Notes on Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921) [Part 1]

Freud opens up by suggesting that the split that we often make between the group and the individual, especially in terms of “psychology,” which means, in other words, the split we make in our research between studying the individual and studying the group, is not a very good one. It is a fictitious split between the individual is by his very nature a social animal, always in some relation to others, and, hence, it is implied, he is inherently a social creature. This is the first point that Freud makes. Freud writes: “in the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in an extended by entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology.” Okay, but this says nothing of the contemporary condition whereby an individual loses the social and must seek to rebond with society. Thus, for example, many of today’s social movements are forced, through an obscene epistemology, to forge a link with the other — a tenuous and ultimately fleeting link — via foundationless conspiracy theory. Thus, the word conspiracy, its etymological implication, implies that there is a bringing together (hence the “con-“) of spirits “-spiracy.” The conspiracy is essential a mode of social link, and its major problem is not the truthfulness of its epistemology but rather the tenuousness of its fictions in the establishment of a bond that would otherwise perhaps endure.

Freud is in this essay describing a society that is structured according to the Oedipal theory, that is, the family romance, whereby a social group is established at the outside through the enterprising impositions of a non-sensical master figure. Thus, Freud writes that “[t]he individual in the relations which have already been mentioned — to his parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the person he is in love with, to his friend, and to his physician — comes under the influence of only a single person, or of a very small number of persons, each one of whom has become enormously important to him.” So — what we can say here is not that Freud was wrong, but that he was right, but he was right only in the discourse from which he was implicated: the only discourses of mastery. It becomes a question of ascertaining what within this essay is still of significance, then, today. Freud’s reduction of the social question to the microcosm of the family structure is not improper but rather misses the essential family structure today: the father is the friend of the child, and the family is, to borrow the expression of the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, ‘liquid,’ in that it can take any number of forms. However, the forms that it does often take includes: divorced or separated or single parents, and a single, isolated, lonely child. The father’s authority — not biologically speaking, but discursively — has receded significantly to give way to a more obscene — “..or worse” — discourse whereby the child is encouraged to enjoy him, her, or, indeed, their, self and the prohibitions which once anchored him within a neurotic discourse have mutated.

Freud begins — interrogating Le Bon’s conception of the “group” — with the question of what unites individuals into a group, into a bond. The bond is the essence of the group, that is, their coherence or consistency, or, rather, what Lacan referred to, in his traditional discourses (seminar 17), as S2. Hence, Freud uses the word (translated into English since I do not have the German awareness) “harmonize.” The discourse is an apparent harmony, that is, there is a harmony of the group. This, in other words, means that it subsists, that is coheres, consists, and endures, to some considerable extent. I depart from this only for a moment to discuss an observation while I was in India. There are social bonds which form organically, spontaneously, and disband just as quickly — which is to claim that a bond need not cohere, consist, and certainly not endure. While waiting for the traffic to clear, a pedestrian stands alongside the road in preparation for a crossing. A passage never offers itself to the pedestrian, but, in the meantime, more pedestrians congregate. The pedestrians grow, larger and larger, as the social group achieves its formation, and they spill out into the street, until, finally, a threshold is reached, an obstacle to 30% of the traffic is reached, and the traffic stops to permit the group to cross. The group crosses and just as quickly as they had been formed they disintegrate and disperse. This is enough of an example to demonstrate that there are groups which do not uphold these Freudian principles. Indeed, India has always been the future of the American social bond: today, the group formation has also mutated, and endurance or consistency/coherence is not a trademark, necessarily, of the group.

I return to my thread.

