Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Review

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Contribution to the Webinar "Subject and Masses", 2021,

https://www.periodical-psychoanalysis.european union/webionar-soggetto-e-masse/

12/02/2021

The essay Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego failed to influence the broader cultural scene as it should have because in the final hundred years or so readings of psychoanalysis in a political key have been dominated by Freudo-Marxism. And, as we shall conspicuously see, this Freudian text does non play into the hands of Freudo-Marxism.

Hither Freud seems to accept up once again a theme that intrigued the Ancients: is the rationality of single individuals superior to the rationality of the Massen, of groups or collectives, or is the contrary truthful? The theory that every person is rational when taken individually just loses it when role of a collective has always run counter the theory that a collective is capable of a college rationality than that of single individuals.

The main advocate of the latter thesis is Hegel, for whom the Objective Spirit (Objektive Geist), "the spirit in the community", expresses a Reason superior to that of each individual subject, often manipulated by the Cunning of Reason. As for the one-time thesis – which expresses a deep aristocratic contempt for "the crowds" –, i of its best-known proponents is Gustave Le Bon, by whom Freud is inspired. Merely Freud thoroughly deviates from this age-old opposition.

Freud tries to business relationship for any collection of people – from an improvised crowd assembled to loot a bakery to highly structured ones like the church or the army – taking as a starting point Eros, i.due east., the drives. This text was conceived and written together with Beyond the Pleasure Principle and should be seen every bit 1 of the starting time applications of the old. In other words, a group is the product of Eros, of the impulse that tends to brand individuals connect to each other. When a group breaks up, Thanatos, death drive, takes over and individuals disconnect.

Now, the essential point in Freud is that this erotic zipper ever takes identify thanks to a leader, a Führer. At the time the term Führer lacked the sinister connotations it has for united states of america, just in fact, après-coup, with hindsight, we tin state that Freud basically describes whatever group as a fascist formation. Because every group stands thanks to a process in which an external object – the Führer – replaces the Ideal Ego. Every grouping is based on a shared alienation: what unites us is our love for the same leader. In short, in that location can be no anarchic collectives: a gang of anarchists also needs a Führer to be able to office, even but equally a gang.

Freud couldn't talk about fascism at the time, of class, as in 1921 it still hadn't established itself. But if we read correctly the diagram of group alienation as described by Freud, we can agree the it is ultimately an exact clarification of what we phone call fascism:

The external object is the person who will get Führer, insofar as it replaces an idealized object. Paradoxically, therefore, according to Freud a group always forms narcissistically. Narcissism is precisely a replacing of object dearest with something idealized, which for Freud is in a higher place all an idealization of oneself. For this reason, Freud opposes the beloved couple to the collective, every bit its biggest threat and limit. The love couple is not narcissistic. If – similar Paolo and Francesca or Romeo and Juliet – information technology is the epitome of Eros, the erotic couple is a deadly threat to the Masse, to the collective. The couple is always centrifugal from the Eros of the Masse: paradoxically, sexual Eros tends to destroy the erotic bond of a group. For Freud sexuality is de-socializing. Later all, all societies that aim at an extremely solid social bond – theocratic regimes, Communism – always end upwardly devaluing couple relationships, they are sexophobic societies.

Conversely, Freud describes hypnosis – which he had himself practiced for years – as a crowd of 2. Which just means he believed that every group is hypnotic. "A group is a dream" Jean-Bertrand Pontalis said. Just, in contrast to his predecessors, Freud wasn't interested whether a group is or is not the sleep of reason; he was interested in proverb that groups are hypnosis, and in hypnosis at that place is always someone who is commander, the hypnotist. In this way Freud innovated compared to a previous tradition that based groups on mutual simulated among members. Mutual imitation is not the essential point (unlike in hysteria). Collectives are not hysteric, they are fascist: they are always hypnotized past a Führer.

Some may object that this is not always true. We could say that if millions of human beings followed Stalin or Mao it'south because Stalin and Mao in turn personified an ideal: Communism. It is not enough for someone to present him or herself as a Führer, this someone must too be inspired by a shared ideal. But the signal is a different 1: lots of people believe in Communism, simply they stay home, they don't become involved with political parties or unions, they don't bring together "groups". For an ideal to attract a crowd, for someone to be prepared to impale or be killed for an ideal, a Führer is required. For Freud politics always exploits, to the very cease, narcissistic identification with a leader.

