Freud - Complete Works (630 page)

   In a Church (and we may with
advantage take the Catholic Church as a type) as well as in an
army, however different the two may be in other respects, the same
illusion holds good of there being a head - in the Catholic Church
Christ, in an army its Commander-in-Chief - who loves all the
individuals in the group with an equal love. Everything depends
upon this illusion; if it were to be dropped, then both Church and
army would dissolve, so far as the external force permitted them
to. This equal love was expressly enunciated by Christ:
‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ He stands to the
individual members of the group of believers in the relation of a
kind elder brother; he is their substitute father. All the demands
that are made upon the individual are derived from this love of
Christ’s. A democratic strain runs through the Church, for
the very reason that before Christ everyone is equal, and that
everyone has an equal share in his love. It is not without a deep
reason that the similarity between the Christian community and a
family is invoked, and that believers call themselves brothers in
Christ, that is, brothers through the love which Christ has for
them. There is no doubt that the tie which unites each individual
with Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one
another. The like holds good of an army. The Commander-in-Chief is
a father who loves all soldiers equally, and for that reason they
are comrades among themselves. The army differs structurally from
the Church in being built up of a series of such groups. Every
captain is, as it were, the Commander-in-Chief and the father of
his company, and so is every non-commissioned officer of his
section. It is true that a similar hierarchy has been constructed
in the Church, but it does not play the same part in it
economically; for more knowledge and care about individuals may be
attributed to Christ than to a human Commander-in-Chief.

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   An objection will justly be
raised against this conception of the libidinal structure of an
army on the ground that no place has been found in it for such
ideas as those of one’s country, of national glory, etc.,
which are of such importance in holding an army together. The
answer is that that is a different instance of a group tie, and no
longer such a simple one; for the examples of great generals, like
Caesar, Wallenstein, or Napoleon, show that such ideas are not
indispensable to the existence of an army. We shall presently touch
upon the possibility of a leading idea being substituted for a
leader and upon the relations between the two. The neglect of this
libidinal factor in an army, even when it is not the only factor
operative, seems to be not merely a theoretical omission but also a
practical danger. Prussian militarism, which was just as
unpsychological as German science, may have had to suffer the
consequences of this in the World War. We know that the war
neuroses which ravaged the German army have been recognized as
being a protest of the individual against the part he was expected
to play in the army; and according to the communication of Simmel
(1918), the hard treatment of the men by their superiors may be
considered as foremost among the motive forces of the disease. If
the importance of the libido’s claims on this score had been
better appreciated, the fantastic promises of the American
President’s Fourteen Points would probably not have been
believed so easily, and the splendid instrument would not have
broken in the hands of the German leaders.

   It is to be noticed that in these
two artificial groups each individual is bound by libidinal ties on
the one hand to the leader (Christ, the Commander-in-Chief) and on
the other hand to the other members of the group. How these two
ties are related to each other, whether they are of the same kind
and the same value, and how they are to be described
psychologically - these questions must be reserved for subsequent
enquiry. But we shall venture even now upon a mild reproach against
earlier writers for not having sufficiently appreciated the
importance of the leader in the psychology of the group, while our
own choice of this as a first subject for investigation has brought
us into a more favourable position. It would appear as though we
were on the right road towards an explanation of the principal
phenomenon of group psychology - the individual’s lack of
freedom in a group. If each individual is bound in two directions
by such an intense emotional tie, we shall find no difficulty in
attributing to that circumstance the alteration and limitation
which have been observed in his personality.

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   A hint to the same effect, that
the essence of a group lies in the libidinal ties existing in it,
is also to be found in the phenomenon of panic, which is best
studied in military groups. A panic arises if a group of that kind
becomes disintegrated. Its characteristics are that none of the
orders given by superiors are any longer listened to, and that each
individual is only solicitous on his own account, and without any
consideration for the rest. The mutual ties have ceased to exist,
and a gigantic and senseless fear is set free. At this point,
again, the objection will naturally be made that it is rather the
other way round; and that the fear has grown so great as to be able
to disregard all ties and all feelings of consideration for others.
McDougall (1920
a
, 24) has even made use of panic (though not
of military panic) as a typical instance of that intensification of
emotion by contagion (‘primary induction’) on which he
lays so much emphasis. But nevertheless this rational method of
explanation is here quite inadequate. The very question that needs
explanation is why the fear has become so gigantic. The greatness
of the danger cannot be responsible, for the same army which now
falls a victim to panic may previously have faced equally great or
greater danger with complete success; it is of the very essence of
panic that it bears no relation to the danger that threatens, and
often breaks out on the most trivial occasions. If an individual in
panic fear begins to be solicitous only on his own account, he
bears witness in so doing to the fact that the emotional ties,
which have hitherto made the danger seem small to him, have ceased
to exist. Now that he is by himself in facing the danger, he may
surely think it greater. The fact is, therefore, that panic fear
presupposes a relaxation in the libidinal structure of the group
and reacts to that relaxation in a justifiable manner, and the
contrary view - that the libidinal ties of the group are destroyed
owing to fear in the face of the danger - can be refuted.