Freud continues with a second point concerning the principle of “contagion” within the group, which he treats as a synonym for the hypnotic qualities of a group. Freud writes that “[i]n every group a sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.” In this sense, we are correct to call every group fascist. We can think also of the sociological principles put forward by Emile Durkheim on “collective effervescence,” or “altruism” as a social fact of certain social groups (that may give rise to a particular type of suicide, for example). The contagion effect of any group though is not enough of a principle to describe the contemporary situation. Contagion is today not on the side of the epistemology of a group, that is, on the side of the means by which a social link is formed. Rather, contagion is on the side of what Lacan calls the real, that is, the impossible to say — and it has as its most obvious example the recent pandemic. Thus, the social bond, the group, under the time of the real of contagion, is glued together “too much,” since, at the time of the pandemic our public social bonds are places of “distance” from the privately experienced “too muchness” of proximity to those within our household or bubble. Something here has also shifted, and it is important to point out, then, that Freud was not wrong — he just was not here, today.

The second point from Freud on contagion is only a consequence of the hypnotic function of “fascination” (Freud uses this word — this is the english translation). I derive from the root word, fascism, taking and developing a point from Sergio Benvenuto (e.g., that all groups are fascist). Thus, Freud wrote that there is a “magnetic influence given out by the group […] in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer […] all feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.” Today, of course, there is an acute awareness of the hypnotizing effect of the group. It has become elevated to a culturally dominant attitude that one should not be “sheep,” thus, the “woke culture,” if I may use that expression, constantly admonishes its public to “wake up” to the way they are being programmed by society. Today the radical gesture is not to claim that the hypnotized are under the sway of the hypnotizer, since that is precisely what the mainstream discourse is all about: it is to demonstrate, I think, that this statement is a disavowal of the truth. One states it precisely all the more to avoid its consequences.

Freud’s problem with Le Bon’s position is that it does not explain who the hypnotizer is — but rather leaves the answer elusively connected somehow to the group formation itself. The important point that I want to make here is that I have noticed that some readers of this essay have conflated Le Bon’s position with Freud’s own position. Let us take Freud’s opening statement as the guide, as our orientation: Freud’s opening statement is that all individual psychology is already group psychology. And Why? Precisely because of the unconscious. Now, if this is our guiding thread we should note also that to claim that all groups are fascist is much more of Le Bon’s position, Le Bon’s implications than it is Freud’s. Freud is rather discussing and interrogating Le Bon’s claims. Thus, when Freud writes that “a group is impulsive, changeable and irritable,” he is merely summarizing Le Bon’s point and not necessarily claiming that it is true. Thus, Freud adds “it [the group] is led almost exclusively by the unconscious.” This statement, taken in full, seems to be Freud’s because of the use of the word unconscious. Except that there is a footnote here which attributes the statement to Le Bon, which implies, finally, that many of these statements are Freud’s summaries of Le Bon. The only truly hard rock of Freud’s position that we have right now is the guiding orientation, of which I see no reason to disagree: the unconscious implies the group, implies sociability, implies a relationship, or, rather, some vague connection with the Other.

However, Freud writes, and footnotes it with a reference to his own essay on Totem and Taboo, that “the notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a group.” This is a fascinating claim in that it finds that the authentic group does not lack anything, there is no castration in the authentic group, and hence, no unconscious. It is not what we might expect then: that the group takes hold of the individual through suggestion, and hence renders him or her an obedient servant of the group’s will. It is much more radical than this: the individual is not an individual at the level of the group at all, precisely because there is no unconscious. Hence, the group is psychotic. I quote Freud: “A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty […] it thinks in images, which call one another up by association […] and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable agency.” This statement is incredibly sophisticated. First, you can see that it is not the symbolic that seems to come forth in the group-work but rather the succession of images, and images, that is, signs, are not signifiers. This is the first point I want to make. The second point is that Freud does not claim that there is a detachment from reality but rather that there is an agreement with reality — that the real is all to present — but it is never checked by any reasonable agency, that is, it is never mediated by the signifier. Freud adds: “a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.” Hence, the negations which characterize a neurotic subject are not present: instead there is only certainty, which, in other words, are delusions, and closer to a psychotic experience.