Of course, such an epitome of the collective could not exist accepted by Freudo-Marxism, from Fromm to Žižek, from Wilhelm Reich to Badiou, from Marcuse to Althusser… Marxism has a Hegelian mold, information technology believes in a collective Reason that does not culminate in fascism. Hence a sure embarrassed marginalization of this text from the official Freudian Canon.

Notation that Freud himself was the Führer of a collective, the psychoanalytical 1. And nosotros know only too well, alas, how much fascism there has been in the history of psychoanalysis as an establishment: expulsions, intolerance, wars of succession, conflicts over intellectual legacies.

There is, yet, something missing in Freud's theory. Something not even added by W.R. Bion, author of a grouping theory that restructures and enhances Freud'due south.

In collectives, Freud simply sees idealization processes, idealizing alienation. Had he been familiar with Carl Schmitt, he would have seen how a group is always based on the difference betwixt friend and enemy. For Freud – who does mention armies in the essay – a group does not demand an enemy; it need not necessarily elect an enemy. In bodily fact, any collective is always based on a difference, which can turn into hostility or war, between an u.s.a. and a them. Who the us are and who the them are is of no importance.

M. Klein spoke of a splitting of the object into good and bad. We can say that when the external Object takes the place of the Object of each of usa, its idealization splits this Object, in the sense that a part of it identifies with the Ego Ideal and another part takes a dissimilar route, that of ejection, and is like thrown back into the existent.

Beyond the process of idealization, therefore, we take to await at its revers, its sinister fold, which psychoanalysis hasn't named only which I would call debasement, the reverse of idealization. Every collective self-idealization produces a discarded object, a scrap, an expulsion (which, according to Freud ["Die Verneinung"], is the matrix of the real itself), something that Lacan tried to explain, I think, with the concept of object a. Because a is certainly a fleck, a "piece of shit", just it is also, or can also go, a first-class precious object, an Agalma, every bit we shall come across. I therefore propose to complete the Freudian diagram as follows:

In "Mourning and Affective" Freud said that in melancholia the shadow of the object falls on the ego (meaning that the shadow of a hated object falls on the ego, thus the ego itself becomes mean). In every group, insofar as it is a collective of us-versus, idealization throws as its shadow a discarded object in the overturned space of idealization. The other as discarded object volition always problem the nights of even the most tolerant groups.

And in fact, even when a lodge is extremely tolerant and open – for example, Norwegian social club today – information technology produces (or finds?) an Anders Breivik, the terrorist who killed 77 people in that country in 2011. A tolerant society will always find an intolerance to quash. Terrorist intolerance is today the shadow that "soils" the arcadian image of openness and tolerance that European societies offer of themselves. Intolerance always ends up producing the intolerance of the tolerant.

But this discarded object very often slips into a process which is the reverse of debasement, 1 I would call of "reassessment". In this style, the discarded object, like the Lacanian object a, climbs back up to the position from which it sets itself forth as Führer. Information technology is a mysterious procedure, but ane that finds thousands of confirmations, specially in religious history. I'll limit myself to the example closest to united states, to Jesus.

Significantly, the cantankerous remains the principal symbol of the Christian faith. The cross was an atrocious grade of torment that the Romans inflicted mainly on slaves and that Jesus, the outcast among outcasts, underwent. Abandoned by his disciples and by the people, Jesus sinks into the lowest condition that was believable at the fourth dimension: the κενωσις (kenosis) that Christianity gives such cracking importance besides. But it is precisely this absolute beggary that makes him, in the eyes of his apostles and worshippers, the Christ, the Messiah, even equivalent to God Himself. Nosotros can find this process of reassessment, ofttimes hyperbolic, of the discarded object in nigh all the Great Collectives, not only in religious ones. The discarded object turns from being an enemy into no less than the Führer of the new Collective, there where the lord's day of the future shines.

