Category: Psychiatry/Psychology

The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study

Since the publication of Le Bon's book, _The Crowd_, little has been added to our knowledge of the mechanisms of crowd-behavior. As a practical problem, the habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization. Events are making it more and more clear...

Chapters

15. Part 15

As it is, the state has become overgrown and bureaucratic. Commissions of all sorts are being multiplied year by year. Public debts are piled up till they approach the point of...

5. Part 5

According to Brill, these "auto erotic" persons are always homosexual, their homosexuality manifesting itself in various ways. The overt manifestations of this tendency are know...

7. Part 7

This likeness between the propaganda of the crowd and the delusions of paranoia is illustrated daily in our newspapers. The following items cut from the New York _Tribune_ are t...

14. Part 14

There is a demand for revenge for old abuses. The displaced crowd likely as not, foreseeing the doom which awaits its members, seeks escape by attempting a counter-revolution. A...

10. Part 10

Reformist crowds differ only superficially from religious crowds. Patriotic crowds make use of a different terminology, but their mental habits are the same. It has become a cul...

17. Part 17

The opinions about which people differ are for the most part ready-made. They are concerned with the choice of social mechanisms, but hardly with valuations. With nearly all ali...

9. Part 9

Note the fact that there is a necessary relation between the fixed ideal system of the paranoiac and his withdrawal of interest in the outside world. The system gains the functi...

18. Part 18

The new kind of education, the education which is to liberate the mind, will make much of scientific methods. But let us notice what it is to set a mind free. Mind does not exis...

11. Part 11

The fact remains, however, that the dominant crowd possesses always much of the crowd-spirit which originally secured for it its enviable position. Its ideas, like those of all...

12. Part 12

Revolutions do not occur directly from abuses of power, for in that case there would be nothing but revolution all the time, since every dominant crowd has abused its power. It...

16. Part 16

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is so often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their ir...

8. Part 8

In spite of the fact that the treatment of those who refused military service in this country was so much more severe than the manner with which the British government is report...

13. Part 13

The New Testament dwells upon some phase of this theme on nearly every page. Blessed are ye poor, and woe unto you who are rich, you who laugh now. The Messiah has come and with...

2. Part 2

Tarde and Le Bon were Frenchmen brought up on vivid descriptions of the Revolution and themselves apprehensive of the spread of socialism. Political movements which were in larg...

1. Part 1

Since the publication of Le Bon's book, _The Crowd_, little has been added to our knowledge of the mechanisms of crowd-behavior. As a practical problem, the habit of crowd-makin...

6. Part 6

In the case of abnormal people, the individual entirely fails to recognize the compensating influences which arise in the unconscious. He even continues to accentuate his onesid...

3. Part 3

Among civilized people, social relationships make severe demands upon the individual. Primitive impulses, unchecked eroticism, tendencies to perversions, and antisocial demands...

4. Part 4

Throughout the discussion thus far I have been making repeated reference to the psychology of the unconscious, without going into detail any more than was necessary. Let us now...

19. Part 19