Rather than conceiving the leader as hypnotized, Freud treats the leader as hypnotist: “the hypnotist asserts that he is in possession of a mysterious power that robs the subject of his own will; or, which is the same thing, the subject believes it of him.”<sup>100</sup> He argues further that the very uncanniness of hypnosis suggests something familiar but repressed, whether that of the child’s relation to his parents or of the primal horde to the primal father. Freud thereby transfers a certain passivity in Le Bon’s leader—fascination with the idea—to the crowd. The leader becomes active in their place. As primal father, the leader acquires a freedom, independence, and intellectual capacity altogether missing in Le Bon even as he bears traces of the excesses of the crowd in his own furious enjoyment. Freud emphasizes that the father of the horde needs no reinforcement from others. Le Bon makes the leader himself a follower, a conduit for the natural instincts of a crowd no longer obedient to governmental authority.
Just as Freud transposes the activity of the crowd onto the leader, so too does he transfer the crowd’s creativity to the poet. Early in Group Psychology he acknowledges the genius of groups “as is shown above all by language itself, as well as by folk-song, folklore and the like.”<sup>101</sup> Le Bon had credited crowds with the creation of language. By the end of Group Psychology, creativity is the province of the individual, the singular poet who invents the heroic myth of the slaying of the father.
Freud presents psychoanalysis as capable of explaining aspects of behavior in groups central to crowd theory. Where crowd theorists see numbers, contagion, and suggestion as innovating, as producing actions that are unexpected and uncontrollable, Freud finds the explicable patterns of individual psychology: nothing new here, except Freud’s own findings. The collective subjectivity of Le Bon’s powerful, sovereign, often criminal and sometimes heroic crowd is incorporated in an individual figured as leader or poet, and the individual form becomes itself the site of struggling desires, drives, ideals, and anxieties, organic processes localized at best in a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements. So rather than explaining the crowd, Freud encloses it, fragilely and awkwardly. Where there were many, there appears one. Psychoanalysis’s attempt to account for collective desire condenses and displaces it into the individual form. Perhaps surprisingly, we learn more about collective subjectivity from the notorious Le Bon than we do from Freud.
Conclusion
If the subject is interpellated as an individual, the strengths of many become the imaginary attributes of one. The individual appears as the locus of a capacity for innovation and interruption that is only ever an effect of collectivities. If bourgeois ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, as we learn from Althusser, these conditions will be represented repeatedly as individual matters of individual preference and choice, belief, and circumstance. The contradictions constitutive of capitalist relations will exist side by side, appearing as so many dreams or neuroses. Collectivity, in turn, will be figured derivatively, in the shadow of the individual such that the subjectivity it evinces fails to appear as an effect of a subject. Rather than as the dynamic force of the crowd, desire appears as personal longing. Rather than an inescapable circuit of activity, drive appears as addiction. While the subject of psychoanalysis is not the reasonable, self-aware subject of liberalism, when the unconscious is rendered as that of an individual, psychoanalysis is drafted into its service as covert support for an individuated subjectivity conceived in terms of a rational and knowable will. Recognizing the collective as a subject becomes all the more challenging because the terms of what counts as the act of a subject are truncated and distorted. Rather than heterogeneous, conflictual, temporary, unbounded, and in need of support from objects and figures that exceed it, the subject as individual is impossibly, fantastically independent and enduring. The crowd becomes unconscious again in the continued operation of enclosure effected by the individual form.
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