Information technology could exist argued that there are some admittedly skillful-natured and tolerant societies, like certain religious orders, like the Franciscans, for example. But the story of Francis of Assisi – sackcloths, mortification of the flesh and a crude search for an even moral mortification – shows that this extreme tolerance towards outsiders has to be paid for with an extreme intolerance towards oneself, which replaces the discarded object. But sometimes fifty-fifty Franciscan masochism turns outwards. Thus, in the fifteenth century the Franciscan Bernardino da Feltre actually became a ferocious persecutor of Jews, fifty-fifty accusing them of imaginary infanticides.

Some might argue that rigid caste systems, similar the 1 that still prevails today in India, don't allow this "upswing". The Untouchables, the Dalit (the oppressed) are impure for the superior castes and are therefore given the job of cleaning up their excrements. But it is unthinkable that a Dalit could become a Führer. Nonetheless Gandhi, who belonged to the superior castes and even supported the caste system, presented himself as the Führer of Bharat dressing, or better, stripping down to, the robes of an Indian peasant, or rather a fakir. He needed to disguise himself as a discarded object to take on the legendary position he holds in India and beyond.

This is how what I would call the Samsara of human political breach takes shape, the circle that never really ends, between processes of idealization and processes of debasement.

Completing the Freudian diagram in this way, we could find once more a circularity accounting for historical dynamics, those that lead on the one hand to commonage identifications ("u.s.a.") and on the other to conflictual struggles against the other every bit a scrap ("them").

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12/02/2021

Addendum

In the text of his presentation for the April 23rd 2021 webinar, Jean-Luc Nancy writes that all societies are essentially anarchist. This could appear to be the exact opposite of what I assert in my text for the same online result: I hold that, according to Freud, everyMasse, every association, is fascist. But I do not observe these two statements contradictory. I experience that their truth lies at two unlike levels.

Nancy builds on Freud's idea that every lodge is the product of the elimination of apadre-padrone, as we say in Italian, of a paternal primary, and every bit such, it is anarchist in character. But we well know that concretely societies are never anarchist, they are all, in i fashion or another, repressive. Precisely because there is no longer a paternal primary, each of them must identify a Führer to fill this empty place. Indeed, since among higher primates there is no transcendent leader, an alpha male volition dominate, taking the all-time females for himself and becoming feared by the other males. In curt, it is not enough for someone to exist « inately » a leader or a soveraign, he must gain his position at the top of the hierarchy by presenting himself every bit the leader of the masses, in other words, by beingness loved by the horde. The Freudian Führer is in a higher place all a beloved leader. In fact, in most cases fascist leaders were democratically elected, in 1923 in Italy, in 1933 in Frg… and more recently in Republic of hungary, Russia, Brazil…

In Pasolini's movieSalò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,one of the protagonists, a sadistic fascist leader, says: "We, the fascists, are the truthful anarchists."

19/03/2021

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Sergio Benvenuto is a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome, Italy, and a psychoanalyst.

His publications in English include: « Perversion and clemency : an ethical approach », in D. Nobus & L. Downing eds., Perversion. Psychoanalytic Perspectives / Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (London : Karnac, 2006). With A. Molino, In Freud's Tracks (New York: Aronson, 2008) nominated for Gradiva Award. "The Monsters Adjacent Door", American Imago. Psychoanalysis and Man Sciences, 69, 2012, iv. "The Gaze of the Blind. Notes on Cézanne and Cubism", American Imago, vol. seventy, 3, Fall 2013. "Does Perversion Need the Police?", W. Müller-Funk, I. Scholz-Strasser, H. Westerink, Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality (Leuven: Leuven Academy Press, 2013). "Ethics, Wonder and Real in Wittgenstein", in Y. Gustafsson, C. Kronqvist, H. Nykänen, eds., Ideals and the Philosophy of Civilisation: Wittgensteinian Approaches, 2013, Cambridge Scholar Publishing. What are Perversions? (London: Karnac, 2016). Conversations with Lacan. Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan (London: Routledge, 2020). [eu.jou.psy@gmail.com]

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Source: https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/one-hundred-years-of-group-psychology-and-the-analysis-of-the-ego/

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