groups there can evidently
+be no question of sexual aims of that kind. We are concerned here with
+love instincts which have been diverted from their original aims, though
+they do not operate with less energy on that account. Now we have
+already observed within the range of the usual sexual object-cathexis
+[_Objektbesetzung_] phenomena which represent a diversion of the
+instinct from its sexual aim. We have described them as degrees of being
+in love, and have recognized that they involve a certain encroachment
+upon the ego. We shall now turn our attention more closely to these
+phenomena of being in love, in the firm expectation of finding in them
+conditions which can be transferred to the ties that exist in groups.
+But we should also like to know whether this kind of object-cathexis, as
+we know it in sexual life, represents the only manner of emotional tie
+with other people, or whether we must take other mechanisms of the sort
+into account. As a matter of fact we learn from psycho-analysis that
+there do exist other mechanisms for emotional ties, the so-called
+_identifications_, insufficiently-known processes and hard to describe,
+the investigation of which will for some time keep us away from the
+subject of Group Psychology.
+
+Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of
+an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early
+history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special
+interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him,
+and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his
+father as his ideal. This behaviour has nothing to do with a passive or
+feminine attitude towards his father (and towards males in general); it
+is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the
+Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare the way.
+
+At the same time as this identification with his father, or a little
+later, the boy has begun to develop a true object-cathexis towards his
+mother according to the anaclitic type [_Anlehnungstypus_].[38] He then
+exhibits, therefore, two psychologically distinct ties: a
+straightforward sexual object-cathexis towards his mother and a typical
+identification towards his father. The two subsist side by side for a
+time without any mutual influence or interference. In consequence of the
+irresistible advance towards a unification of mental life they come
+together at last; and the normal Oedipus complex originates from their
+confluence. The little boy notices that his father stands in his way
+with his mother. His identification with his father then takes on a
+hostile colouring and becomes identical with the wish to replace his
+father in regard to his mother as well. Identification, in fact, is
+ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of
+tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal. It behaves
+like a derivative of the first _oral_ phase of the organisation of the
+libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by
+eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know,
+has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his
+enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond.[39]
+
+The subsequent history of this identification with the father may easily
+be lost sight of. It may happen that the Oedipus complex becomes
+inverted, and that the father is taken as the object of a feminine
+attitude, an object from which the directly sexual instincts look for
+satisfaction; in that event the identification with the father has
+become the precursor of an object tie with the father. The same holds
+good, with the necessary substitutions, of the baby daughter as well.
+
+It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an
+identification with the father and the choice of the father as an
+object. In the first case one's father is what one would like to _be_,
+and in the second he is what one would like to _have_. The distinction,
+that is, depends upon whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the
+object of the ego. The former is therefore already possible before any
+sexual object-choice has been made. It is much more difficult to give a
+clear metapsychological representation of the distinction. We can only
+see that identification endeavours to mould a person's own ego after the
+fashion of the one that has been taken as a 'model'.
+
+Let us disentangle identification as it occurs in the structure of a
+neurotic symptom from its rather complicated connections. Supposing that
+a little girl (and we will keep to her for the present) develops the
+same painful symptom as her mother--for instance, the same tormenting
+cough. Now this may come about in various ways. The identification may
+come from the Oedipus complex; in that case it signifies a hostile
+desire on the girl's part to take her mother's place, and the symptom
+expresses her object love towards her father, and brings about a
+realisation, under the influence of a sense of guilt, of her desire to
+take her mother's place: 'You wanted to be your mother, and now you
+_are_--anyhow as far as the pain goes'. This is the complete mechanism
+of the structure of a hysterical symptom. Or, on the other hand, the
+symptom may be the same as that of the person who is loved--(so, for
+instance, Dora in the 'Bruchstück einer Hysterieanalyse'[40] imitated
+her father's cough); in that case we can only describe the state of
+things by saying that _identification has appeared instead of
+object-choice, and that object-choice has regressed to identification_.
+We have heard that identification is the earliest and original form of
+emotional tie; it often happens that under the conditions in which
+symptoms are constructed, that is, where there is repression and where
+the mechanisms of the unconscious are dominant, object-choice is turned
+back into identification--the ego, that is, assumes the characteristics
+of the object. It is noticeable that in these identifications the ego
+sometimes copies the person who is not loved and sometimes the one who
+is loved. It must also strike us that in both cases the identification
+is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait
+from the person who is its object.
+
+There is a third particularly frequent and important case of symptom
+formation, in which the identification leaves any object relation to the
+person who is being copied entirely out of account. Supposing, for
+instance, that one of the girls in a boarding school has had a letter
+from someone with whom she is secretly in love which arouses her
+jealousy, and that she reacts to it with a fit of hysterics; then some
+of her friends who know about it will contract the fit, as we say, by
+means of mental infection. The mechanism is that of identification based
+upon the possibility or desire of putting oneself in the same
+situation. The other girls would like to have a secret love affair too,
+and under the influence of a sense of guilt they also accept the pain
+involved in it. It would be wrong to suppose that they take on the
+symptom out of sympathy. On the contrary, the sympathy only arises out
+of the identification, and this is proved by the fact that infection or
+imitation of this kind takes place in circumstances where even less
+pre-existing sympathy is to be assumed than usually exists between
+friends in a girls' school. One ego has perceived a significant analogy
+with another upon one point--in our example upon a similar readiness for
+emotion; an identification is thereupon constructed on this point, and,
+under the influence of the pathogenic situation, is displaced on to the
+symptom which the one ego has produced. The identification by means of
+the symptom has thus become the mark of a point of coincidence between
+the two egos which has to be kept repressed.
+
+What we have learned from these three sources may be summarised as
+follows. First, identification is the original form of emotional tie
+with an object; secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute
+for a libidinal object tie, as it were by means of the introjection of
+the object into the ego; and thirdly, it may arise with every new
+perception of a common quality shared with some other person who is not
+an object of the sexual instinct. The more important this common
+quality is, the more successful may this partial identification become,
+and it may thus represent the beginning of a new tie.
