{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":63,"pdf_page":62,"physical_index":62,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"28f17194dd64cde8f5e656846f8714a110a2b27351c59b33120a00107ec2dadc"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"“Aprovisional beingformed ofheterogeneous elements”\n\nFreud quotes extensively from The Crowd. Two ideas significant for Le Bon’s crowd concept appear in the first passage Freud lifts: the crowd as a source of new feelings, thoughts, and ideas; and the crowd as the novel consistency of a provisional being. First, individuals in a group are\n\nin the possession of a sort of collective mind that makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual one of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group.\n\nSecond, the psychological group is a\n\nprovisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.<sup>77</sup>\n\nFreud doesn’t question the emergence of previously inexistent ideas and feelings. Nor does he challenge the notion of a new, provisional being. He fully assumes the idea that in a group, individuals combine into a temporary unity, a collectivity that did not exist prior to this combining. Freud wants to know what unites people in a crowd, what the character of the ties that bind them together is.\n\nLe Bon had not concerned himself with what unites people in a crowd because he begins from the fact of collectivity—the provisional being of the crowd—seeking to understand its effects. He thus tries to explain why actions and affects not previously possessed by individuals emerge in a crowd.<sup>78</sup> Freud recounts Le Bon’s three explanations. The first is that a crowd feels itself to have enormous power. This feeling of invincibility makes a person less likely to hold himself in check which means that he yields to instincts he would otherwise restrain. Freud writes this off as unimportant: of course our deepest selves lack responsibility; the crowd enables the individual to “throw off repressions.”<sup>79</sup> Le Bon is mistaken in taking the sentiment of invincible power as a cause for the appearance of something new—nothing new is appearing. Rather, the impulses repressed in the unconscious have simply become free to manifest themselves. As Freud notes, his disagreement with Le Bon here stems from their differing accounts of the unconscious. Le Bon’s “racial mind” lacks the dimension of the “unconscious repressed” conceptualized by psychoanalysis, so for him the crowd does give rise to something new, something that cannot be reduced to the substratum of hereditary influences. Freud’s objection thus treats the dynamic Le Bon describes as a structure, shifting between the two senses of “unconscious” such that behavior in a crowd manifests what is contained in the human mind.\n\n63","previous_page":62,"next_page":64}