Crowds and Party · 第 64 页

More interesting to Freud is the second explanation Le Bon provides for the change effected by crowds: contagion. Contagion is kin to hypnosis in that it induces people to act in unexpected ways. Freud quotes Le Bon: “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.”⁸⁰ The third is suggestion. Freud fills the next page with Le Bon’s description of the “magnetic influence given out by the group,” the vanishing of conscious personality and loss of will, “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.”⁸¹ Freud notes an asymmetry in Le Bon’s account. Contagion refers to members’ effects on each other. Suggestion, particularly when understood in terms of hypnosis, implies something else entirely, the operation of a hierarchical relation of influence. Who is the hypnotist? I should add here that even today nearly everyone who writes about crowds describes crowds in terms of contagion and suggestion. We see the language of contagion, for instance, in discussions of networked media as well as in depictions of the movements, protests, occupations, and riots erupting in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Momentarily setting aside the matter of the hypnotist (just as he did the question of group ties), Freud includes another long quote from Le Bon:

by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. 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.⁸²

Freud approves, commending not just Le Bon’s “identification of the group mind with the mind of primitive people” but also noting the convergence between crowd theory and psychoanalysis. What crowd theory has found in crowds, psychoanalysis has observed “in the unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics.”⁸³ The processes that Le Bon describes as changing the man in the crowd are for Freud indications of the crowd already in the man. He then repeats multiple elements of LeBon’s description, saying that the group is changeable, irritable, impulsive, credulous, incapable of persevering, desirous, intolerant of delays in the satisfaction of its desire, open to influence and that it thinks in images. “It has a sense of omnipotence;” “no personal interest, not even that of self-preservation, can make itself felt.”⁸⁴ The group is inclined to extremes, lacks a critical faculty and respects force. It has a thirst for obedience: “It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters.”⁸⁵ Groups demand illusions. Distinctions between truth and falsity matter little. Words function more magically than rationally. A group “knows neither doubt nor certainty,” a phenomenon of unconscious life that Freud reminds his readers he has already discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams.

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