Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Freud’s study of group psychology. Starting from the accounts of crowds given by Le Bon and McDougall, he argues that what binds the members of a group together, and binds them to their leader, is libido diverted from its sexual aims. He takes the church and the army as examples of artificial groups held together by love for a leader. He develops the concept of identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, and compares being in love and hypnosis to group formation: in each, an object is put in place of the ego ideal. A group is then a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and so have identified with one another. Freud links the leader to the father of the primal horde, and separates the ego ideal from the ego as a differentiating grade within it.