A very interesting statement of one of our contemporaries is that any person, to one degree or another, is both a psychologist and a philosopher - they say, life forces him to. On the one hand, the main driving force of every person is the craving for knowledge, the desire to reach certain social heights, the desire to be wise in any everyday situations - and this is the philosophy of life. Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego by Sigmund Freud (notion reading list .TXT) 📖
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[1] ['Group' is used throughout this translation as equivalent to the rather more comprehensive German 'Masse'. The author uses this latter word to render both McDougall's 'group', and also Le Bon's 'foule', which would more naturally be translated 'crowd' in English. For the sake of uniformity, however, 'group' has been preferred in this case as well, and has been substituted for 'crowd' even in the extracts from the English translation of Le Bon.—Translator..]
[2] The Crowd: a Study of the Popular Mind. Fisher Unwin 12th. Impression, 1920.
[3] [See footnote page 1.]
[4] [References are to the English translation.—Translator.]
[5] [The German translation of Le Bon, quoted by the author, reads 'bewusster'; the English translation has 'unconscious'; and the original French text 'inconscients'.—Translator.]
[6] [The English translation reads 'which we ourselves ignore'—a misunderstanding of the French word 'ignorées'.—Translator.]
[7] There is some difference between Le Bon's view and ours owing to his concept of the unconscious not quite coinciding with the one adopted by psycho-analysis. Le Bon's unconscious more especially contains the most deeply buried features of the racial mind, which as a matter of fact lies outside the scope of psycho-analysis. We do not fail to recognize, indeed, that the ego's nucleus, which comprises the 'archaic inheritance' of the human mind, is unconscious; but in addition to this we distinguish the 'unconscious repressed', which arose from a portion of that inheritance. This concept of the repressed is not to be found in Le Bon.
[8] Compare Schiller's couplet:
Jeder, sieht man ihn einzeln, ist leidlich klug und verständig; Sind sie in corpore, gleich wird euch ein Dummkopf daraus. [Everyone, seen by himself, is passably shrewd and discerning; When they're in corpore, then straightway you'll find he's an ass.][9] 'Unconscious' is used here correctly by Le Bon in the descriptive sense, where it does not only mean the 'repressed'.
[10] Compare Totem und Tabu, III., 'Animismus, Magie, und Allmacht der Gedanken.' [Totem and Taboo. New York, Moffat, 1918. London, Kegan Paul, 1919.]
[11] [See footnote p. 69.]
[12] In the interpretation of dreams, to which, indeed, we owe our best knowledge of unconscious mental life, we follow a technical rule of disregarding doubt and uncertainty in the narrative of the dream, and of treating every element of the manifest dream as being quite certain. We attribute doubt and uncertainty to the influence of the censorship to which the dream-work is subjected, and we assume that the primary dream-thoughts are not acquainted with doubt and uncertainty as critical processes. They may naturally be present, like everything else, as part of the content of the day's residue which leads to the dream. (See Die Traumdeutung, 6. Auflage, 1921, S. 386. [The Interpretation of Dreams. Allen and Unwin, 3rd. Edition, 1913, p. 409.])
[13] The same extreme and unmeasured intensification of every emotion is also a feature of the affective life of children, and it is present as well in dream life. Thanks to the isolation of the single emotions in the unconscious, a slight annoyance during the day will express itself in a dream as a wish for the offending person's death, or a breath of temptation may give the impetus to the portrayal in the dream of a criminal action. Hanns Sachs has made an appropriate remark on this point: 'If we try to discover in consciousness all that the dream has made known to us of its bearing upon the present (upon reality), we need not be surprised that what we saw as a monster under the microscope of analysis now reappears as an infusorium.' (Die Traumdeutung, S. 457. [Translation p. 493.])
[14] In young children, for instance, ambivalent emotional attitudes towards those who are nearest to them exist side by side for a long time, without either of them interfering with the expression of the other and contrary one. If eventually a conflict breaks out between the two, it often settled by the child making a change of object and displacing one of the ambivalent emotions on to a substitute. The history of the development of a neurosis in an adult will also show that a suppressed emotion may frequently persist for a long time in unconscious or even in conscious phantasies, the content of which naturally runs directly counter to some predominant tendency, and yet that this antagonism does not result in any proceedings on the part of the ego against what it has repudiated. The phantasy is tolerated for quite a long time, until suddenly one day, usually as a result of an increase in the affective cathexis [see footnote page 48] of the phantasy, a conflict breaks out between it and the ego with all the usual consequences. In the process of a child's development into a mature adult there is a more and more extensive integration of its personality, a co-ordination of the separate instinctive feelings and desires which have grown up in him independently of one another. The analogous process in the domain of sexual life has long been known to us as the co-ordination of all the sexual instincts into a definitive genital organisation. (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905. [Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory. Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 7, 1910.]) Moreover, that the unification of the ego is liable to the same interferences as that of the libido is shown by numerous familiar instances, such as that of men of science who have preserved their faith in the Bible, and the like.
