{"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":67,"pdf_page":66,"physical_index":66,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0dd6e25a2f5ffc4a5869c7d0f40847526437da55111cfe4f915dfe836de3fa68"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"There are further challenges Freud encounters as he deploys psychoanalysis against crowd theory and explains group ties as a reinforcing combination of aim-inhibited object love and mutual identification. At key points he illustrates his argument by appealing to girls and women: the hysterical sympathetic identification of boarding school girls longing for secret love affairs and the “troop of women and girls” crowded around a singer or pianist with whom they are all in love. Le Bon’s fierce and powerful crowds ready “to pillage a palace, or to die in defense of a stronghold or a barricade” are diminished and truncated, enclosed in the bourgeois sites of boarding school and concert hall, the ferocity of collective power turned inward as identification through love for a shared object. Collective desire becomes nothing but common frustration.\n\nBorch-Jacobsen explores Freud’s discussion of the imbrication of identification and object love, drawing out the strange loops in Freud’s efforts to shore up an individual ego the emergence of which perpetually eludes him. Freud presents a graphic representation of these loops at the close of chapter eight. I limit myself here to noting Freud’s acknowledgement that “We cannot for long enjoy the illusion that we have solved the riddle of the group with this formula.”<sup>92</sup> He recognizes that his discussion of church and army unfairly emphasizes the leader and keeps “the other factor of mutual suggestion too much in the background.”<sup>93</sup> And he wonders whether it would have been simpler, more modest, just to accept the idea of a herd instinct (he invokes Wilfred Trotter, Instincts ofthe Herd in War and Peace, 1916). But he concludes no. There’s no such thing as a primary herd instinct. What’s at work is the more complex structure he already outlined, the one where multiple individuals identify with one another in their love for the same object. The reason the herd instinct doesn’t explain groups is that it leaves no room for the leader, which Freud has already asserted to be crucial. The leader is necessary because he is that point in relation to which all the others are equal to one another. The members assert their equality to one another in light of the leader’s superiority to them all. Freud presents the demand for equality as a reaction-formation arising out of envy; if one can’t have the special relation to the leader, no other shall either. The equality of the crowd is thus a kind of negative solidarity of rivals. Freud substitutes for the herd instinct a horde. Man is a horde animal, “an individual creature in a horde led by a chief.”<sup>94</sup>\n\nFor Freud the primal horde is the originary form that the crowd revives. He notes that the dynamics associated with crowds—“the dwindling of the conscious individual personality, the focusing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction, the predominance of the affective side of the mind and of unconscious psychical life”—are contained in his idea of the primal horde.<sup>95</sup> Freud thereby morphs crowd processes into a closed, mythic, ur-form of sociality. Group behavior corresponds to a regression to a primitive mental state.\n\nAccording to Freud’s myth of the primal horde, because of the strong emotional ties connecting the group, “there was only a common will, there were no single ones.”<sup>96</sup>\n\n67","previous_page":66,"next_page":68}