Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Collective Psychology

Collective psychology, or human psychological behavior within communities, has been a subject of study in the Bible and among the ancient Greeks, hence since the origins of Western culture. In the nineteenth century, new fields of investigation opened up: schools of anthropology in Great Britain, folk psychology in Germany, and sociology in France. Sigmund Freud's predecessors and contemporaries within these schools of thought were his favorite interlocutors. From the outset, Freud collaborated in his works on individual and collective psychology (see his letters to Wilhelm Fliess dated December 6, 1896; January 24, 1897; and May 31, 1897 [1950a]).

This form of debate, if not actual borrowing, between psychoanalysis and collective psychology continued throughout Freud's work. A vivid and systematic picture thus emerges in which Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a) formed the basis for the Schreber case (1911c) and anticipated "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914c); in which Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) is a response to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) and paves the way for The Ego and the Id (1923b); and in which The Future of an Illusion (1927c) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]) led Freud to develop and elaborate, between 1923 and 1927, his structural theory (the castration complex, the superego, and the theory of anxiety) in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926d [1925]).

Some other works also relate to Freud's first topography: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905c), a contribution to the study of central European Jewish culture; "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1907b), the first major analogy between individual and collective psychology; and "'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908d), in which Freud proposes that society reduce cultural sexual repression as a collective prophylaxis for neurosis. Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939a [1937-1939], one of Freud's last works, brought together and explained the themes developed on collective psychology and went on to analyze Jewish and Christian monotheistic cultures. Finally, there is Freud's work between 1930 and 1932 on U.S. President Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1966).

The nexus between individual and collective psychology is the family, as the origin of the Oedipus complex and of totemism, which connects the transference neuroses with collective manifestations. Previously Freud had investigated more localized analogies of the connection between individual and group, such as analogies between the observances and rituals of obsessive neurotics and those of religion. From Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) on, he proclaimed collective psychology to be part of psychoanalysis and established his metapsychology on this basis. He discussed the libidinal dynamics of the formation and stabilization of groups in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) and explained the economic point of view in The Future of an Illusion (1927c) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]), where he related the economic point of view to hatred and fear. The topography characteristic of groups consists of reduced and simplified forms of the individual psychic agencies of the ego, ego ideal, and superego, as a result of the identifying ties that groups impose: "A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego" (1921c, p. 116). Depending on the form of authority and its degree of symbolic elaboration, these reductions are more or less extreme—hence the importance of the great man, capable of representing the ideal at the highest level of elaboration. There are three paradigmatic groups: the horde, the matriarchy, and the totemic clan (in political science, they correspond to rule by one person, by a few, and by all). They differ according to type of representative of the ideal, which ranges from the flesh-and-blood leader to such symbolic forms as the totem and the stated ideal, which substitute for the leader after the greater or lesser elaboration of his murder.

Freud created or developed some core concepts in the course of this research: primal ambivalence, narcissism, the Oedipus complex (1912-1913a); identifications, the ego ideal, aim-inhibited drives, sublimation (1921c); the superego and guilt feelings, dereliction and its consequences, the conflict between Eros and Thanatos (1927c, 1930a); and splitting of the ego, constructions in analysis (1939a).

Criticisms have abounded, impeding work on almost half of the body of Freud's work. Freud's method of analogy (between individual and collective psychic processes) has not been accepted, nor has his dynamic method. Freud's explicit Lamarckism concerning the transmission of mnemic traces in groups has been rejected. Freud has been criticized for a narrow view of religion that ignores its cultural contributions by considering it as a collective neurosis or delusion. Finally, although Freud considered matriarchy at an early stage (1911f), he neglected other similar figures of identification.

Two further qualifications were formulated by Freud himself: collective psychic processes have to be understood in isolation from any form of therapeutic activity; the analysis of these processes requires the analyst to be separated from groups, especially groups to which the subject belongs, which is difficult to achieve.

Psychoanalysis has made a clear contribution to anthropology, yet collective psychology has mainly been used with small groups in clinical practice. The metapsychological, sociological, and political dimensions of Freud's work have yet to be turned to account.

MICHÈLE PORTE

See also: Alienation; Anthropology and psychoanalysis; Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytical Study; Civilization and Its Discontents; "Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest"; "Dreams and myths"; Ego ideal; Fascination; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Identification; Le Bon, Gustave; Narcissism of minor differences; Otherness; Racism, anti-Semitism, and psychoanalysis; Schiff, Paul; Totem and Taboo.