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   The contention that fear in a
group is increased to enormous proportions through induction
(contagion) is not in the least contradicted by these remarks.
McDougall’s view meets the case entirely when the danger is a
really great one and when the group has no strong emotional ties -
conditions which are fulfilled, for instance, when a fire breaks
out in a theatre or a place of amusement. But the truly instructive
case and the one which can be best employed for our purposes is
that mentioned above, in which a body of troops breaks into a panic
although the danger has not increased beyond a degree that is usual
and has often been previously faced. It is not to be expected that
the usage of the word ‘panic’ should be clearly and
unambiguously determined. Sometimes it is used to describe any
collective fear, sometimes even fear in an individual when it
exceeds all bounds, and often the name seems to be reserved for
cases in which the outbreak of fear is not warranted by the
occasion. If we take the word ‘panic’ in the sense of
collective fear, we can establish a far-reaching analogy. Fear in
an individual is provoked either by the greatness of a danger or by
the cessation of emotional ties (libidinal cathexes); the latter is
the case of neurotic fear or anxiety.¹ In just the same way
panic arises either owing to an increase of the common danger or
owing to the disappearance of the emotional ties which hold the
group together; and the latter case is analogous to that of
neurotic anxiety.²

   Anyone who, like McDougall
(1920
a
), describes a panic as one of the plainest functions
of the ‘group mind’, arrives at the paradoxical
position that this group mind does away with itself in one of its
most striking manifestations. It is impossible to doubt that panic
means the disintegration of a group; it involves the cessation of
all the feelings of consideration which the members of the group
otherwise show one another.

   The typical occasion of the
outbreak of a panic is very much as it is represented in
Nestroy’s parody of Hebbel’s play about Judith and
Holofernes. A soldier cries out: ‘The general has lost his
head!’ and thereupon all the Assyrians take to flight. The
loss of the leader in some sense or other, the birth of misgivings
about him, brings on the outbreak of panic, though the danger
remains the same; the mutual ties between the members of the group
disappear, as a rule, at the same time as the tie with their
leader. The group vanishes in dust, like a Prince Rupert’s
drop when its tail is broken off.

  
¹
See Lecture XXV of my
Introductory
Lectures
(1916-17)

  
²
Compare Béla von Felszeghy’s
interesting though somewhat over-imaginative paper ‘Panik und
Pankomplex’ (1920).

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   The dissolution of a religious
group is not so easy to observe. A short time ago there came into
my hands an English novel of Catholic origin, recommended by the
Bishop of London, with the title
When It Was Dark
. It gave a
clever and, as it seems to me, a convincing picture of such a
possibility and its consequences. The novel, which is supposed to
relate to the present day, tells how a conspiracy of enemies of the
person of Christ and of the Christian faith succeed in arranging
for a sepulchre to be discovered in Jerusalem. In this sepulchre is
an inscription, in which Joseph of Arimathaea confesses that for
reasons of piety he secretly removed the body of Christ from its
grave on the third day after its entombment and buried it in this
spot. The resurrection of Christ and his divine nature are by this
means disproved, and the result of this archaeological discovery is
a convulsion in European civilization and an extraordinary increase
in all crimes and acts of violence, which only ceases when the
forgers’ plot has been revealed.

   The phenomenon which accompanies
the dissolution that is here supposed to overtake a religious group
is not fear, for which the occasion is wanting. Instead of it
ruthless and hostile impulses towards other people make their
appearance, which, owing to the equal love of Christ, they had
previously been unable to do.¹  But even during the
kingdom of Christ those people who do not belong to the community
of believers, who do not love him, and whom he does not love, stand
outside this tie. Therefore a religion, even if it calls itself the
religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not
belong to it. Fundamentally indeed every religion is in this same
way a religion of love for all those whom it embraces; while
cruelty and intolerance towards those who do not belong to it are
natural to every religion. However difficult we may find it
personally, we ought not to reproach believers too severely on this
account; people who are unbelieving or indifferent are much better
off psychologically in this matter. If to-day that intolerance no
longer shows itself so violent and cruel as in former centuries, we
can scarcely conclude that there has been a softening in human
manners. The cause is rather to be found in the undeniable
weakening of religious feelings and the libidinal ties which depend
upon them. If another group tie takes the place of the religious
one - and the socialistic tie seems to be succeeding in doing so -
then there will be the same intolerance towards outsiders as in the
age of the Wars of Religion; and if differences between scientific
opinions could ever attain a similar significance for groups, the
same result would again be repeated with this new motivation.

  
¹
Compare the explanation of similar
phenomena after the abolition of the paternal authority of the
sovereign given in Federn’s
Die vaterlose Gesellschaft
(1919).

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VI

FURTHER PROBLEMS AND LINES OF WORK

We have hitherto considered two artificial
groups and have found that both are dominated by emotional ties of
two kinds. One of these, the tie with the leader, seems (at all
events for these cases) to be more of a ruling factor than the
other, which holds between the members of the group.

   Now much else remains to be
examined and described in the morphology of groups. We should have
to start from the ascertained fact that a mere collection of people
is not a group, so long as these ties have not been established in
it; but we should have to admit that in any collection of people
the tendency to form a psychological group may very easily come to
the fore. We should have to give our attention to the different
kinds of groups, more or less stable, that arise spontaneously, and
to study the conditions of their origin and of their dissolution.
We should above all be concerned with the distinction between
groups which have a leader and leaderless groups. We should
consider whether groups with leaders may not be the more primitive
and complete, whether in the others an idea, an abstraction, may
not take the place of the leader (a state of things to which
religious groups, with their invisible head, form a transitional
stage), and whether a common tendency, a wish in which a number of
people can have a share, may not in the same way serve as a
substitute. This abstraction, again, might be more or less
completely embodied in the figure of what we might call a secondary
leader, and interesting varieties would arise from the relation
between the idea and the leader. The leader or the leading idea
might also, so to speak, be negative; hatred against a particular
person or institution might operate in just the same unifying way,
and might call up the same kind of emotional ties as positive
attachment. Then the question would also arise whether a leader is
really indispensable to the essence of a groups - and other
questions besides.