Finally, there is excessive jouissance, another trademark of psychosis: “a group can only be excited by an excessive stimulus […] he must paint in the most forcible colours, he must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again.” Tell me this is not at all related to our current American situation! The echo chamber effect is therefore not a mark of social isolation but rather a mark of social proximity — too much sociability. This is the experience of psychosis, it is the trademark of the pandemic, whereby the distance is produced in the social precisely because for the individual there is *only* sociability and hence no individuality left.

We have next another curious feature which shows the depth of the psyche within the group, and it was also expressed, in an interesting way — incidentally — by Matte Blanco: the symmetry of the unconscious. When one has cancelled one’s subscription to the unconscious, that is, when there appears to be no Other, it is because there is, in fact, only Other — no subject. Thus, the contradictions of the unconscious, of society and of the Other, are no matter for figures like Donald Trump, or on social media. Freud writes: “in groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them.” Hence, the contradictions that exist within today’s social movements are blatantly apparent, but they leave their adherents completely unfazed. The contradictions do not matter.

Earlier I mentioned that the social bond is essentially an epistemic one, a bond is formed with words and signifiers. Well, Freud writes something quite interesting to support this claim: “A group, further, is subject to the truly magical power of words; they can evoke the most formidable tempests in the group mind, and are also capable of stilling them. […] It is only necessary in this connection to remember the taboo upon names among primitive people and the magical powers which they ascribe to names and words.’

Now, Freud, echoing Le Bon’s points, seems to agree that all groups are fascist, but he does so only in the same paragraph within which he is summarizing Le Bon’s points. Freud, in another paragraph, seems to correct or add further nuance to Le Bon: “He [the individual] must himself be held in fascination by a strong faith (an idea) in order to awaken the groups’ faith.” This implies, does it not, that fascism is only possible within the group if the individual has an inclination within himself toward fascination. Thus, the group does not produce fascism into which the subject is positioned, but rather the individual must have a particular mode of consent that enables the fascination.

Freud opens the third section of his essay but critiquing Le Bon for not adding anything new to the study of unconscious mental life. Thus, it is important, and Freud sets it as his own task, to develop something more sophisticated than a simplist account which posits that a leader brings the group into submission, all groups are fascist, and the individual loses himself within the group, and so on. Freud begins by critiquing the notion of fascination — what I have been calling fascism — within the group since it is clear that sometimes the morality of the group can in fact supersede that of the individual, or, rather, sometimes there are ‘good’ groups, groups which are not selfish and so on. However, Freud concludes, nonetheless, that there is something about solitary intellectual work that sets the condition for genius. Individuals working in solitude, away from the social group, seem to have more intelligence. This, of course, is a basic sociological principle discoverable not only in the 13th century writings of ibn Khaldun on the people of the desert (on the periphery of the social bond) or in the modern German sociology of Georg Simmel, since, for him, the stranger, within a triad, is the place of objectivity about the ongoings of the group. In Canadian sociology we see it in the work of McLuhan and Harold Innis who argued that Canada is privileged because it is at a distance from America yet also a part of America.

But this does not say anything about the fact that today leaders themselves believe themselves outside of the group, or on the periphery of the group. Leaders of all kinds today want to demonstrate to us that they are ex-centric. It is important and it itself is a mode of identification, a way of obtaining power.

However, Freud develops something about the jouissance of the group: there is always an amplification of emotion within the group. The group stirs up emotion. I call this the jouissance of the group, or the jouissance of the Other. This is very important for understanding the contemporary manifestation of power within the new master social discourse because it is not necessarily a fascistic leader which is ruling us or forming us but it is rather a stirring sociability, a society of enjoyment and jouissance.

