The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study — A Closer Reading

There was a time when insanity was also regarded as excessive emotion. The insane man was one who raved, he was mad. The word "crazy" still suggests the condition of being "out of one's mind"--that is, driven by irrational emotion. Psychiatry would accept no such explanation to-day. Types of insanity are distinguished, not with respect to the mere amount of emotional excitement they display, but in accordance with the patient's whole psychic functioning. The analyst looks for some mechanism of controlling ideas and their relation to impulses which are operating in the unconscious. So with our understanding of the crowd-mind. Le Bon is correct in maintaining that the crowd is not a mere aggregation of people. _It is a state of mind._ A peculiar psychic change must happen to a group of people before they become a crowd. And as this change is not merely a release of emotion, neither is it the creation of a collective mind by means of imitation and suggestion. My thesis is that _the crowd-mind is a phenomenon which should best be classed with dreams, delusions, and the various forms of automatic behavior_. The controlling ideas of the crowd are the result neither of reflection nor of "suggestion," but are akin to what, as we shall see later, the psychoanalysts term "complexes." The crowd-self--if I may speak of it in this way--is analogous in many respects to "compulsion neurosis," "somnambulism," or "paranoiac episode." Crowd ideas are "fixations"; they are always symbolic; they are always related to something repressed in the unconscious. They are what Doctor Adler would call "fictitious guiding lines."

There is a sense in which all our thinking consists of symbol and fiction. The laws, measurements, and formulas of science are all as it were "shorthand devices"--instruments for relating ourselves to reality, rather than copies of the real. The "truth" of these working ideas is demonstrated in the satisfactoriness of the results to which they lead us. If by means of them we arrive at desired and desirable adaptations to and within our environment, we say they are verified. If, however, no such verification is reached, or the result reached flatly contradicts our hypothesis, the sane thinker holds his conclusions in abeyance, revises his theories, or candidly gives them up and clings to the real as empirically known.

Suppose now that a certain hypothesis, or "fiction," instead of being an instrument for dealing with external reality, is unconsciously designed as a refuge from the real. Suppose it is a symbolic compromise among conflicting desires in the individual's unconscious of which he cannot rid himself. Suppose it is a disguised expression of motives which the individual as a civilized being cannot admit to his own consciousness. Suppose it is a fiction necessary to keep up one's ego consciousness or self-appreciative feeling without which either he or his world would instantly become valueless. In these latter cases the fiction is not and cannot be, without outside help, modified by the reality of experience. The complex of ideas becomes a closed system, a world in and of itself. Conflicting facts of experience are discounted and denied by all the cunning of an insatiable, unconscious will. The fiction then gets itself substituted for the true facts of experience; the individual has "lost the function of the real." He no longer admits its disturbing elements as correctives. He has become mentally unadjusted--pathological.

Most healthy people doubtless would on analysis reveal themselves as nourishing fictions of this sort, more or less innocent in their effects. It is possible that it is by means of such things that the values of living are maintained for us all. But with the healthy these fictions either hover about the periphery of our known world as shadowy and elusive inhabitants of the inaccessible, or else they are socially acceptable as religious convention, race pride, ethical values, personal ambition, class honor, etc. The fact that so much of the ground of our valuations, at least so far as these affect our self-appreciation, is explicable by psychologists as "pathological" in origin need not startle us. William James in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, you will remember, took the ground that in judging of matters of this kind, it is not so much by their origins--even admitting the pathological as a cause--but by their fruits that we shall know them. There are "fictions" which are neither innocent nor socially acceptable in their effects on life and character. Many of our crowd-phenomena belong, like paranoia, to this last class.