MASS PSYCHOLOGY AND EGO ANALISYS - Freud E-Book

Sigmund Freud

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Freud Essential
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 142

Beschreibung

In "Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis"Sigmund Freud retrieves the theories of a sociologist of his time named Le Bon. According to Le Bon, the individual gains immense power by associating with a group and feels security in being part of it. However, Freud adds that this sense of belonging leads to a loss of individual consciousness. Thus, the sensations that permeate the group tend to have a great influence and to override individual consciousness. In recent years in Brazil, massified behaviors have been clearly observed, currently amplified by social media. The analysis that Freud conducted on this type of behavior remains fully valid and useful in today's world. It is this analysis that is available to the reader now in "Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis."

Leseprobe

Sigmund Freud

MASS PSYCHOLOGY AND EGO ANALYSIS

Contents

INTRODUCTION

About the autor

MASS PSYCHOLOGY AND EGO ANALYSIS

Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis

INTRODUCTION

About the autor

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and important psychologist. He is considered the father of psychoanalysis, which significantly influenced contemporary social psychology.

Sigmund Freud

1856-1939

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, on May 6, 1856. The son of Jacob Freud, a small merchant, and Amalie Nathanson, of Jewish origin, he was the firstborn of seven siblings. At the age of four, his family moved to Vienna, where Jews had better social acceptance and economic prospects.

Education

From an early age, Freud showed himself to be a brilliant student. At the age of 17, he entered the University of Vienna to study medicine. During his college years, he became fascinated by the research conducted in the physiological laboratory led by Dr. E. W. von Brucke. From 1876 to 1882, he worked with this specialist and later at the Institute of Anatomy under the guidance of H. Maynert. He completed his degree in 1881 and decided to become a clinician specializing in neurology.

For several years, Freud worked in a neurological clinic for children, where he distinguished himself by discovering a type of cerebral palsy that later became known by his name. In 1884, he came into contact with the physician Josef Breuer, who had cured severe symptoms of hysteria through hypnotic sleep, where the patient could remember the circumstances that gave rise to his illness. Called the "cathartic method," it constituted the starting point of psychoanalysis.

In 1885, Freud obtained a master's degree in neuropathology. That same year, he received a scholarship for a period of specialization in Paris, with the French neurologist J. M. Charcot. Back in Vienna, he continued his experiments with Breuer. He published, along with Breuer, "Studies on Hysteria" (1895), which marked the beginning of his psychoanalytic investigations.

Oedipus Complex

In 1897, Freud began to study the sexual nature of infant traumas causing neuroses and began to outline the theory of the "Oedipus Complex," according to which physical love for the mother would be part of men's mental structure. That same year, he had already observed the importance of dreams in psychoanalysis. In 1900, he published "The Interpretation of Dreams," the first proper psychoanalytic work.

Father of Psychoanalysis

In a short time, Freud managed to take a decisive and original step that opened perspectives for the development of psychoanalysis by abandoning hypnosis, replacing it with the method of free associations, thus penetrating into the darkest regions of the unconscious, being the first to discover the instrument capable of reaching and exploring it in its essence.

For ten years, Freud worked alone on the development of psychoanalysis. In 1906, he was joined by Adler, Jung, Jones, and Stekel, who in 1908 met at the first International Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg. The first sign of acceptance of Psychoanalysis in the academic community came in 1909 when he was invited to lecture in the United States at Clark University in Worcester.

In 1910, on the occasion of the second international psychoanalytic congress held in Nuremberg, the group founded the International Psychoanalytic Association, which consecrated psychoanalysts in several countries. Between 1911 and 1913, Freud was the target of hostilities, mainly from scientists themselves, who, outraged by the new ideas, did everything to discredit him. Adler, Jung, and the entire so-called Zurich school separated from Freud.

Some concepts developed by Freud: unconscious, psychic conflict, repression, Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality, and death drive.

End of Life

In 1923, already ill, Freud underwent his first surgery to remove a tumor in his palate. He began to have difficulty speaking, felt pain and discomfort. His last years coincided with the expansion of Nazism in Europe. In 1938, when the Nazis took Vienna, Freud, of Jewish origin, had his property confiscated and his library burned. He was forced to take refuge in London, after paying a ransom, where he spent the last days of his life.

About Mass Psychology

Freud's statement in the introduction to his article on mass psychology, that Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology, may raise some doubts. After all, what social and what individual is Freud talking about? Certainly, he did not consider them as separate entities, but rather as something that "naturally constituted a single nexus" (FREUD, 1921-1976). Therefore, even when alone (i.e., outside of any psychological group), there is always the presence of the other in the individual, bringing the social into question in psychoanalytic clinic.

Since the individual is inseparable from the social, it does not make sense to talk about some special moment in which the interaction between them would occur. Thus, the question of whether there is a "social drive" acting in these moments, as opposed to an "individual drive," which would be what psychoanalysis would study, loses its meaning, since there would only be one drive.

However, despite this constancy of the individual's relationship with the social, it can be transformed under certain circumstances, such as when the so-called Mass (or Group) formation occurs. Taking masses as the object of study, Freud will start from the following problem in his investigation: when inserted into the mass, the individual thinks, feels, and acts differently from when alone.

To discover why this is, Freud will basically use two authors, Le Bon1 and McDougall, in their descriptions of collective mental life. Invariably, Le Bon and McDougall attribute almost all responsibility for the changes that occur in individuals gathered in a group to suggestion. But despite this, they do not provide an explanation that justifies the functioning of this suggestion.

Unlike the others, Freud will brilliantly use the concept of Libido, drawn from his previous practices, to explain the suggestibility described by other authors.

