The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study

by Everett Dean Martin

"Regression," or withdrawal of the libido, is present to some degree I believe in all forms of the neurosis. But we are informed that a withdrawal of the libido may, and frequently does, occur also in normal people. Knowledge of the neurosis here, as elsewhere, serves to throw light on certain thought processes of people who are considered normal. Brill says that "normally we seek a substitute for the suspended attachment." New interests and new affections in time take the places of the objects from which the feelings have been torn. In analytical psychology the process by which this is achieved is called a "transference."

Now the crowd is in a sense a "transference phenomenon." In the temporary crowd or mob this transference is too transitory to be very evident, though even here I believe there will generally be found a certain esprit de corps. In permanent crowds there is often a marked transference to the other members of the group. This is evident in the joy of the new convert or the newly initiated, also in such terms of affection as "comrade" and "brother." I doubt, however, if this affection, so far as it is genuine among individuals of a certain crowd, is very different from the good will and affection which may spring up anywhere among individuals who are more or less closely associated, or that it ever really extends beyond the small circle of personal friends that everyone normally gains through his daily relations with others.

But to the crowd-mind this transference is supposed to extend to all the members of the group; they are comrades and brothers not because we like them and know them intimately, but because they are fellow members. In other words, this transference, so far as it is a crowd phenomenon as such, is not to other individuals, but to the idea of the crowd itself. It is not enough for the good citizen to love his neighbors in so far as he finds them lovable; he must love his country. To the churchman the Church herself is an object of faith and adoration. One does not become a humanitarian by being a good fellow; he must love "humanity"—which is to say, the bare abstract idea of everybody. I remember once asking a missionary who was on his way to China what it was that impelled him to go so far in order to minister to suffering humanity. He answered, "It is love." I asked again, "Do you really mean to say that you care so much as that for Chinese, not one of whom you have ever seen?" He answered, "Well, I—you see, I love them through Jesus Christ." So in a sense it is with the crowd-man always; he loves through the crowd.

The crowd idealized as something sacred, as end in itself, as something which it is an honor to belong to, is to some extent a disguised object of our self-love. But the idea of the crowd disguises more than self-love. Like most of the symbols through which the unconscious functions, it can serve more than one purpose at a time. The idea of the crowd also serves to disguise the parental image, and our own imaginary identification or reunion with it. The nation is to the crowd-man the "Fatherland," the "mother country," "Uncle Sam"—a figure which serves to do more than personalize for cartoonists the initials U. S. Uncle Sam is also the father-image thinly disguised. The Church is "the Mother," again the "Bride." Such religious symbols as "the Heavenly Father" and the "Holy Mother" also have the value of standing for the parent image. For a detailed discussion of these symbols, the reader is referred to Jungs Psychology of the Unconscious.

In another connection I have referred to the fact that the crowd stands to the member in loco parentis. Here I wish to point out the fact that such a return to the parent image is commonly found in the psychoneurosis and is what is meant by "regression." I have also dwelt at some length on the fact that it is by securing a modification in the immediate social environment, ideally or actually, that the crowd permits the escape of the repressed wish. Such a modification in the social at once sets the members of the crowd off as a "peculiar people." Interest tends to withdraw from the social as a whole and center in the group who have become a crowd. The Church is "in the world but not of it." The nation is an end in itself, so is every crowd. Transference to the idea of the crowd differs then from the normal substitutes which we find for the object from which affection is withdrawn. It is itself a kind of regression. In the psychoneurosis—in paranoia most clearly—the patients attempt to rationalize this shifting of interest gives rise to the closed systems and ideal reconstructions of the world mentioned in the passage quoted from Brill.

Does the crowds thinking commonly show a like tendency to construct an imaginary world of thought-forms and then take refuge in its ideal system? As we saw at the beginning of our discussion, it does. The focusing of general attention upon the abstract and universal is a necessary step in the development of the crowd-mind.

The crowd does not think in order to solve problems. To the crowd-mind, as such, there are no problems. It has closed its case beforehand. This accounts for what Le Bon termed the "credulity" of the crowd. But the crowd believes only what it wants to believe and nothing else. Anyone who has been in the position of a public teacher knows how almost universal is the habit of thinking in the manner of the crowd and how difficult it is to get people to think for themselves. One frequently hears it said that the people do not think, that they do not want to know the truth.

Ibsen makes his Doctor Stockman say:

What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports? They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up.... These "majority truths" are like last years cured meat—like rancid tainted ham; and they are the origin of the moral scurvy that is rampant in our communities.... The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority, yes, the damned compact liberal majority ... the majority has might on its side unfortunately, but right it has never.

It is not really because so many are ignorant, but because so few are able to resist the appeal which the peculiar logic of crowd-thinking makes to the unconscious, that the cheap, the tawdry, the half-true almost exclusively gain popular acceptance. The average man is a dogmatist. He thinks what he thinks others think he is thinking. He is so used to propaganda that he can hardly think of any matter in other terms. It is almost impossible to keep the consideration of any subject of general interest above the dilemmas of partisan crowds. People will wherever possible change the discussion of a mooted question into an antiphonal chorus of howling mobs, each chanting its ritual as ultimate truth, and hurling its shibboleths in the faces of the others. Pursuit of truth with most people consists in repeating their creed. Nearly every movement is immediately made into a cult. Theology supplants religion in the churches. In popular ethics a dead formalism puts an end to moral advance. Straight thinking on political subjects is subordinated to partisan ends. Catch-phrases and magic formulas become substituted for scientific information. Even the Socialists, who feel that they are the intellectually elect—and I cite them here as an example in no unfair spirit, but just because so many of them are really well-informed and "advanced" in their thinking—have been unable to save themselves from a doctrinaire economic orthodoxy of spirit which is often more dogmatic and intolerant than that of the "religious folks" to whose alleged "narrow-mindedness" every Socialist, even while repeating his daily chapter from the Marxian Koran, feels himself superior.