48 The German title refers to Massenpsychologie. The English “group” could have been translated as “mass” or as “crowd.” Readings of the text in its relation to crowd theory vary. Serge Moscovici argues that Freud provided analytic rigor to crowd theory (The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise of Mass Psychology, trans. J. C. Whitehouse, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Daniel Pick argues for its relevance to interrogating nationalism and national identity (“Freud’s Group Psychology and the History ofthe Crowd,” History Workshop Journal 40, Autumn 1995, 39–61); Ernesto Laclau reads Freud as unifying a dualism in crowd theory (On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2007). Laclau emphasizes the notion of identification in Freud but fails to associate it with Freud’s enclosing ofthe crowd in the individual.
49 Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981, 43–44.
50 J. S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 242.
51 Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic, London: Sage Publications, 1975; Barrows, 162–66.
52 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001. Widely translated and reprinted, The Crowd has been credited as an originating text for social psychology. See Robert A. Nye, “Two Paths to a Psychology of Social Action: Gustave Le Bon and Georges Sorel,” Journal of Modern History 45: 3, September 1973, 411–38.
53 Le Bon, The Crowd, 10.
54 This point and the following are indebted to Barrows, Distorting Mirrors.
55 Le Bon, The Crowd, 8–9.
56 Ibid., 15.
57 Ibid., 16.
58 Jaap Van Ginneken, “The 1985 Debate on the Origins of Crowd Psychology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 21:4, Oct. 1985, 375–382; McClelland, 163-173; Barrows, 137–88.
59 See also Christian Borch and Britta Timm Knudsen, “Postmodern crowds: re-inventing crowd thinking,” introduction to a special issue ofDistinktion: Scandanavian Journal ofSocial Theory 14: 2, August 2013, 109– 13.
60 Le Bon, The Crowd, 4.
61 Ibid., 10, 73.
62 McClelland, 168. This is another point Le Bon steals from Sighele.
63 Le Bon, The Crowd, 8.
64 Ibid., 17.
65 Ibid., 13. Tarde theorizes the same phenomena under the heading of“imitation.”
66 In an analysis ofthe rise of“mass” as a sociological category in France, Stefan Jonsson identifies four (loose and overlapping) moments: mass as innumerable individuals, mass as the violent and criminal mob of the poor, mass as organized movement of workers, and, finally, mass as political sickness, the madness of all collectivity. See “The Invention of the Masses: The Crowd in French Culture from the Revolution to the Commune,” Crowds, 47–75. Eugene E. Leach recounts crowd psychology in the US, tracing the reception of the work of Le Bon and Tarde as well as the work of Boris Sidis, “America’s only original crowd psychologist,” a student of William James who linked the “mob-self” to the highly suggestible, immoral, will-less, and de-individuated “sub-waking self.” See “‘Mental Epidemics’: Crowd Psychology and American Culture, 1890–1940,” American Studies 33: 1, Spring 1992, 5–29.
67 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Standard Edition, New York: W. W. Norton, 1990, 19.
68 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. He writes, “the cleavage or division ofthe subject that psychoanalysis keeps talking about takes place against the background of unity, a unitary subject,” 6. Borch-Jacobsen presents his account as an alternative to
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