+
+We already begin to divine that the mutual tie between members of a
+group is in the nature of an identification of this kind, based upon an
+important emotional common quality; and we may suspect that this common
+quality lies in the nature of the tie with the leader. Another suspicion
+may tell us that we are far from having exhausted the problem of
+identification, and that we are faced by the process which psychology
+calls 'empathy [_Einfühlung_]' and which plays the largest part in our
+understanding of what is inherently foreign to our ego in other people.
+But we shall here limit ourselves to the immediate emotional effects of
+identification, and shall leave on one side its significance for our
+intellectual life.
+
+Psycho-analytic research, which has already occasionally attacked the
+more difficult problems of the psychoses, has also been able to exhibit
+identification to us in some other cases which are not immediately
+comprehensible. I shall treat two of these cases in detail as material
+for our further consideration.
+
+The genesis of male homosexuality in a large class of cases is as
+follows. A young man has been unusually long and intensely fixated upon
+his mother in the sense of the Oedipus complex. But at last, after the
+end of his puberty, the time comes for exchanging his mother for some
+other sexual object. Things take a sudden turn: the young man does not
+abandon his mother, but identifies himself with her; he transforms
+himself into her, and now looks about for objects which can replace his
+ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has
+experienced from his mother. This is a frequent process, which can be
+confirmed as often as one likes, and which is naturally quite
+independent of any hypothesis that may be made as to the organic driving
+force and the motives of the sudden transformation. A striking thing
+about this identification is its ample scale; it remoulds the ego in one
+of its important features--in its sexual character--upon the model of
+what has hitherto been the object. In this process the object itself is
+renounced--whether entirely or in the sense of being preserved only in
+the unconscious is a question outside the present discussion.
+Identification with an object that is renounced or lost as a substitute
+for it, introjection of this object into the ego, is indeed no longer a
+novelty to us. A process of the kind may sometimes be directly observed
+in small children. A short time ago an observation of this sort was
+published in the _Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse_. A child
+who was unhappy over the loss of a kitten declared straight out that now
+he himself was the kitten, and accordingly crawled about on all fours,
+would not eat at table, etc.[41]
+
+Another such instance of introjection of the object has been provided by
+the analysis of melancholia, an affection which counts among the most
+remarkable of its exciting causes the real or emotional loss of a loved
+object. A leading characteristic of these cases is a cruel
+self-depreciation of the ego combined with relentless self-criticism and
+bitter self-reproaches. Analyses have shown that this disparagement and
+these reproaches apply at bottom to the object and represent the ego's
+revenge upon it. The shadow of the object has fallen upon the ego, as I
+have said elsewhere.[42] The introjection of the object is here
+unmistakably clear.
+
+But these melancholias also show us something else, which may be of
+importance for our later discussions. They show us the ego divided,
+fallen into two pieces, one of which rages against the second. This
+second piece is the one which has been altered by introjection and which
+contains the lost object. But the piece which behaves so cruelly is not
+unknown to us either. It comprises the conscience, a critical faculty
+[_Instanz_][43] within the ego, which even in normal times takes up a
+critical attitude towards the ego, though never so relentlessly and so
+unjustifiably. On previous occasions we have been driven to the
+hypothesis[44] that some such faculty develops in our ego which may cut
+itself off from the rest of the ego and come into conflict with it. We
+have called it the 'ego ideal', and by way of functions we have ascribed
+to it self-observation, the moral conscience, the censorship of dreams,
+and the chief influence in repression. We have said that it is the heir
+to the original narcissism in which the childish ego found its
+self-sufficiency; it gradually gathers up from the influences of the
+environment the demands which that environment makes upon the ego and
+which the ego cannot always rise to; so that a man, when he cannot be
+satisfied with his ego itself, may nevertheless be able to find
+satisfaction in the ego ideal which has been differentiated out of the
+ego. In delusions of observation, as we have further shown, the
+disintegration of this faculty has become patent, and has thus revealed
+its origin in the influence of superior powers, and above all of
+parents.[45] But we have not forgotten to add that the amount of
+distance between this ego ideal and the real ego is very variable from
+one individual to another, and that with many people this
+differentiation within the ego does not go further than with children.
+
+But before we can employ this material for understanding the libidinal
+organisation of groups, we must take into account some other examples of
+the mutual relations between the object and the ego.[46]
+
+Even in its caprices the usage of language remains true to some kind of
+reality. Thus it gives the name of 'love' to a great many kinds of
+emotional relationship which we too group together theoretically as
+love; but then again it feels a doubt whether this love is real, true,
+actual love, and so hints at a whole scale of possibilities within the
+range of the phenomena of love. We shall have no difficulty in making
+the same discovery empirically.
+
+In one class of cases being in love is nothing more than object-cathexis
+on the part of the sexual instincts with a view to directly sexual
+satisfaction, a cathexis which expires, moreover, when this aim has been
+reached; this is what is called common, sensual love. But, as we know,
+the libidinal situation rarely remains so simple. It was possible to
+calculate with certainty upon the revival of the need which had just
+expired; and this must no doubt have been the first motive for
+directing a lasting cathexis upon the sexual object and for 'loving' it
+in the passionless intervals as well.
+
+To this must be added another factor derived from the astonishing course
+of development which is pursued by the erotic life of man. In his first
+phase, which has usually come to an end by the time he is five years
+old, a child has found the first object for his love in one or other of
+his parents, and all of his sexual instincts with their demand for
+satisfaction have been united upon this object. The repression which
+then sets in compels him to renounce the greater number of these
+infantile sexual aims, and leaves behind a profound modification in his
+relation to his parents. The child still remains tied to his parents,
+but by instincts which must be described as being 'inhibited in their
+aim [_zielgehemmte_]'. The emotions which he feels henceforward towards
+these objects of his love are characterized as 'tender'. It is well
+known that the earlier 'sensual' tendencies remain more or less strongly
+preserved in the unconscious, so that in a certain sense the whole of
+the original current continues to exist.[47]
+
+At puberty, as we know, there set in new and very strong tendencies with
+directly sexual aims. In unfavourable cases they remain separate, in the
+form of a sensual current, from the 'tender' emotional trends which
+persist. We are then faced by a picture the two aspects of which certain
+movements in literature take such delight in idealising. A man of this
+kind will show a sentimental enthusiasm for women whom he deeply
+respects but who do not excite him to sexual activities, and he will
+only be potent with other women whom he does not 'love' but thinks
+little of or even despises.[48] More often, however, the adolescent
+succeeds in bringing about a certain degree of synthesis between the
+unsensual, heavenly love and the sensual, earthly love, and his relation
+to his sexual object is characterised by the interaction of uninhibited
+instincts and of instincts inhibited in their aim. The depth to which
+anyone is in love, as contrasted with his purely sensual desire, may be
+measured by the size of the share taken by the inhibited instincts of
+tenderness.