MASS PSYCHOLOGY

Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis2

I - Introduction

The antithesis between individual and social or mass psychology, which at first glance may seem to us very important, loses a great deal of its sharpness on close examination. Individual psychology is of course directed at the person in isolation, tracing the ways in which he seeks to satisfy his drive-impulses, but only rarely, in specific exceptions, is it able to disregard the relationships between that individual and others. In the mental life of the individual, the other comes very regularly into consideration as model, object, aid and antagonist; at the same time, therefore, and from the outset, the psychology of the individual is also social psychology in this extended but wholly justified sense.

The individual’s relationships with his parents and siblings, love-object, teacher, and doctor (in other words, all the ties that have hitherto formed the preferential targets of psychoanalytical investigations) can claim to be ranked as social phenomena, which sets them in opposition to certain other processes (called by us narcissistic) in which drive-satisfaction eludes or forgoes the influence of others. The antithesis between social and narcissistic (Bleuler3 might say autistic) mental acts thus falls very much within the sphere of individual psychology and does not lend itself to distinguishing the latter from social or c mass psychology.

In the said relationships with parents and siblings, lover, friend, teacher, and doctor, the individual invariably experiences only the influence of one or a very small number of persons, each of whom has acquired enormous importance for him. The fact is, people have got into the habit, when discussing social or mass psychology, of disregarding these ties and treating the simultaneous influencing of the individual by a large number of persons with whom he has some sort of connection (whereas in many other respects they may be strangers to him) as a separate object of investigation. In other words, mass psychology deals with the individual as member of a tribe, people, caste, class institution, or as one element in an assemblage of human beings who at a particular time, and for a specific purpose, have organized themselves into a mass. Following this rupture of a natural context, the obvious next step was to regard the phenomena that emerge in such special conditions as manifestations of a special drive not susceptible of being traced back further, the social drive (or herd instinct, or group mind4), which does not come out in other situations. However, we may well object that we find it difficult to attribute such great importance to the numerical factor as to make it possible for number alone to rouse a new and otherwise unactivated drive in the life of the human mind. Our expectations will thus be directed towards two other possibilities: that the social drive is perhaps not an original, irreducible one and that the origins of its formation may be found in a smaller circle - that of the family, for instance.

Mass psychology, although it is only in its earliest stages, embraces a still incalculable wealth of individual problems and sets the investigator innumerable tasks that have not even been properly separated as yet. Merely classifying the various forms of mass formation and defining the psychical phenomena to which they give expression require a major effort of observation and description and have already given rise to a copious literature. Anyone measuring this slim booklet5 against the great bulk of mass psychology will have every right to suppose that the intention here is to deal with only a few points from all this material. There will indeed be only a small number of questions in which the depth research of psychoanalysis takes a particular interest.

II - Le Bon´s portrayal of the mass mind

Rather than preface these remarks with a definition, it would seem more useful to begin by referring to the published literature and extracting from it a few particularly striking and typical facts that the investigation can take as its starting point. We shall achieve both by quoting an excerpt from Le Bon’s (rightly) famous book, La psychologie des foules.6

Let us remind ourselves of the facts of the case. If psychology, which traces the predispositions, drive-impulses, motives and intentions of the individual through to his actions and into the individual’s relationships to those closest to him, had done its job completely and rendered all these connections transparent, it would suddenly find itself facing a fresh and as yet unperformed task. It would be required to explain the astonishing fact that, given a certain condition, the individual whom it has come to understand will feel, think and act quite otherwise than expected, that condition being incorporation into a body of people that has taken on the quality of a ‘psychological mass’. But what is a ‘mass’, how does it acquire the ability so decisively to influence the mental life of the individual, and in what does the mental change it imposes on the individual consist?

Answering these three questions is the task facing theoretical mass psychology. Clearly, the best way to tackle them is by starting with the third. It is observation of the altered reaction of the individual that is the stuff of mass psychology; the fact is, every attempt to explain something needs to be preceded by a description of what is to be explained.

Now, over to Le Bon. He writes:

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual 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 crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional 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.7

Taking the liberty of interrupting Le Bon’s account with comments of our own, we beg to remark at this point: if the individuals in the mass are bound together to form an entity, there must presumably be something binding them together, and that binding medium might be precisely what characterizes the mass. Le Bon, however, leaves this question unanswered, dealing instead with the way in which the individual changes in the mass and describing the change in terms that chime well with the basic premises of our depth psychology.

It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still which we ourselves ignore. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our  observation.8

In the mass, Le Bon believes, individual acquisitions are effaced, which means that the uniqueness of the individual disappears. The racial unconscious comes to the fore, the heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous. We would say that the psychical superstructure that had developed so variously in individuals is eroded away, enfeebled, and the unconscious foundation that is the same for everyone is exposed (activated).

In this way, it is alleged, an average nature of the individuals forming the mass comes about. However, Le Bon finds that those individuals also evince fresh qualities, ones they did not possess before, and he looks for the reason in three different factors:

The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.9

From our standpoint, we should not need to place so much emphasis on the emergence of fresh qualities. All we should want to say is that, in the mass, the individual finds himself in conditions that allow him to shed the repressions of his unconscious drive-impulses. The apparently fresh qualities that the individual then exhibits are in fact expressions of that unconscious, along with which, as we know, everything wicked in the human mind comes enclosed; the disappearance of conscience or sense of responsibility in such circumstances does not present our understanding with any difficulty. We had long contended that the core of what is called conscience is ‘social anxiety’.10

The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.11

We shall return to that last sentence later, basing an important supposition on it.

A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.