On the ecstasies of mass psychology

This note is part of a paper with the subtitle: “Notes on the libidinality of ‘losing one’s autonomous mind.’” It was written for the Cartagena Conference of the International Psychoanalytic Association, July 2023, as part of a panel presentation titled “One Hundred Years of Group Psychology.” In my absence, the paper was presented by one of the panellists on my behalf.

The published abstract for this paper read as follows:
Writing in 1921, Sigmund Freud drew respectfully on Le Bon’s classic writing on crowd psychology, whereby individuals lose their autonomously thinking mind. Freud substantially advanced Le Bon’s thinking by pointing to the unconscious erotic substrata of group allegiances and mass participation ― the significance of libidinal embodiment in experiences of merger, both moderate and fanatic.  Most subsequent work, both within the arena of psychoanalytic scholarship and without, has neglected this libidinally energetic dimension of ‘losing one’s autonomously thinking mind.’  Arguing that this is a serious omission, the remedy of which is urgent, this paper discusses the specifically ecstatic force of group participation, in both its benign and malign aspects.  Examples from contemporary culture and from the consulting room are offered.

The following is the text of the paper:

Within the social and cultural sciences, it is widely recognized that, across the globe, we live in an epoch of escalating authoritarianism and demagogic populism, “fascist creep” as defined by Alexander Ross (2017), and the precariousness of any genuinely democratic polity. In this context, it seems urgent that we explore what psychoanalysis might have to offer by way of understanding these disastrous trends, let alone contributing to their antidote. Given the constraints of today’s panel, this very brief paper will make just a few points ― an outline of a longer work‑in‑progress.

First point: It is instructive to reread Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des Foules written in 1895, the English translation’s subtitle of which is “A study of the Popular Mind.” Because this is the text to which Freud was responding when he wrote Massenpsychologie und Ich‑analyse” (“Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”). The latter is more or less the first text in which Freud discusses shifts in the functioning of the ego organization as such ― shifts prompted through the processes of social facilitation and/or inhibition in large groups. That is, crowds or mobs. Freud is clearly impressed with the way Le Bon describes how crowds generate a sort of “collective mind” that can takeover individual functioning ― leading the supposedly autonomous person to participate in behaviour that is powerfully emotive and intellectually feeble or faulty. But also ― and this aspect is perhaps underemphasized by Le Bon ― the “collective mind” has a force that can lead the individual to engage in activities that are actually counter to that individual’s interests. As will be demonstrated shortly, this aspect is crucially significant in our understanding of fascist creep and the rise of demagogic populism (Barratt, 2020).

Second point: Of course, looking back after a century of psychoanalytic theorizing, we would now say that the ego is ― if not in all its organizational features, then at least in terms of the representational content of its self, object, and affect or action representations ― a social entity from the start. The material for these constructs comes from the collective environment ― from the enigmatic messages discussed by Jean Laplanche and later from the linguistic context in which the infant or toddler operates. The ego is a paranoid construct, Jacques Lacan would proclaim. And this should be kept in mind as we consider what has gone missing in the psychoanalytic understanding of group behaviour, both generally and in the Lacanian field specifically.

Third point: With this last point, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us return to thinking about what Freud did as he responded to Le Bon in 1921. In a sense, he highlighted a crucial dimension of group allegiance that Le Bon was not able to explicate. The group phenomenon can be described as one in which the individual’s supposedly autonomous mind is relinquished in favour of some sort of “collective mind.” Another was of phrasing this would be to describe how the person’s sense of identity as individual is ceded to an identity furnished by the group. Sociologically, the group may be defined in terms of creed, country, colour, class, or culture ― more impulsively it may be defined by the mob in terms of that “other” that the mob seeks to degrade or destroy. Drawing on his earlier discoveries of the power and ubiquity of the field of libidinal energies (in the 1905 Essays and elsewhere), Freud demonstrates the specifically erotic dimension fuelling every sense of identity ― although “identity” is not his terminology ― with its attendant processes of distinction, exclusion, and domination‑subjugation. This is the wellspring of what LeBon called the “popular mind” that Le Bon himself was in no position to appreciate. As is well known, in the 1921 text, Freud uses the church and the army as prime examples for his thesis that there are unconscious erotic energies that tie us ― bind us ― to identifications with social groupings, familial and beyond.