+
+In connection with this question of being in love we have always been
+struck by the phenomenon of sexual over-estimation--the fact that the
+loved object enjoys a certain amount of freedom from criticism, and that
+all its characteristics are valued more highly than those of people who
+are not loved, or than its own were at a time when it itself was not
+loved. If the sensual tendencies are somewhat more effectively
+repressed or set aside, the illusion is produced that the object has
+come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits, whereas
+on the contrary these merits may really only have been lent to it by its
+sensual charm.
+
+The tendency which falsifies judgement in this respect is that of
+_idealisation_. But this makes it easier for us to find our way about.
+We see that the object is being treated in the same way as our own ego,
+so that when we are in love a considerable amount of narcissistic libido
+overflows on to the object. It is even obvious, in many forms of love
+choice, that the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego
+ideal of our own. We love it on account of the perfections which we have
+striven to reach for our own ego, and which we should now like to
+procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism.
+
+If the sexual over-estimation and the being in love increase even
+further, then the interpretation of the picture becomes still more
+unmistakable. The tendencies whose trend is towards directly sexual
+satisfaction may now be pushed back entirely, as regularly happens, for
+instance, with the young man's sentimental passion; the ego becomes more
+and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and
+precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of
+the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The
+object has, so to speak, consumed the ego. Traits of humility, of the
+limitation of narcissism, and of self-injury occur in every case of
+being in love; in the extreme case they are only intensified, and as a
+result of the withdrawal of the sensual claims they remain in solitary
+supremacy.
+
+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 over-estimation. 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 faculty 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 summarised in a formula: _The object
+has taken the place of the ego ideal._
+
+It is now easy to define the distinction between identification and such
+extreme developments of being in love as may be described as fascination
+or infatuation. 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
+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 hyper-cathexis 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 with the object 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_.
+
+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 just as towards the loved object. There is the same
+absorption of one'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 dream-like
+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.[49] No wonder that the ego takes a perception for
+real if its reality is vouched for by the mental faculty which
+ordinarily discharges the duty of testing the reality of things. The
+complete absence of tendencies which are uninhibited in their sexual
+aims contributes further towards the extreme purity of the phenomena.
+The hypnotic relation is the devotion of someone in love to an unlimited
+degree but with sexual satisfaction excluded; whereas in the 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.
+
+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
+tendencies. In this respect it occupies a middle position between the
+two.
+
+It is interesting to see that it is precisely those sexual tendencies
+that are inhibited in their aims which achieve such lasting ties between
+men. But this can easily be understood from the fact that they are not
+capable of complete satisfaction, while sexual tendencies 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 first be mixed with purely tender
+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
+tendencies excluded. There is still a great deal in it which we must
+recognise as unexplained and mystical. 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 terror 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
+realised 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.
+
+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 'organisation' to
+acquire secondarily the characteristics of an individual. _A primary
+group of this kind is a number of individuals who have substituted one
+and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified
+themselves with one another in their ego._ This condition admits of
+graphic representation:
+
+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 separate
+emotion and personal intellectual act are too weak to come to anything
+by themselves and are absolutely obliged to wait till they are
+reinforced through 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.
+
+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 upon the
+herd instinct, concerning which my only regret is that it does not
+entirely escape the antipathies that were set loose by the recent great
+war.[50]
+
+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 this
+gregariousness is an analogy to multicellularity and as it were a
+continuation of it. From the standpoint of the libido theory it is a
+further manifestation of the inclination, 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.[51] The individual feels
+'incomplete' if he is alone. The dread 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.
+
+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 generalised form of assemblage in
+which man, that [Greek: zôon politikon], 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.
+
+But Trotter's exposition, with even more justice than the others', is
+open to the objection that it takes too little account of the leader's
+part in a group, while we incline rather to the opposite judgement, that
+it is impossible to grasp the nature of a group if the leader is
+disregarded. The herd instinct leaves no room at all for the leader; he
+is merely thrown in along with the herd, almost by chance; it follows,
+too, that no path leads from this instinct to the need for a God; the
+herd is without a herdsman. But besides this Trotter's exposition can be
+undermined psychologically; that is to say, it can be made at all events
+probable that the herd instinct is not irreducible, that it is not
+primary in the same sense as the instinct of self-preservation and the
+sexual instinct.
+
+It is naturally no easy matter to trace the ontogenesis of the herd
+instinct. The dread which is shown by small children when they are left
+alone, and which Trotter claims as being already a manifestation of the
+instinct, nevertheless suggests more readily another interpretation. The
+dread relates to the child's mother, and later to other familiar
+persons, and it is the expression of an unfulfilled desire, which the
+child does not yet know how to deal with in any way except by turning
+it into dread.[52] Nor is the child's dread when it is alone pacified by
+the sight of any haphazard 'member of the herd', but on the contrary it
+is only brought into existence by the approach of a 'stranger' of this
+sort. Then for a long time nothing in the nature of herd instinct or
+group feeling is to be observed in children. Something like it grows up
+first of all, in a nursery containing many children, out of the
+children's relation to their parents, and it does so as a reaction to
+the initial envy with which the elder child receives the younger one.
