Crowds and Party · 第 66 页

to the more passive, receiving “suggestibility” (die Suggerierbarkeit), Freud takes a group process and makes it into an attribute of an individual.⁸⁹

Looking “behind the shelter, the screen, of suggestion,” Freud finds love. Group ties are libidinal ties. The individual gives up his distinctiveness to the group because he wants to be in harmony with its members. Given the violent, disruptive, and volatile crowds Le Bon describes, this is a very strange move. Freud justifies it by faulting Le Bon for paying insufficient attention to the leader and by attending himself to groups that crowd theory typically ignores: the church and the army. This enables Freud to oedipalize the crowd, to enclose it into the oedipal relationships crucial to his theory of individual psychology. Church and army are each headed by a leader (Christ, commander) “who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love.” The illusion of equal love is absolutely essential, Freud tells us. Everything depends on it. Christ stands in relation to the individuals in the church as an elder brother or “father surrogate.” Because of the equality of members—each shares equally in Christ’s love— the church is like a family. Members call each other brother: “the tie which unites each individual to Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one another.”⁹⁰ The army is basically the same, with the fundamental difference being that this familial structure is repeated in a hierarchical fashion (sections, units, squadrons, etc.). What matters here to Freud is the double nature of the libidinal tie of the group: individual to leader, individual to individual. Group ties have to be libidinal if they are to be strong enough to limit the narcissism that Freud attributes to the individual.

Yet the forces Freud describes exceed the structure in which he wants to place them. He has been attempting to remedy the problem of the circularity of suggestion by appealing to libido. To cement his case, he considers the complicating example of panic (as discussed by another crowd theorist, William McDougall). On the one hand, panic “means the disintegration of the group.” On the other, it is an intensification of affect through contagion. This produces the paradox that what binds unbinds. Freud thinks that understanding group ties libidinally solves the problem insofar as panic is analogous to anxiety and is thus manifest because of an increase in danger or a cessation of emotional ties. Borch-Jacobsen points out the resulting contortions this results in for Freud:

the disappearance of the libidinal-political bond that ensured the cohesion of the group does not liberate narcissistic egos in a pure and simple unbonding. In a way, it liberates nothing at all, and especially not autonomous subjects (individuals), since panic consists precisely in an unmasterable overflowing of ego by way of (affects of) others; or, put somewhat differently, panic consists in a mimetic-contagious epidemic narcissism. The example of panic is thus not the counter-example of the group, and Freud’s argument can easily be turned around: by making panic the exemplary example of individual psychology, a paradoxical result is achieved—namely, that narcissism does away with itself in one of its most striking manifestations, since panic is tantamount to a gaping, more or less bewildered opening toward others.⁹¹

Another way to describe this same contortion is to note that it results from Freud’s structuring of process. Panic is an affective force, a flow that disrupts as it moves. It is not the counterexample to the group or crowd because it is itself unleashed as a dispersion of crowd intensity. The problem Freud encounters is the result of his attempt to enclose this intensity in the form of the individual. Freud focuses on the scattered elements rather than the common dynamic that scatters them.

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