The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study

by Everett Dean Martin

Now all pathological types of mental life have in common this quality of absent-mindedness, and it is held that the thing said or done absent-mindedly has in every instance, even when normal, a meaning which is unconscious. But the unconscious or unattended is by no means confined to the infrequent and the trivial. As temperament, or character, its activity is a determining factor in all our thought and conduct. Dream fancies do not really cease when we awake; the dream activity goes on all about our conscious thoughts, our associations now hovering near long-forgotten memories, now pulled in the direction of some unrecognized bit of personal conceit, now skipping on tiptoe over something forbidden and wicked and passing across without looking in; only a part of our mental processes ever directly finding expression in our conscious acts and words. The unchosen and the illogical run along with the desired and the logical material, only we have learned not to pay attention to such things. Under all our logical structures there flows a ceaseless stream of dream stuff. Our conscious thought is like little planks of attention laid end to end on the stones which here and there rise above the surface of our thinking. The mind skips across to a desired conclusion, not infrequently getting its feet wet, and, on occasion, upsetting a plank or slipping off and falling in altogether.

We have only to relax our attention a little to enter the world of day dreams, of art, and religion; we can never hold it so rigid as to be wholly rational for long.

Those interested in the general psychology of the unconscious are referred to the writings of such authorities in this field as Freud, Jung, Adler, Dr. A. A. Brill, and Dr. William White. In fact, the literature dealing with psychoanalysis is now so widely read that, unless the reader has received his information about this branch of science from hostile sources alone, it is to be assumed that he has a fairly accurate acquaintance with its general history and theory. We must confine our discussions to those aspects of unconscious behavior which can be shown by analogy with the psychoneurosis to be determinants of crowd-thinking. As the details and technical discussions of psychoanalytical material belong strictly to the psychiatric clinic, any attempt at criticism by the medical layman of the scientific processes by which they are established is of course impossible. Consequently, I have sought to make use of only those principles which are now so well established as to become rather generally accepted commonplaces of psychopathology.

All analysis reveals the fact that the unconscious of the individual is concerned primarily with himself. This is true in the psychosis, and always in dreams. Freud says:

Every dream is absolutely egotistical; in every dream the beloved ego appears, even though it be in a disguised form. The wishes that are realized in dreams are regularly the wishes of this ego; it is only a deceptive appearance if interest in another person is thought to have caused the dream.

Freud then proceeds to give analyses of several dreams in which the naïve egoism of childhood which lies at the core of the unconscious psyche is apparently absent, and shows that in each and every case it is there. The hero of our dreams, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, is always ourself.

Brill, in his book, Psychoanalysis, says of the neurosis:

Both hysteria and compulsion neurosis belong to the defense neuropsychoses; their symptoms originate through the psychic mechanism of defense, that is, through the attempt to repress a painful idea which was incompatible with the ego of the patient. There is still another more forceful and more successful form of defense wherein the ego misplaces the incompatible idea with its emotions and acts as though the painful idea had never come to pass. When this occurs the person merges into a psychosis which may be called "hallucinatory confusion."

Thus the psychoneurosis is in all its forms, I believe, regarded as a drama of the ego and its inner conflicts. The egoism of the unconscious belongs alike to the normal and the unadjusted. The mental abnormalities appear when the ego seeks to escape some such conflict by means of a closed system of ideas or symbolic acts which will divert attention from the unwelcome psychic material. Adler, in The Neurotic Constitution, is even, if possible, more emphatic in affirming the egoism of the unconscious as revealed in neurotics. His thesis is that the mainspring of all the efforts of achievement and the source of all the vicissitudes of the psyche is a desire to be important, or will to "be above," not wholly unlike Nietzsches theory of the "will to power." The neurosis goes back to some organic defect or other cause of childish humiliation. As a result, the cause of such humiliation, a defective bodily organ, or whatever it may be, gains special attention. The whole psyche is modified in the process of adjustment. In cases where the psyche remains normal, adjustment is achieved through stimulation to extra effort to overcome the disadvantage, as in the triumph of Demosthenes, Byron, Pope.

On the contrary, this disadvantage may result in a fixed feeling of inferiority. Such a feeling may be brought about in the sensitive child by a variety of circumstances, physical facts such as smallness of stature, adenoids, derangements of the alimentary organs, undersized genitals, homeliness of feature, or any physical deformity or weakness; again by such circumstances as domineering parents or older brothers and sisters. The child then thinks always of himself. He forms the habit of comparing himself with others. He creates, as a protection against the recognition of this feeling of inferiority, what Adler calls the "masculine protest."