Section four of the essay, on Suggestion and Libido, really highlights Freud’s understanding of the group. Freud’s version of the group formation has so much more to do with the intensity of libido, that is, of affect, of jouissance: “”an individual in a group is subjected through its influence to what is often a profound alteration in his mental activity […] His liability to affect becomes extraordinarily intensified, while his intellectual ability is markedly reduced […].” You can see that the group is defined here not by shared meanings but rather by a jouissance which overwhelms and invades the individual. The individual forecloses the domain of the signifier, and its illusory signified, and hence, it seems to me, it is only natural, for those alienated within the group formation, to adopt, at best, an imaginary language of signs and onomatopoeias.

Freud claims that “suggestibility” is at the foundation of mental life. This is linked, obviously, with the notion of “fascination,” of which we have made some commentary on fascism. But in the very next statement Freud adds that “instead of this, I shall make an attempt at using the concept of libido for the purpose of throwing light upon group psychology …” Why libido rather than an extended discussion of suggestibility? Perhaps suggestibility is a decipherable aspect, related to language and the signifier, but libido is much more enigmatic and is related to what Lacan called jouissance. Libido is drive. It is much more primitive than the primitive notion of suggestibility because it is there at the level of drive rather than desire. In this movement Freud has an intuition about the drive (rather than desire) as a foundation for social life. And this is confirmed by the fact that he brings into play a discussion of love as having as its “nucleus” sexual love and sexual union (“as its aim”). Thus, there is, here, an epistemic rim, love, around the navel, the darkness of the drives, which is the sexual relationship. And I find myself correct in claiming that it is an “epistemic rim” because Freud writes that “language has carried out an entirely justifiable piece of unification in creating the word ‘love’ […].” He places love within the domain of language. He does not say the same thing about sex. And he charts a relationship of love to sex: “in its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, …” implies that love is tenuous related to sex, in that, sex is its origin, and from that origin, there is, perhaps, love, and the love of the group at the level of desire. But love, its preparation, is founded upon the nucleus of sex, which means that there is something of love, nonetheless, in the domain of the drives. But it is a love which is not a means of overcoming sex, of overcoming the impossibilities of sex, but rather one of precisely making sex possible on the group level. This is Freud’s point, and one which strikes at the heart of our contemporary social bond, based as it is, fundamentally, on sex positive sentiments.

It is only in this restricted sense that we can take Freud’s claim that “love relationships also constitute the essence of the group mind.” Hence, he adds: “love relationships (or, to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties) …” You relates love here to the affective dimension and not necessarily to a meaningful bond.

Section 5, titled “Two Artificial groups: The Church and the Army,” seem to offer us some concrete examples of Freud’s explorations. Freud claims that there are two types of groups: homogeneous ones — made up of the same sort of individuals,” which we can most likely relate to those that are linked by enjoyment in the contemporary society, and, on the other hand, “unhomogeneous ones.” The former are “natural groups” and the latter are “artificial groups.” I would say that the latter are more common in Freud’s day in that “they require an external force to keep them together.” Whereas the former do not require the same fascination, the same hierharchal anchoring point. Thus, Freud wrote that the distinction is also one between “leaderless groups and those with leaders.” Hence, today’s social movements, which are a part of the ruling hegemony, are leaderless groups, apparently anarchic. The master discourse today is precisely this castrated master, this leadership figure, like Trump, or like any anarchist group. It is only in these sense that the two examples i just gave are related. What happens next is that Freud develops some examples of only the artificial groups, those with a leader figure which binds the libido of the group. This extended discussion of artificial groups is no doubt — which were prevalent in Freud’s day — is no doubt why there is a reduction of all groups to fascination, to hierarchical anchoring points, in reading Freud’s work today.

What is interesting, however, is the Christian discussion about how to love thy neighbour implies a certain unjustifiable cruelty toward those who are true neighbours: “a religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it. […] cruelty and intolerance towards those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.” This is true, especially, of secular religions such as Christianity which perform intolerance in obscure and dishonest ways: through incorporation into a disavowed universality of loving thy neighbour, tolerance only to those who admit the grounding principle of tolerance. Freud claims that one will find the same intolerance within socialism.