+The elder child would certainly like to put its successor jealously
+aside, to keep it away from the parents, and to rob it of all its
+privileges; but in face of the fact that this child (like all that come
+later) is loved by the parents in just the same way, and in consequence
+of the impossibility of maintaining its hostile attitude without
+damaging itself, it is forced into identifying itself with the other
+children. So there grows up in the troop of children a communal or group
+feeling, which is then further developed at school. The first demand
+made by this reaction-formation is for justice, for equal treatment for
+all. We all know how loudly and implacably this claim is put forward at
+school. If one cannot be the favourite oneself, at all events nobody
+else shall be the favourite. This transformation--the replacing of
+jealousy by a group feeling in the nursery and classroom--might be
+considered improbable, if the same process could not later on be
+observed again in other circumstances. We have only to think of the
+troop of women and girls, all of them in love in an enthusiastically
+sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or pianist after his
+performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to be jealous
+of the rest; but, in face of their numbers and the consequent
+impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it,
+and, instead of pulling out one another's hair, they act as a united
+group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions,
+and would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks.
+Originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with
+one another by means of a similar love for the same object. When, as is
+usual, a situation in the field of the instincts is capable of various
+outcomes, we need not be surprised if the actual outcome is one which
+involves the possibility of a certain amount of satisfaction, while
+another, even though in itself more obvious, is passed over because the
+circumstances of life prevent its attaining this aim.
+
+What appears later on in society in the shape of _Gemeingeist_, _esprit
+de corps_, 'group spirit', etc., does not belie its derivation from what
+was originally envy. No one must want to put himself forward, every one
+must be the same and have the same. Social justice means that we deny
+ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as
+well, or, what is the same thing, may not be able to ask for them. This
+demand for equality is the root of social conscience and the sense of
+duty. It reveals itself unexpectedly in the syphilitic's dread of
+infecting other people, which psycho-analysis has taught us to
+understand. The dread exhibited by these poor wretches corresponds to
+their violent struggles against the unconscious wish to spread their
+infection on to other people; for why should they alone be infected and
+cut off from so much? why not other people as well? And the same germ is
+to be found in the pretty anecdote of the judgement of Solomon. If one
+woman's child is dead, the other shall not have a live one either. The
+bereaved woman is recognized by this wish.
+
+Thus social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a
+hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie of the nature of an
+identification. So far as we have hitherto been able to follow the
+course of events, this reversal appears to be effected under the
+influence of a common tender tie with a person outside the group. We do
+not ourselves regard our analysis of identification as exhaustive, but
+it is enough for our present purpose that we should revert to this one
+feature--its demand that equalization shall be consistently carried
+through. We have already heard in the discussion of the two artificial
+groups, church and army, that their preliminary condition is that all
+their members should be loved in the same way by one person, the leader.
+Do not let us forget, however, that the demand for equality in a group
+applies only to its members and not to the leader. All the members must
+be equal to one another, but they all want to be ruled by one person.
+Many equals, who can identify themselves with one another, and a single
+person superior to them all--that is the situation that we find realised
+in groups which are capable of subsisting. Let us venture, then, to
+correct Trotter's pronouncement that man is a herd animal and assert
+that he is rather a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led
+by a chief.
+
+In 1912 I took up a conjecture of Darwin's to the effect that the
+primitive form of human society was that of a horde ruled over
+despotically by a powerful male. I attempted to show that the fortunes
+of this horde have left indestructible traces upon the history of human
+descent; and, especially, that the development of totemism, which
+comprises in itself the beginnings of religion, morality, and social
+organisation, is connected with the killing of the chief by violence and
+the transformation of the paternal horde into a community of
+brothers.[53] To be sure, this is only a hypothesis, like so many others
+with which archaeologists endeavour to lighten the darkness of
+prehistoric times--a 'Just-So Story', as it was amusingly called by a
+not unkind critic (Kroeger); but I think it is creditable to such a
+hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence and understanding into
+more and more new regions.
+
+Human groups exhibit once again the familiar picture of an individual of
+superior strength among a troop of similar companions, a picture which
+is also contained in our idea of the primal horde. The psychology of
+such a group, as we know it from the descriptions to which we have so
+often referred--the dwindling of the conscious individual personality,
+the focussing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction, the
+predominance of the emotions and of the unconscious mental life, the
+tendency to the immediate carrying out of intentions as they emerge--all
+this corresponds to a state of regression to a primitive mental
+activity, of just such a sort as we should be inclined to ascribe to the
+primal horde.[54]
+
+Thus the group appears to us as a revival of the primal horde. Just as
+primitive man virtually survives in every individual, so the primal
+horde may arise once more out of any random crowd; in so far as men are
+habitually under the sway of group formation we recognise in it the
+survival of the primal horde. We must conclude that the psychology of
+the group is the oldest human psychology; what we have isolated as
+individual psychology, by neglecting all traces of the group, has only
+since come into prominence out of the old group psychology, by a gradual
+process which may still, perhaps, be described as incomplete. We shall
+later venture upon an attempt at specifying the point of departure of
+this development.
+
+Further reflection will show us in what respect this statement requires
+correction. Individual psychology must, on the contrary, be just as old
+as group psychology, for from the first there were two kinds of
+psychologies, that of the individual members of the group and that of
+the father, chief, or leader. The members of the group were subject to
+ties just as we see them to-day, but the father of the primal horde was
+free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent even in
+isolation, and his will needed no reinforcement from others. Consistency
+leads us to assume that his ego had few libidinal ties; he loved no one
+but himself, or other people only in so far as they served his needs. To
+objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary.
+
+He, at the very beginning of the history of mankind, was the _Superman_
+whom Nietzsche only expected from the future. Even to-day the members of
+a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly
+loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he
+may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident
+and independent. We know that love puts a check upon narcissism, and it
+would be possible to show how, by operating in this way, it became a
+factor of civilisation.
+
+The primal father of the horde was not yet immortal, as he later became
+by deification. If he died, he had to be replaced; his place was
+probably taken by a youngest son, who had up to then been a member of
+the group like any other. There must therefore be a possibility of
+transforming group psychology into individual psychology; a condition
+must be discovered under which such a transformation is easily
+accomplished, just as it is possible for bees in case of necessity to
+turn a larva into a queen instead of into a worker. One can imagine only
+one possibility: the primal father had prevented his sons from
+satisfying their directly sexual tendencies; he forced them into
+abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties with him and with
+one another which could arise out of those of their tendencies that were
+inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group
+psychology. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last
+resort the causes of group psychology.[55]
+
+Whoever became his successor was also given the possibility of sexual
+satisfaction, and was by that means offered a way out of the conditions
+of group psychology. The fixation of the libido to woman and the
+possibility of satisfaction without any need for delay or accumulation
+made and end of the importance of those of his sexual tendencies that
+were inhibited in their aim, and allowed his narcissism always to rise
+to its full height. We shall return in a postscript to this connection
+between love and character formation.
