Crowds and Party · 第 59 页

The Unconscious Is a Crowd

In Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego (1921), Freud concerns himself with man as a member, man in his belonging to: how is it that that to which man belongs, belongs to him? These concerns lead Freud to discuss problems of identification, attachment, and the intensification of affect.

Freud’s turn to group psychology brings psychoanalysis into dialogue with crowd theory, a field of work emerging in late nineteenth-century social science out of discussions in biology, criminology, psychology, and sociology and out of fears incited by the revolutionary crowds of the Paris Commune of 1871.⁴⁸ Crowd theorists wanted to understand what they saw as the dangerous irrationality of the crowd, why people in large groups seemed to become more emotional, instinctual, and even primitive. In predisciplinary or even interdisciplinary style, crowd theorists used evolution to rank human civilizations, hypnosis to explain imitation in groups, and medicine to diagnose crowd pathology.⁴⁹ At the time of Freud’s intervention, crowd theory was well established and widely accepted. Freud enters the conversation as a way to expand the influence of the newer field of psychoanalysis by demonstrating how psychoanalysis better accounts for group behavior.⁵⁰

While he engages several different crowd theorists, Freud relies most heavily on the work of Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon was a pessimistic conservative who presented his racist, elitist, and misogynist ideas as scientific discoveries.⁵¹ His immensely popular 1895 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, consolidated literary and historical accounts of the crowd from Émile Zola and Hyppolite Taine with work on criminal crowds from Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde.⁵² The Crowd announced to its readers that they were entering an Era of Crowds (capitalization in the original). It instructed them to fear it. It was certainly possible, Le Bon warned, “that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilization, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society.”⁵³ The masses were now in charge and the most likely result

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