Abstract
The following chapter proposes to examine the conception of the mass that runs through Freud’s work with particular reference to the analysis of religion that is developed in the essays on application. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), this reflection leads to the hope that, one day, science will take over from religious ideas. This prediction rests on a traditional apportioning whereby ignorance and superstition are the lot of the many while enlightenment through science the prerogative of the few. The psychoanalytic examination of religion does not entirely modify this view, it could even be said to reinforce it. Our purpose, however, is less to insist on the pejorative view on ‘the great number’ that psychoanalysis undeniably holds than to explore the way in which the scientific activity that psychoanalysis aims to constitute cannot easily make room for ‘the many’. It is mostly as far as the future science at issue in The Future is above all the psychoanalytic science of the mind, whose object of study is a psychical apparatus that the incompatibility between science and ‘the many’ takes its full importance. An overview of the apparently only ‘social’ concept of the mass that runs through Freud thus leads us to the core of the psychoanalytic project, by confronting us with the ‘delicate apparatus of the mind’, whose operations are not easily conceivable on a large scale.
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Notes
The rejection of hypnosis by psychoanalysis has inspired numerous studies. See for example, Chertok, L. and I. Stengers. Le Coeur et la raison, L’hypnose en question de Lavoisier à Lacan (Payot, 1989). See chapter 3 above.
On the association of the crowd with disease, see S. Barrows, Distorting mirrors Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France (Yale University Press, 1981). In ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894), Freud speaks of a ‘psychosis through simple intensification’ of an Überwältigungspsychose, ‘a psychosis of overwhelming’ (SE III, p. 55).
The question of observation is at issue in C. Borck’s article on ‘The Rhetoric of Freud’s Illustration’ in Freud and the N’euro-Sciences, From Brain Research to the Unconscious, ed. G. Guttmann and I. Scholz-Strasser (Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998). Borck demonstrates among other things, 1) that there is a continuity between the illustrations that Freud did as a medical student and researcher and those that he did in the metapsychological essays; 2) that what preoccupies Freud is above all the insufficiency of any visual representation. Yet we may wonder why the representation of the ‘libidinal constitution of a crowd’ in Mass psychology is not included among the illustrations that Borck discusses. Borck’s study raises the question as to what distinguishes the Bildersprache, the verbal auxiliary constructions from the visual ones. Is the one means more apt to provide ‘representations’ than the other?
This raises the classical question prevalent in the discourses on the crowd as to whether the crowd is capable or not of ‘elevated’ acts. The existing literature on dreams partly believes that dream-life provides a release from ‘the dictates of morality’. See chapter 3 above, and chapter II ‘The Morality of Crowds’ in Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Ernst Benn Limited [19th edn], 1947), pp. 56–9. The main points of this section pertain to the way in which the ‘moral standard of crowd is very low’ because the crowd gives impunity to the individual, who would not otherwise ‘gratify his instincts’ (pp. 56–7).
See P.-L. Assoun, Introduction à l’épistémologie freudienne (Payot, 1981), p. 147. See the whole of Chapter III ‘De la dynamique à l’économique. Le modèle Fechnero-Helmholtzien’, pp. 145–87.
The rejection of hypnosis by psychoanalysis has inspired numerous studies. See for example, Chertok, L. and I. Stengers. Le Coeur et la raison, L’hypnose en question de Lavoisier à Lacan (Payot, 1989). See chapter 3 above.
On the association of the crowd with disease, see S. Barrows, Distorting mirrors Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France (Yale University Press, 1981). In ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894), Freud speaks of a ‘psychosis through simple intensification’ of an Überwältigungspsychose, ‘a psychosis of overwhelming’ (SE III, p. 55).
The question of observation is at issue in C. Borck’s article on ‘The Rhetoric of Freud’s Illustration’ in Freud and the N’euro-Sciences, From Brain Research to the Unconscious, ed. G. Guttmann and I. Scholz-Strasser (Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998). Borck demonstrates among other things, 1) that there is a continuity between the illustrations that Freud did as a medical student and researcher and those that he did in the metapsychological essays; 2) that what preoccupies Freud is above all the insufficiency of any visual representation. Yet we may wonder why the representation of the ‘libidinal constitution of a crowd’ in Mass psychology is not included among the illustrations that Borck discusses. Borck’s study raises the question as to what distinguishes the Bildersprache, the verbal auxiliary constructions from the visual ones. Is the one means more apt to provide ‘representations’ than the other?
This raises the classical question prevalent in the discourses on the crowd as to whether the crowd is capable or not of ‘elevated’ acts. The existing literature on dreams partly believes that dream-life provides a release from ‘the dictates of morality’. See chapter 3 above, and chapter II ‘The Morality of Crowds’ in Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Ernst Benn Limited [19th edn], 1947), pp. 56–9. The main points of this section pertain to the way in which the ‘moral standard of crowd is very low’ because the crowd gives impunity to the individual, who would not otherwise ‘gratify his instincts’ (pp. 56–7).
See P.-L. Assoun, Introduction à l’épistémologie freudienne (Payot, 1981), p. 147. See the whole of Chapter III ‘De la dynamique à l’économique. Le modèle Fechnero-Helmholtzien’, pp. 145–87.
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© 2003 Céline Surprenant
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Surprenant, C. (2003). On a Large Scale. In: Freud’s Mass Psychology. Renewing Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913746_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913746_5
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