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 known as perversions. Certain persons who have suppressed or sublimated these tendencies, by means of certain defense mechanisms, or "fictions," as Adler would call them, get along very well so long as the defense mechanism functions. There are cases when this unconsciously constructed defense breaks down. An inner conflict is then precipitated, a marked form of which is the common type of insanity, "paranoia." Persons suffering with paranoia are characterized by an insatiable demand for love along with a psychic incapacity to give love. They have an exaggerated sense of their own importance which is sustained by a wholly unreal but deadly logical system of _a priori_ ideas, which constitute the "obsessions" common to this type of mentality. The inner conflict becomes external--that is, it is "projected." The paranoiac projects his own inner hostility and lack of adjustment upon others--that is, he attributes his own feeling of hostility to some one else, as if he were the object, not the author, of his hatred. He imagines that he is persecuted, as the following example will show. The passage here quoted is taken from a pamphlet which was several years ago given to me by the author. He ostensibly wished to enlist my efforts in a campaign he believed himself to be conducting to "expose" the atrocious treatment of persons, like himself, who were imprisoned in asylums as the innocent victims of domestic conspiracy. By way of introducing himself the author makes it known that he has several times been confined in various hospitals, each time by the design and instigation of his wife, and after stating that on the occasion described he was very "nervous and physically exhausted" and incidentally confessing that he was arrested while attempting homicide "purely in self-defense," he gives this account of his incarceration:

I was locked in a cold cell, and being in poor health, my circulation was poor, and the officer ordered me to go to bed and I obeyed his orders, but I began to get cold, and believing then, as I still believe, that the coffee I got out of the coffee tank for my midnight lunch had been "doped," and fearful that the blood in my veins which began to coagulate would stop circulating altogether, I got out of bed and walked the floor to and fro all the remainder of the night and by so doing I saved my life. For had I remained in bed two hours I would have been a dead man before sunrise next morning. I realized my condition and had the presence of mind to do everything in my power to save my life and put my trust in God, and asked his aid in my extremity. But for divine aid, I would not now have the privilege of writing my awful experiences in that hell-hole of a jail.

The officer who arrested me without any warrant of law, and without any unlawful act on my part was the tool of some person or persons who were either paid for their heinous crime, or of the landlady of the ---- hotel (he had been a clerk there) who allowed gambling to go on nearly every night, and thought I was a detective or spy, and so was instrumental in having me thrown into jail.

I begged so hard not to be locked in the cell that I was allowed to stay in the corridor in front of the cells. I observed chloral dripping through the roof of the cell-house in different places, and as I had had some experience with different drugs, I detected the smell of chloral as soon as I entered the cell-house.

Sometime after midnight some one stopped up the stovepipe and the door of the coal stove was left open so that the coal gas issued from the stove, so that breathing was difficult in the jail. The gases from the stove and other gases poisoned the air ... and your humble servant had the presence of mind to tear up a hair mattress and kept my nostrils continually filled with padding out of the mattress. I would often and instantly change the filling in one nostril, and not during the long hours of that awful night did I once open my mouth. In that manner I inhaled very little gases. Why in my weakened condition and my poor health anyone wanted to deprive me of my life I am at a loss to know, but failing to kill me, I was taken after nearly three days of sojourn in that hell-hole to the courthouse in ----. But such thoughts as an innocent man in my condition would think, in among criminals of all sorts, can better be imagined than described.... I thought of Christ's persecutors and I thought how the innocent suffer because of the wicked.

In general we may say that the various forms of psychoneurosis are characterized by a conflict of the ego with primitive impulses inadequately repressed. In defense against these impulses, which though active remain unconsciously so, the individual constructs a fictitious system of ideas, of symbolic acts, or bodily symptoms. These systems are attempts to compromise the conflict in the unconscious, and in just the degree that they are demanded for this function, they fail of their function of adjusting the individual to his external world. Thought and behavior thus serve the purpose of compensating for some psychic loss, and of keeping up the individual's self feeling. Though the unconscious purpose is to enhance the ego consciousness, the mechanisms through which this end is achieved produce through their automatic and stereotyped form a shrinking of personality and a serious lack of adjustment to environment.

Now it is not at all the aim of this argument to try to prove that crowds are really insane. Psychoanalysts commonly assert that the difference between the normal and the abnormal is largely one of degree and of success in adjustment. We are told that the conflict exists also in normal people, with whom, however, it is adequately repressed and "sublimated"--that is, normal people pass on out of the stages in which the libido of the neurotic becomes fixed, not by leaving them behind, but by attaching the interests which emerge in such stages to ends which are useful in future experience. The neurotic takes the solitary path of resolving the conflict between his ego and the impulses which society demands shall be repressed.

It is altogether conceivable that _another path lies open--that of occasional compromise in our mutual demands on one another_. The force of repression is then relaxed by an unconscious change in the significance of social ideas. Such a change must of course be mutual and unconscious. Compromise mechanisms will again be formed serving a purpose similar to the neurosis. As in the neurosis, thought and action will be compulsory, symbolic, stereotyped, and more or less in conflict with the demands of society as a whole, though functioning in a part of it for certain purposes. Many of the characteristics of the unconscious will then appear and will be similar in some respects to those of neurosis. It is my contention that this is what happens in the crowd, and I will now point out certain phases of crowd-behavior which are strikingly analogous to some of the phenomena which have been described above.