+
+We may further emphasize, as being specially instructive, the relation
+that holds between the contrivance by means of which an artificial group
+is held together and the constitution of the primal horde. We have seen
+that with an army and a church this contrivance is the illusion that
+the leader loves all of the individuals equally and justly. But this is
+simply an idealistic remodelling of the state of affairs in the primal
+horde, where all of the sons knew that they were equally persecuted by
+the primal father, and feared him equally. This same recasting upon
+which all social duties are built up is already presupposed by the next
+form of human society, the totemistic clan. The indestructible strength
+of the family as a natural group formation rests upon the fact that this
+necessary presupposition of the father's equal love can have a real
+application in the family.
+
+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.[56]
+Let us consider how hypnosis is induced. The hypnotist asserts that he
+is in possession of a mysterious power which robs the subject of his own
+will, or, which is the same thing, the subject believes it of him. This
+mysterious power (which is even now often described popularly as animal
+magnetism) must be the same 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 hypnotising 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.[57]
+
+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. As a matter 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 hypnotising, 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.[58]
+
+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 hypnosis are to be distinguished: one coaxing and soothing,
+which he considers is modelled upon the mother, and another threatening,
+which is derived from the father.[59] Now the command to sleep in
+hypnosis means nothing more nor less than an order to withdraw all
+interest from the world and to concentrate it upon the person of the
+hypnotist. And it is so understood by the subject; for in this
+withdrawal of interest from the outer world lies the psychological
+characteristic of sleep, and the kinship between sleep and the state of
+hypnosis is based upon it.
+
+By the measures that he takes, then, the hypnotist awakens in the
+subject a portion of his archaic inheritance 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 their suggestion phenomena, 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.[60]
+
+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
+self-complacency. The selection of the leader is very much facilitated
+by this circumstance. He need 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.
+
+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 substitution of the
+object for the ego ideal. The assumption of this kind of differentiating
+grade [_Stufe_] 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 'Zur Einführung des Narzissmus' I have put
+together all the pathological material that could at the moment be used
+in support of this separation. 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
+appears in the relation of an object to the ego ideal which has been
+developed out of it, and that all the interplay between an outer 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
+inside 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.[61] 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 outer world and to 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 outer 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, which is pathologically more
+important, is not subject to any such qualification. In the course of
+our 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. Wit 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.
+
+It is quite conceivable that the separation of the ego ideal from the
+ego cannot be borne for long either, and has to be temporarily undone.
+In all renunciations and limitations imposed upon the ego a periodical
+infringement of the prohibition is the rule; this indeed is shown by the
+institution of festivals, which in origin are nothing more nor less than
+excesses provided by law and which owe their cheerful character to the
+release which they bring.[62] The Saturnalia of the Romans and our
+modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the festivals of
+primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of every kind and
+the transgression of what are at other times the most sacred
+commandments. But the ego ideal comprises the sum of all the limitations
+in which the ego has to acquiesce, and for that reason the abrogation of
+the ideal would necessarily be a magnificent festival for the ego, which
+might then once again feel satisfied with itself.[63]
+
+There is always a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides
+with the ego ideal. And the sense of guilt (as well as the sense of
+inferiority) can also be understood as an expression of tension between
+the ego and the ego ideal.
+
+It is well known that there are people the general colour of whose mood
+oscillates periodically from an excessive depression through some kind
+of intermediate state to an exalted sense of well-being. These
+oscillations appear in very different degrees of amplitude, from what is
+just noticeable to those extreme instances which, in the shape of
+melancholia and mania, make the most painful or disturbing inroads upon
+the life of the person concerned. In typical cases of this cyclical
+depression outer exciting causes do not seem to play any decisive part;
+as regards inner motives, nothing more (or nothing different) is to be
+found in these patients than in all others. It has consequently become
+the custom to consider these cases as not being psychogenic. We shall
+refer later on to those other exactly similar cases of cyclical
+depression which can nevertheless easily be traced back to mental
+traumata.
+
+Thus the foundation of these spontaneous oscillations of mood is
+unknown; we are without insight into the mechanism of the displacement
+of a melancholia by a mania. So we are free to suppose that these
+patients are people in whom our conjecture might find an actual
+application--their ego ideal might be temporarily resolved into their
+ego after having previously ruled it with especial strictness.
+
+Let us keep to what is clear: On the basis of our analysis of the ego it
+cannot be doubted that in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have
+fused together, so that the person, in a mood of triumph and
+self-satisfaction, disturbed by no self-criticism, can enjoy the
+abolition of his inhibitions, his feelings of consideration for others,
+and his self-reproaches. It is not so obvious, but nevertheless very
+probable, that the misery of the melancholiac is the expression of a
+sharp conflict between the two faculties of his ego, a conflict in which
+the ideal, in an excess of sensitiveness, relentlessly exhibits its
+condemnation of the ego in delusions of inferiority and in
+self-depreciation. The only question is whether we are to look for the
+causes of these altered relations between the ego and the ego ideal in
+the periodic rebellions, which we have postulated above, against the new
+institution, or whether we are to make other circumstances responsible
+for them.
+
+A change into mania is not an indispensable feature of the
+symptomatology of melancholic depression. There are simple melancholias,
+some in single and some in recurring attacks, which never show this
+development. On the other hand there are melancholias in which the
+exciting cause clearly plays an aetiological part. They are those which
+occur after the loss of a loved object, whether by death or as a result
+of circumstances which have necessitated the withdrawal of the libido
+from the object. A psychogenic melancholia of this sort can end in
+mania, and this cycle can be repeated several times, just as easily as
+in a case which appears to be spontaneous. Thus the state of things is
+somewhat obscure, especially as only a few forms and cases of
+melancholia have been submitted to psycho-analytical investigation.[64]
+So far we only understand those cases in which the object is given up
+because it has shown itself unworthy of love. It is then set up again
+inside the ego, by means of identification, and severely condemned by
+the ego ideal. The reproaches and attacks directed towards the object
+come to light in the shape of melancholic self-reproaches.[65]
+
+A melancholia of this kind may also end in a change to mania; so that
+the possibility of this happening represents a feature which is
+independent of the other characteristics in the symptomatology.
