The large group: dynamics and passions

The question of whether one can imagine group psychic processes as being comparable to those of the individual was answered long ago. In his seminal paper “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego,” Freud, as early as 1921, wrote:

The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (Freud, 1921, p. 68)

Nevertheless, the group possesses a psychic functioning of its own, which can be different from that of the individuals that belong to it, a collective psychic reality that should not be reduced to a simple sum or even to the interaction of individual realities (Anzieu, 1975; Käes, 2004).

According to Freud, identification plays a crucial role in the building of group bonds:

Thus social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification  …  Many equals, who can identify themselves with one another, and a single person superior to them all—that is the situation that we find realized in groups which are capable of subsisting. (Freud, 1921, p. 120)

In the above passage, the issues of identification, hostility, leadership (the leader representing an ideal), and the relation of the individual to the group (be it the group leader or a member of it) seem closely knit. Before Freud’s ground-breaking text had been written, thinkers like Gustave Le Bon had already observed a group-specific tendency to rapid, profound regression, potentially leading to violence.

The psychoanalytic exploration of groups represented, among other things, an effort to fathom the functioning of the large social group. The term “large group” is used by Volkan to indicate “thousands or millions of individuals most of them will never meet in their life, sharing an intense sentiment of identity” (2007, p. 1047) – for instance an ethnic group or a political party.

Finally, there has been a shift in psychoanalytic approaches to large groups from an emphasis on the leader as an idealized father to the leader as an idealized, nurturing mother (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1999). In this line of thought, large groups could be representing an early mother (Anzieu, 1975). Anything that menaces this ideal, which forms the core of the identity of this group, is to be expelled or attacked. This may be one of the factors determining the emergence of hate and aggression in the group.

Hate is the subject matter of two erudite articles by Eva D. Papiasvili, the first, “Hate (its vicissitudes and its relations) revisited: Part I – Individual,” focusing on dynamic elements of hate in the individual context, and the second, “Hate (its vicissitudes and its relations) revisited: Part II – Groups and culture,” exploring hate as a multidimensional group phenomenon. These two papers, both of them an expansion of the author’s discussion of Harold Blum’s presentation on “Hate and its vicissitudes” in Prague in 2017, are to be read together. In Part I, hate in the individual is approached from a variety of angles, theoretical, clinical, and interdisciplinary, to be eventually considered:

as a complex affective-cognitive sentiment, instinctually invested with variously conceptualized aggression, structured in unconscious or partially conscious scenarios/fantasies, being employed for various purposes of (imagined or real) self-preservation and self-affirmation, closely alloyed with love, being activated and reactivated by trauma and loss as one of the potential posttraumatic responses.

Part II also makes use of a wealth of theoretical perspectives in order to focus on the group-specific dynamic of contagious regression that can unbridle not only hateful destructiveness, but also creative mobilization. In accordance with Volkan’s formulations, the author puts stress on the role of historical trauma and unresolved mourning as a binding factor for the members of a large group and as a predisposing factor to “regression into a paranoid ideology, paranoid mass movement, fanaticism, ostracizing, and violent attacks upon another political, national, or racial subgroup.”

“The constant concern about ‘purity of blood’, a past free from contamination by other creeds, cultures, and languages, undoubtedly has a lot to do, by way of collective reactive formation, with the need to escape the confusion and genuine identity fragmentation that constitutes  …  history,” observe Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Torres and Aranzanzu Fernandez-Rivas. In their article “Return to Sepharad: Is it possible to heal an ancient wound? A reflection on the constitution of large-group identity,” they explore the interplay of complex dynamics that may determine an ethnic group’s negative response to acknowledging a part of its history, namely the imposed choice of expulsion from Spain or conversion to Christianism put to the Jews of Spain in the fifteenth century. The authors believe that, in this case, dynamics of transgenerational transmission play an important role in the attitude of the descendants of those who were responsible for the mistreatment of Spanish Jews, thus extending Volkan’s views on transmission. What is also of major importance in this article is that it points out that “the introspection of the converts, forced to search within themselves for what they could not find through belonging to a large group, is an early manifestation of contemporary man.” So the ancient wound the authors mention could refer not only to a fragmented collective identity, but also to traumatic tensions between the individual and the large group.

Tensions with a tragic outcome between Wilhelm Reich, the charismatic but controversial member of the prewar Vienna Psychoanalytic society, and groups from the psychoanalytic community to postwar American society form the soil in which Henry Zvi Lothane traces the itinerary of Reich as a psychoanalytic sociologist and analyzes one of his major works, The mass psychology of fascism. In his article “Wilhelm Reich revisited: The role of ideology in character analysis of the individual versus character analysis of the masses and the Holocaust,” the author portrays Wilhelm Reich as “a dreamer” who (in Reich’s own words) “gets out of step with the marching column of the human herd.” Henry Zvi Lothane does not omit to point out the perspicacity with which the fascist leader’s appeal to the masses is analyzed in The mass psychology of fascism: he observes that Reich attributed “Hitler’s success  …  [and] his mass psychological effect [to] his ideology [bearing] a resemblance to the average structure of a broad category of individuals.”

Myths, folktales, and, in the era of mass culture, films are a royal road to the unconscious of the large group. This idea forms the starting point of the article “Persian tales on the couch: Notes on folktales as the mirror of the contemporary cultural struggles with gender and sexuality” by Siamak Movahedi and Nahaleh Moshtagh. The authors study Persian storylines dealing with the struggle between men and women, aiming at identifying core preoccupations in the collective mind of the Iranian nation concerning the relation between the sexes.