[15] See Totem and Tabu.
[16] [See footnote p. 48.]
[17] B. Kraškovič jun.: Die Psychologie der Kollektivitäten. Translated [into German] from the Croatian by Siegmund von Posavec. Vukovar, 1915. See the body of the work as well as the bibliography.
[18] See Walter Moede: 'Die Massen-und Sozialpsychologie im kritischen Überblick.' Meumann and Scheibner's Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und experimentelle Pädagogik. 1915, XVI.
[19] Cambridge University Press, 1920.
[20] Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. Fisher Unwin, 1916.
[21] Brugeilles: 'L'essence du phénomèna social: la suggestion.' Revue philosophique, 1913, XXV.
[22] Konrad Richter: 'Der deutsche S. Christoph.' Berlin, 1896, Acta Germanica, V, I.
[23] [Literally:"Christopher bore Christ; Christ bore the whole world; Say, where did Christopher then put his foot?']
[24] Thus, McDougall: 'A Note on Suggestion.' Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, 1920, Vol. I, No. I.
[25] Nachmansohn: 'Freuds Libidotheorie verglichen mit der Eroslehre Platos'. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 1915, Bd. III; Pfister: 'Plato als Vorläufer der Psychoanalyse', ibid., 1921, Bd. VII. ['Plato: a Fore-Runner of Psycho-Analysis'. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1922, Vol. III.]
[26] 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'
[27] [An idiom meaning 'for their sake'. Literally: 'for love of them'.—Translator.]
[28] An objection will justly be raised against this conception of the libidinal [see next foot-note] structure of an army on the ground that no place has been found in it for such ideas as those of one's country, of national glory, etc., which are of such importance in holding an army together. The answer is that that is a different instance of a group tie, and no longer such a simple one; for the examples of great generals, like Caesar, Wallenstein, or Napoleon, show that such ideas are not indispensable to the existence of an army. We shall presently touch upon the possibility of a leading idea being substituted for a leader and upon the relations between the two. The neglect of this libidinal factor in an army, even when it is not the only factor operative, seems to be not merely a theoretical omission but also a practical danger. Prussian militarism, which was just as unpsychological as German science, may have had to suffer the consequences of this in the great war. We know that the war neuroses which ravaged the German army have been recognized as being a protest of the individual against the part he was expected to play in the army; and according to the communication of E. Simmel (Kriegsneurosen and 'Psychisches Trauma'. Munich, 1918), the hard treatment of the men by their superiors may be considered as foremost among the motive forces of the disease. If the importance of the libido's claims on this score had been better appreciated, the fantastic promises of the American President's fourteen points would probably not have been believed so easily, and the splendid instrument would not have broken in the hands of the German leaders.
[29] [Here and elsewhere the German 'libidinös' is used simply as an adjectival derivative from the technical term 'Libido'; 'libidinal' is accordingly introduced in the translation in order to avoid the highly-coloured connotation of the English 'libidinous'.—Translator.]
[30] ['Cathexis', from the Greek 'κατἑχω', 'I occupy'. The German word 'Besetzung' has become of fundamental importance in the exposition of psycho-analytical theory. Any attempt at a short definition or description is likely to be misleading, but speaking very loosely, we may say that 'cathexis' is used on the analogy of an electric charge, and that it means the concentration or accumulation of mental energy in some particular channel. Thus, when we speak of the existence in someone of a libidinal cathexis of an object, or, more shortly, of an object-cathexis, we mean that the libidinal energy is directed towards, or rather infused into, the idea (Vorstellung) of some object in the outer world. Readers who desire to obtain a more precise knowledge of the term are referred to the discussions in 'Zur Einführung des Narzissmus' and the essays on metapsychology in Kleine Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Vierte Folge.—Translator.]
[31] See Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. XXV, 3. Auflage, 1920. [Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Lecture XXV. George Allen and Unwin, 1922.]
[32] Compare Bela v. Felszeghy's interesting though somewhat fantastic paper 'Panik und Pankomplex'. Imago, 1920, Bd. VI.
[33] Compare the explanation of similar phenomena after the abolition of the paternal authority of the sovereign given
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