+
+Nevertheless I see no difficulty in assigning to the factor of the
+periodical rebellion of the ego against the ego ideal a share in both
+kinds of melancholia, the psychogenic as well as the spontaneous. In the
+spontaneous kind it may be supposed that the ego ideal is inclined to
+display a peculiar strictness, which then results automatically in its
+temporary suspension. In the psychogenic kind the ego would be incited
+to rebellion by ill-treatment on the part of its ideal--an ill-treatment
+which it encounters when there has been identification with a rejected
+object.
+
+In the course of the enquiry which has just been brought to a
+provisional end we came across a number of side-paths which we avoided
+pursuing in the first instance but in which there was much that offered
+us promises of insight. We propose now to take up a few of the points
+that have been left on one side in this way.
+
+A. The distinction between identification of the ego with an object and
+replacement of the ego ideal by an object finds an interesting
+illustration in the two great artificial groups which we began by
+studying, the army and the Christian church.
+
+It is obvious that a soldier takes his superior, that is, really, the
+leader of the army, as his ideal, while he identifies himself with his
+equals, and derives from this community of their egos the obligations
+for giving mutual help and for sharing possessions which comradeship
+implies. But he becomes ridiculous if he tries to identify himself with
+the general. The soldier in _Wallensteins Lager_ laughs at the sergeant
+for this very reason:
+
+It is otherwise in the Catholic Church. Every Christian loves Christ as
+his ideal and feels himself united with all other Christians by the tie
+of identification. But the Church requires more of him. He has also to
+identify himself with Christ and love all other Christians as Christ
+loved them. At both points, therefore, the Church requires that the
+position of the libido which is given by a group formation should be
+supplemented. Identification has to be added where object-choice has
+taken place, and object love where there is identification. This
+addition evidently goes beyond the constitution of the group. One can be
+a good Christian and yet be far from the idea of putting oneself in
+Christ's place and of having like him an all-embracing love for mankind.
+One need not think oneself capable, weak mortal that one is, of the
+Saviour's largeness of soul and strength of love. But this further
+development in the distribution of libido in the group is probably the
+factor upon which Christianity bases its claim to have reached a higher
+ethical level.
+
+B. We have said that it would be possible to specify the point in the
+mental development of man at which the advance from group to individual
+psychology was also achieved by the individual members of the group.[67]
+
+For this purpose we must return for a moment to the scientific myth of
+the father of the primal horde. He was later on exalted into the creator
+of the world, and with justice, for he had produced all the sons who
+composed the first group. He was the ideal of each one of them, at once
+feared and honoured, a fact which led later to the idea of taboo. These
+many individuals eventually banded themselves together, killed him and
+cut him in pieces. None of the group of victors could take his place,
+or, if one of them did, the battles began afresh, until they understood
+that they must all renounce their father's heritage. They then formed
+the totemistic community of brothers, all with equal rights and united
+by the totem prohibitions which were to preserve and to expiate the
+memory of the murder. But the dissatisfaction with what had been
+achieved still remained, and it became the source of new developments.
+The persons who were united in this group of brothers gradually came
+towards a revival of the old state of things at a new level. Man became
+once more the chief of a family, and broke down the prerogatives of the
+gynaecocracy which had become established during the fatherless period.
+As a compensation for this he may at that time have acknowledged the
+mother deities, whose priests were castrated for the mother's
+protection, after the example that had been given by the father of the
+primal horde. And yet the new family was only a shadow of the old one;
+there were numbers of fathers and each one was limited by the rights of
+the others.
+
+It was then, perhaps, that some individual, in the exigency of his
+longing, may have been moved to free himself from the group and take
+over the father's part. He who did this was the first epic poet; and the
+advance was achieved in his imagination. This poet disguised the truth
+with lies in accordance with his longing. He invented the heroic myth.
+The hero was a man who by himself had slain the father--the father who
+still appeared in the myth as a totemistic monster. Just as the father
+had been the boy's first ideal, so in the hero who aspires to the
+father's place the poet now created the first ego ideal. The transition
+to the hero was probably afforded by the youngest son, the mother's
+favourite, whom she had protected from paternal jealousy, and who, in
+the era of the primal horde, had been the father's successor. In the
+lying poetic fancies of prehistoric times the woman, who had been the
+prize of battle and the allurement to murder, was probably turned into
+the seducer and instigator to the crime.
+
+The hero claims to have acted alone in accomplishing the deed, which
+certainly only the horde as a whole would have ventured upon. But, as
+Rank has observed, fairy tales have preserved clear traces of the facts
+which were disavowed. For we often find in them that the hero who has to
+carry out some difficult task (usually a youngest son, and not
+infrequently one who has represented himself to the father surrogate as
+being stupid, that is to say, harmless)--we often find, then, that this
+hero can carry out his task only by the help of a crowd of small
+animals, such as bees or ants. These would be the brothers in the primal
+horde, just as in the same way in dream symbolism insects or vermin
+signify brothers and sisters (contemptuously, considered as babies).
+Moreover every one of the tasks in myths and fairy tales is easily
+recognisable as a substitute for the heroic deed.
+
+The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group
+psychology. The first myth was certainly the psychological, the hero
+myth; the explanatory nature myth must have followed much later. The
+poet who had taken this step and had in this way set himself free from
+the group in his imagination, is nevertheless able (as Rank has further
+observed) to find his way back to it in reality. For he goes and relates
+to the group his hero's deeds which he has invented. At bottom this hero
+is no one but himself. Thus he lowers himself to the level of reality,
+and raises his hearers to the level of imagination. But his hearers
+understand the poet, and, in virtue of their having the same relation of
+longing towards the primal father, they can identify themselves with the
+hero.[68]
+
+The lie of the heroic myth culminates in the deification of the hero.
+Perhaps the deified hero may have been earlier than the Father God and
+may have been a precursor to the return of the primal father as a deity.