In short, Freud takes Le Bon’s thinking about the force of the crowd and advances it significantly by showing the extent to which erotic energies (and this formulation does not preclude their aggressive manifestations) animate each participant’s attachment both to the figure of the group’s leader and to the camaraderie of the group. Drawing on his 1914 insights, he demonstrates how readily our narcissistic requirements ― loosely, the security of our identity and our capacity for self‑worth ― translate into adoration and fealty toward grand and aggrandizing leaders, tempestuous antagonism toward those who are not aligned with the group, and the dissolution of any sense of individuation in favour of the group’s disposition. In short, the functioning of ― quote/unquote ― “normal” groups such as the church and army, as well as the functioning of the horde, rabble or mob, are all fuelled by libidinal energies that have been suppressed or repressed. The distinctions between suppression, repression, and over expression is important here, but have to be taken as explicated elsewhere (Barratt, 2022). And, we must hasten to add, in referring to libidinal energies, we have to consider not just those that have the appearance of what we think of as sexuality, but also those that manifest ― by processes of transformation and transmutation ― aggressively and hatefully.

Fourth point: Of course, the notion that human behaviours, both individual and collective, may be controlled by the unconscious force of subtle energies that elude representation has all but disappeared from the lexicon of psychoanalytic thinking. In the first two decades of his discipline, Freud was ambiguously convinced that psychic energy operates between the material substrate of biology and the immateriality of representationality (imagistic or symbolic). The subsequent history of psychoanalysis ― bedazzled by theoretical constructions of ego functioning, object‑relations, and self‑psychologies ― effectively obscures the potential significance of this conviction. Laplanche’s notion of “enigmatic messages” perhaps presages the restoration of this notion but is still ― in the opinion of this author ― overly embedded in its Saussurean commitment to the language of the signifier generated within the symbolic order. The history of this obscuration and its significance as an attenuation of the power of psychoanalytic understanding has been discussed extensively in this author’s trilogy published in the past decade (Barratt, 2013, 2016, 2019),

By “subtle energies,” this author points to forces that cannot be captured in representation by any of the usual criteria of sufficiency or adequation. That is, the sort of eventuality that skims across the awareness of your lived‑experience when your yoga instructor intimates that there may be motions of prāna or chi traversing your corporeal being. Although this example may seem trivial, this author would strenuously argue that it is not.

Fifth point: Although subtle energies may not, by definition, be consensually and conventionally demonstrable, it cannot be assumed that their effects are not powerful. It is well known ― to give just a single example ― that every teacher of kuṇḍalinī yoga has to be mindful of the way in which movements of this force can radically destabilize the normally autonomous strictures within which the individual ego organization operates. This is surely pertinent to any consideration of the way in which transpersonal forces can overtake the apparent autonomy of individual functioning. That is, how they can operate to disband the individual’s sense of identity, subsuming it vibrationally within some sort of communality or collectivity.

Although his writing on the Mass Psychology of Fascism was flawed in many respects (as the present author has showed), we owe it to Wilhelm Reich to anchor the insight that the rise of authoritarianism was fuelled by a particular frustration and channelling of libidinal forces ― a distinctive weave of homoerotic and homophobic threads, combined with misogyny and an idealization of the “rock‑hard” figure of the fascist leader (Barratt, 2021). Herein lies the loss of the individual’s autonomously thinking mind ― and its submergence in the frenetic mind of the group’s ideology.

Le Bon used the expression, the “popular mind.” To jump from the rise of fascism to the mentality of a really powerful rock concert is not to trivialize the issue, but rather to suggest how commonplace these processes can be. During covid, one of my patients wept bitterly that he could no longer attend such concerts in which ― quote/unquote ― “I could be lost in the vibration of the crowd, dancing wildly to the music, as if we were just one voice, one entity, one community.”

The conclusion ― or suggestion ― here is that, in 1921, Freud made a mighty contribution to the psychology of groups. But it is a contribution that has been largely forgotten as the subsequent history discards the notion of psychic energy in favor of an over‑extended preoccupation with the mind as solely representational.