Book
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse
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.
What it shows
- 1913
Sigmund Freud introduced Primal horde
Taking Darwin's hypothesis of a primal horde ruled by a jealous father, Freud built on it in the fourth essay of Totem und Tabu the myth of the brothers who kill and eat the father, then out of guilt raise the totem and the incest taboo. In 1921 he read the group as a revival of the primal horde.
- 1914
Sigmund Freud introduced Ego ideal
In 'On Narcissism' Freud introduces the ego ideal as the heir of infantile narcissism: what the subject projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost perfection of childhood, watched over by an agency of self-observation. In 1921 he explains the bond of a group by its members putting the leader in place of their ego ideal.
- 1921
Sigmund Freud developed Identification
After describing narcissistic identification with the lost object in melancholia (1917), Freud devotes a chapter of Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse to identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, distinguishing three forms of it; in 1923 he holds that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.