+The series of gods, then, would run chronologically: Mother
+Goddess--Hero--Father God. But it is only with the elevation of the
+never forgotten primal father that the deity acquires the features that
+we still recognise in him to-day.[69]
+
+C. A great deal has been said in this paper about directly sexual
+instincts and those that are inhibited in their aims, and it may be
+hoped that this distinction will not meet with too much resistance. But
+a detailed discussion of the question will not be out of place, even if
+it only repeats what has to a great extent already been said before.
+
+The development of the libido in children has made us acquainted with
+the first but also the best example of sexual instincts which are
+inhibited in their aims. All the feelings which a child has towards its
+parents and those who look after it pass by an easy transition into the
+wishes which give expression to the child's sexual tendencies. The child
+claims from these objects of its love all the signs of affection which
+it knows of; it wants to kiss them, touch them, and look at them; it is
+curious to see their genitals, and to be with them when they perform
+their intimate excremental functions; it promises to marry its mother or
+nurse--whatever it may understand by that; it proposes to itself to bear
+its father a child, etc. Direct observation, as well as the subsequent
+analytic investigation of the residue of childhood, leave no doubt as to
+the complete fusion of tender and jealous feelings and of sexual
+intentions, and show us in what a fundamental way the child makes the
+person it loves into the object of all its incompletely centred sexual
+tendencies.[70]
+
+This first configuration of the child's love, which in typical cases is
+co-ordinated with the Oedipus complex, succumbs, as we know, from the
+beginning of the period of latency onwards to a wave of repression. Such
+of it as is left over shows itself as a purely tender emotional tie,
+which relates to the same people, but is no longer to be described as
+'sexual'. Psycho-analysis, which illuminates the depths of mental life,
+has no difficulty in showing that the sexual ties of the earliest years
+of childhood also persist, though repressed and unconscious. It gives us
+courage to assert that wherever we come across a tender feeling it is
+the successor to a completely 'sensual' object tie with the person in
+question or rather with that person's prototype (or _imago_). It cannot
+indeed disclose to us without a special investigation whether in a given
+case this former complete sexual current still exists under repression
+or whether it has already been exhausted. To put it still more
+precisely: it is quite certain that it is still there as a form and
+possibility, and can always be charged with cathectic energy and put
+into activity again by means of regression; the only question is (and it
+cannot always be answered) what degree of cathexis and operative force
+it still has at the present moment. Equal care must be taken in this
+connection to avoid two sources of error--the Scylla of under-estimating
+the importance of the repressed unconscious, and the Charybdis of
+judging the normal entirely by the standards of the pathological.
+
+A psychology which will not or cannot penetrate the depths of what is
+repressed regards tender emotional ties as being invariably the
+expression of tendencies which have no sexual aim, even though they are
+derived from tendencies which have such an aim.[71]
+
+We are justified in saying that they have been diverted from these
+sexual aims, even though there is some difficulty in giving a
+representation of such a diversion of aim which will conform to the
+requirements of metapsychology. Moreover, those instincts which are
+inhibited in their aims always preserve some few of their original
+sexual aims; even an affectionate devotee, even a friend or an admirer,
+desires the physical proximity and the sight of the person who is now
+loved only in the 'Pauline' sense. If we choose, we may recognise in
+this diversion of aim a beginning of the _sublimation_ of the sexual
+instincts, or on the other hand we may fix the limits of sublimation at
+some more distant point. Those sexual instincts which are inhibited in
+their aims have a great functional advantage over those which are
+uninhibited. Since they are not capable of really complete
+satisfaction, they are especially adapted to create permanent ties;
+while those instincts which are directly sexual incur a loss of energy
+each time they are satisfied, and must wait to be renewed by a fresh
+accumulation of sexual libido, so that meanwhile the object may have
+been changed. The inhibited instincts are capable of any degree of
+admixture with the uninhibited; they can be transformed back into them,
+just as they arose out of them. It is well known how easily erotic
+wishes develop out of emotional relations of a friendly character, based
+upon appreciation and admiration, (compare Molière's 'Embrassez-moi pour
+l'amour du grec'), between a master and a pupil, between a performer and
+a delighted listener, and especially in the case of women. In fact the
+growth of emotional ties of this kind, with their purposeless
+beginnings, provides a much frequented pathway to sexual object-choice.
+Pfister, in his _Frömmigkeit des Grafen von Zinzendorf_,[72] has given
+an extremely clear and certainly not an isolated example of how easily
+even an intense religious tie can revert to ardent sexual excitement. On
+the other hand it is also very usual for directly sexual tendencies,
+short-lived in themselves, to be transformed into a lasting and purely
+tender tie; and the consolidation of a passionate love marriage rests
+to a large extent upon this process.
+
+We shall naturally not be surprised to hear that the sexual tendencies
+that are inhibited in their aims arise out of the directly sexual ones
+when inner or outer obstacles make the sexual aims unattainable. The
+repression during the period of latency is an inner obstacle of this
+kind--or rather one which has become inner. We have assumed that the
+father of the primal horde owing to his sexual intolerance compelled all
+his sons to be abstinent, and thus forced them into ties that were
+inhibited in their aims, while he reserved for himself freedom of sexual
+enjoyment and in this way remained without ties. All the ties upon which
+a group depends are of the character of instincts that are inhibited in
+their aims. But here we have approached the discussion of a new subject,
+which deals with the relation between directly sexual instincts and the
+formation of groups.
+
+D. The last two remarks will have prepared us for finding that directly
+sexual tendencies are unfavourable to the formation of groups. In the
+history of the development of the family there have also, it is true,
+been group relations of sexual love (group marriages); but the more
+important sexual love became for the ego, and the more it developed the
+characteristics of being in love, the more urgently it required to be
+limited to two people--_una cum uno_--as is prescribed by the nature of
+the genital aim. Polygamous inclinations had to be content to find
+satisfaction in a succession of changing objects.
