Crowds and Party · 第 65 页

To reiterate, insofar as Le Bon conceives the crowd in terms of a dynamic wherein energies are concentrated in a single direction, he sees the force of crowds expressed in races, castes, classes, nations, juries, parties, and parliamentary assemblies. All these can override individual judgment and opinion, eliciting effects that exceed what an individual would rationally decide to do on his own. These are psychological crowds where “crowd” names the novel consistency temporarily formed from interlinked processes. The last third of The Crowd examines the particular characteristics that arise when different collectivities are “transformed into a crowd under the influences of the proper exciting causes.”⁸⁶ Most commentators on Le Bon miss this transformative dimension of Le Bon’s crowd concept. They criticize him for blurring the boundaries of the crowd such that there is no difference between juries and mobs when they should commend him for drawing out the dynamics shaping collectivities. Freud doesn’t miss this point because he doesn’t share the sociologists’ concern with classifying groups. His interest is in establishing the reputation of psychoanalysis by demonstrating its explanatory power. For Freud, whether an individual is physically in a group—in the crowd or in an institution—is no different from whether the group manifests itself in the individual—as with the nation or race. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the individual in a crowd and subject to its emergent dynamics is just another instance of the individual as such, a fragile ego grappling with unevenly repressed desires and drives.

From Group Psychology to Individual Psychology … and Back

Although Freud praises the brilliance of Le Bon’s depiction of the group mind, he’s not satisfied with Le Bon’s discussion of what ties the group together. This is where Freud thinks that psychoanalysis can contribute to crowd psychology. It can explain the desires and instincts that underlie group cohesion instead of taking for granted the primacy of an instinct to sociality. The liability to affect and intellectual inhibition that alters the individual in a crowd, Freud argues, should not be attributed to number, to a quantity of people. Instead, it can be explained with basic psychoanalytic concepts. Moving from many to one, Freud’s explanation encloses the directed intensities of Le Bon’s crowd into an individual unconscious. Collective desire is reduced to an amplification of frustrated individual desire. Forces associated with the crowd become unconscious processes within an individual. Freud works to prevent these processes from rupturing the individual, but his efforts at containment never quite succeed, held in place, ultimately, through the reassertion of the “scientific myth” of the primal horde.

In his initial step toward enclosure, Freud criticizes the authorities on group psychology for appealing to “suggestion” in their attempts to understand crowd processes such as imitation and contagion, in other words, “influence without logical foundation.”⁸⁷ Freud finds these accounts of suggestion circular: they rely on the idea that suggestibility is a fundamental mental fact (ein weiter nicht reduzierbares Urphänomen). As Borch-Jacobsen writes, “when Freud rises up against the tyranny of suggestion, he is of course militating in favor of the autonomy of the individual subject.”⁸⁸ Already in his shift from the active process of “suggestion” (die Suggestion)

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