Crowds and Party · 第 68 页

Freud thus posits that the oldest psychology is group psychology. Individual psychology comes out of it “by a gradual process which may still, perhaps, be described as incomplete.”⁹⁷ But he quickly corrects himself, making individual and group psychology co-primary. Why? Because of the leader, the free, strong, and willful father of the horde. This reintroduces the problem of individual psychology at another level: not just where this primal father comes from but how a member can become a leader. “There must therefore be a possibility of transforming group psychology into individual psychology”—which is precisely Freud’s own task in Group Psychology.⁹⁸ But his answer is nearly nonsensical. It turns back in on itself by suggesting that the sons were initially individuals forced by the primal father’s sexual jealousy into group psychology, which would mean that individual psychology comes first. And, it posits a successor who will be allowed access to women, breaking his libidinal ties to the group. Succession is force in reverse, as if the sons in the horde retained their initial individual desires rather than merging them in group psychology. Freud uses the myth to hold in place and conceal the disruption of the individual form of psychic structure by crowd processes. The myth narrates the processes together in a story where division is forced no less than connection and where the affective dynamics that disrupt are the same as those that bind.

In a postscript to Group Psychology, as if compelled to make his myth itself more dynamic, Freud supplements his abbreviated discussion of the horde. He brings in the patricidal story from Totem and Taboo, which lets him add dissatisfaction, new developments, breakdown, and compensation to the myth. Freud does so in order to provide another origin for, a mythic myth of, the emergence of the individual from the group.

In the elaborated myth, the first to break free of the group is the poet. The poet disguises the truth of the slaying of the father, putting a hero in the place of the crowd (present in fairy tales as the small animals and insects who help the hero accomplish his tasks). By creating the hero myth, the poet gives the group an idealized individual with whom each can identify. Each can imagine himself as the hero, acting alone and abolishing the one who oppresses them all. The poet, an imaginary figure of imagining, writes the individual into being, much as Freud himself does when he asserts the primacy of the father of the horde.

The figures of leader and poet take the place of the crowd, becoming themselves models of subjectivity in its individuated form. As I mentioned, Freud finds Le Bon’s discussion of the leader insufficient. In The Crowd, Le Bon doesn’t talk about leaders until midway through the text. When he does, he treats the leader as the nucleus of will around which a crowd forms, what we could also express in Lacanese as an objectcause of crowd desire. The crowd doesn’t desire the leader; the leader incites and directs the desire of the crowd. The leader is an instigator, an agitator whose intensity inspires the crowd and concentrates its attention. And even as Le Bon allows for the rare, great leaders of history, those whose will is so powerful and enduring that “nothing resists it; neither nature, gods nor man,” he focuses primarily on the fact that the leader begins as one of the led and that he is led himself, hypnotized by the idea as Robespierre was by Rousseau.⁹⁹ The idea possesses the leader such that nothing else exists for him, which explains why leaders of the crowd “are recruited from the ranks of the morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.” For Le Bon, the leader concentrates and transmits an idea, turning it into a cause of action. Indeed, he considers the possibility that mass periodicals may even be replacing the leader in that they, too, can simplify, consolidate, and transmit ideas.

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