+
+Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so
+far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the
+herd instinct, the group feeling. The more they are in love, the more
+completely they suffice for each other. The rejection of the group's
+influence is manifested in the shape of a sense of shame. The extremely
+violent feelings of jealousy are summoned up in order to protect the
+sexual object-choice from being encroached upon by a group tie. It is
+only when the tender, that is, the personal, factor of a love relation
+gives place entirely to the sensual one, that it is possible for two
+people to have sexual intercourse in the presence of others or for there
+to be simultaneous sexual acts in a group as occurs at an orgy. But at
+that point a regression has taken place to an early stage in sexual
+relations, at which being in love as yet played no part, and all sexual
+objects were judged to be of equal value, somewhat in the sense of
+Bernard Shaw's malicious aphorism to the effect that being in love means
+greatly exaggerating the difference between one woman and another.
+
+There are abundant indications that being in love only made its
+appearance late on in the sexual relations between men and women; so
+that the opposition between sexual love and group ties is also a late
+development. Now it may seem as though this assumption were incompatible
+with our myth of the primal family. For it was after all by their love
+for their mothers and sisters that the troop of brothers was, as we have
+supposed, driven to parricide; and it is difficult to imagine this love
+as being anything but unbroken and primitive--that is, as an intimate
+union of the tender and the sensual. But further consideration resolves
+this objection into a confirmation. One of the reactions to the
+parricide was after all the institution of totemistic exogamy; the
+prohibition of any sexual relation with those women of the family who
+had been tenderly loved since childhood. In this way a wedge was driven
+in between a man's tender and sensual feelings, one still firmly fixed
+in his erotic life to-day.[73] As a result of this exogamy the sensual
+needs of men had to be satisfied with strange and unloved women.
+
+In the great artificial groups, the church and the army, there is no
+room for woman as a sexual object. The love relation between men and
+women remains outside these organisations. Even where groups are formed
+which are composed of both men and women the distinction between the
+sexes plays no part. There is scarcely any sense in asking whether the
+libido which keeps groups together is of a homosexual or of a
+heterosexual nature, for it is not differentiated according to the
+sexes, and particularly shows a complete disregard for the aims of the
+genital organisation of the libido.
+
+Even in a person who has in other respects become absorbed in a group
+the directly sexual tendencies preserve a little of his individual
+activity. If they become too strong they disintegrate every group
+formation. The Catholic Church had the best of motives for recommending
+its followers to remain unmarried and for imposing celibacy upon its
+priests; but falling in love has often driven even priests to leave the
+church. In the same way love for women breaks through the group ties of
+race, of national separation, and of the social class system, and it
+thus produces important effects as a factor in civilization. It seems
+certain that homosexual love is far more compatible with group ties,
+even when it takes the shape of uninhibited sexual tendencies--a
+remarkable fact, the explanation of which might carry us far.
+
+The psycho-analytic investigation of the psycho-neuroses has taught us
+that their symptoms are to be traced back to directly sexual tendencies
+which are repressed but still remain active. We can complete this
+formula by adding to it: or, to tendencies inhibited in their aims,
+whose inhibition has not been entirely successful or has made room for
+a return to the repressed sexual aim. It is in accordance with this that
+a neurosis should make its victim asocial and should remove him from the
+usual group formations. It may be said that a neurosis has the same
+disintegrating effect upon a group as being in love. On the other hand
+it appears that where a powerful impetus has been given to group
+formation, neuroses may diminish and at all events temporarily
+disappear. Justifiable attempts have also been made to turn this
+antagonism between neuroses and group formation to therapeutic account.
+Even those who do not regret the disappearance of religious illusions
+from the civilized world of to-day will admit that so long as they were
+in force they offered those who were bound by them the most powerful
+protection against the danger of neurosis. Nor is it hard to discern in
+all the ties with mystico-religious or philosophico-religious sects and
+communities the manifestation of distorted cures of all kinds of
+neuroses. All of this is bound up with the contrast between directly
+sexual tendencies and those which are inhibited in their aims.
+
+If he is left to himself, a neurotic is obliged to replace by his own
+symptom formations the great group formations from which he is excluded.
+He creates his own world of imagination for himself, his religion, his
+own system of delusions, and thus recapitulates the institutions of
+humanity in a distorted way which is clear evidence of the dominating
+part played by the directly sexual tendencies.[74]
+
+E. In conclusion, we will add a comparative estimate, from the
+standpoint of the libido theory, of the states with which we have been
+concerned, of being in love, of hypnosis, of group formation, and of the
+neurosis.
+
+_Being in love_ is based upon the simultaneous presence of directly
+sexual tendencies and of sexual tendencies that are inhibited in their
+aims, so that the object draws a part of the narcissistic ego-libido to
+itself. It is a condition in which there is only room for the ego and
+the object.
+
+_Hypnosis_ resembles being in love in being limited to these two
+persons, but it is based entirely upon sexual tendencies that are
+inhibited in their aims and substitutes the object for the ego ideal.
+
+_The group_ multiplies this process; it agrees with hypnosis in the
+nature of the instincts which hold it together, and in the replacement
+of the ego ideal by the object; but to this it adds identification with
+other individuals, which was perhaps originally made possible by their
+having the same relation to the object.
+
+Both states, hypnosis and group formation, are an inherited deposit from
+the phylogenesis of the human libido--hypnosis in the form of a
+predisposition, and the group, besides this, as a direct survival. The
+replacement of the directly sexual tendencies by those that are
+inhibited in their aims promotes in both states a separation between the
+ego and the ego ideal, a separation with which a beginning has already
+been made in the state of being in love.
+
+_The neurosis_ stands outside this series. It also is based upon a
+peculiarity in the development of the human libido--the twice repeated
+start made by the directly sexual function, with an intervening period
+of latency.[75] To this extent it resembles hypnosis and group formation
+in having the character of a regression, which is absent from being in
+love. It makes its appearance wherever the advance from directly sexual
+instincts to those that are inhibited in their aims has not been
+completely successful; and it represents a _conflict_ between those
+instincts which have been received into the ego after having passed
+through this development and those portions of the same instincts which,
+like other instinctive desires that have been completely repressed,
+strive, from the repressed unconscious, to attain direct satisfaction.
+The neurosis is extraordinarily rich in content, for it embraces all
+possible relations between the ego and the object--both those in which
+the object is retained and others in which it is abandoned or erected
+inside the ego itself--and also the conflicting relations between the
+ego and its ego ideal.