IV

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

The unconscious egoism of the individual in the crowd appears in all forms of crowd-behavior. As in dreams and in the neurosis this self feeling is frequently though thinly disguised, and I am of the opinion that with the crowd the mechanisms of this disguise are less subtle. To use a term which Freud employs in this connection to describe the process of distortion in dreams, the "censor" is less active in the crowd than in most phases of mental life. Though the conscious thinking is carried on in abstract and impersonal formula, and though, as in the neurosis, the "compulsive" character of the mechanisms developed frequently--especially in permanent crowds--well nigh reduces the individual to an automaton, the crowd is one of the most naïve devices that can be employed for enhancing one's ego consciousness. The individual has only to transfer his repressed self feeling to the idea of the crowd or group of which he is a member; he can then exalt and exhibit himself to almost any extent without shame, oblivious of the fact that the supremacy, power, praise, and glory which he claims for his crowd are really claimed for himself.

That the crowd always insists on being flattered is a fact known intuitively by every orator and editor. As a member of a crowd the individual becomes part of a public. The worship with which men regard "The Public," simply means that the personal self falls at the feet of the same self regarded as public, and likewise demands that obeisance from all. _Vox populi est vox Dei_ is obviously the apotheosis of one's own voice while speaking as crowd-man. When this "god-almightiness" manifests itself along the solitary path of the psychoneurosis it becomes one of the common symptoms of paranoia. The crowd, in common with paranoia, uniformly shows this quality of "megalomania." Every crowd "boosts for" itself, lauds itself, gives itself airs, speaks with oracular finality, regards itself as morally superior, and will, so far as it has the power, lord it over everyone. Notice how each group and section in society, so far as it permits itself to think as crowd, claims to be "the people." To the working-class agitator, "the cause of labor is the cause of humanity," workers are always, "innocent exploited victims, kept down by the master class whose lust for gain has made them enemies of Humanity and Justice." "Workers should rule because they are the only useful people; the sole creators of wealth; their dominance would mean the end of social wrong, and the coming of the millennium of peace and brotherhood, the Kingdom of Heaven on the Earth, the final triumph of Humanity!"

On the other hand, the wealthy and educated classes speak of themselves as "the best people"; they _are_ "society." It is they who "bear the burdens of civilization, and maintain Law and Order and Decency." Racial and national crowds show the same megalomania. Hebrews are "God's chosen." "The Dutch Company is the best Company that ever came over from the Old Country." "The Irish may be ornery, and they ain't worth much, but they are a whole lot better than the ---- ---- Dutch." "Little Nigger baby, black face, and shiny eye, you're just as good as the poor white trash, an' you'll git thar by and by." "He might have been a Russian or a Prussian, ... but it's greatly to his credit that he is an Englishman." The German is the happy bearer of _Kultur_ to a barbarian world. America is "The land of the free and the home of the brave," and so on, wherever a group has become sufficiently a crowd to have a propaganda of its own. Presbyterians are "the Elect," the Catholics have the "true church of God," the Christian Scientists have alone attained "Absolute Truth."

A number of years ago, when the interest in the psychology of the crowd led me to attempt a study of Mr. Sunday's revival meetings, then in their earlier stages, certain facts struck me with great force. Whatever else the revival may be, it provides the student of psychology with a delightful specimen for analysis. Every element of the mob or crowd-mind is present and the unconscious manifests itself with an easy naïveté which is probably found nowhere else, not even in the psychiatric clinic. One striking fact, which has since provided me with food for a good deal of reflection, was the place which the revival holds in what I should like to call the spiritual economy of modern democracy.

It is an interesting historical fact that each great religious revival, from Savonarola down, has immediately followed--and has been the resistance of the man in the street to--a period of intellectual awakening. Mr. Sunday's meetings undeniably provided a device whereby a certain psychic type, an element which had hitherto received scant recognition in the community, could enormously enhance his ego consciousness. It would be manifestly unfair to say that this is the sole motive of the religious revival, or that only this type of mind is active in it. But it is interesting to see whose social survival values stand out most prominently in these religious crowd-phenomena. The gambler, the drunkard, the loafer, the weak, ignorant, and unsuccessful, whose self-esteem it may be assumed had always been made to suffer in small communities, where everyone knew everyone else, had only to yield himself to the pull of the obviously worked-up mechanism of the religious crowd, and lo! all was changed. He was now the repentant sinner, the new convert, over whom there was more rejoicing in heaven, and, what was more visible, also for a brief time, in the Church, than over the ninety and nine just persons. He was "redeemed," an object now of divine love, a fact which anyone who has studied the effects of these crowd-movements scientifically will agree was at once seized upon by these converts to make their own moral dilemmas the standards of righteousness in the community, and hence secure some measure of dominance.

This self-adulation of crowds, with its accompanying will to be important, to dominate, is so constant and characteristic a feature of the crowd-mind that I doubt if any crowd can long survive which fails to perform this function for its members. Self-flattery is evident in the pride with which many people wear badges and other insignia of groups and organizations to which they belong, and in the pompous names by which fraternal orders are commonly designated. In its more "exhibitionist" types it appears in parades and in the favorite ways in which students display their "college spirit." How many school and college "yells" begin with the formula, "Who are We?" obviously designed to call general attention to the group and impress upon people its importance.

In this connection I recall my own student days, which are doubtless typical--the pranks which served the purpose of bringing certain groups of students into temporary prominence and permitted them for a brief period to regard themselves as comic heroes, the practices by which the different classes and societies sought to get the better of one another, the "love feasts" of my society which were hardly more than mutual admiration gatherings, the "pajama" parades in which the entire student body would march in costume (the wearing of which by an isolated individual would probably have brought him before a lunacy commission) all through the town and round and round the dormitories of the women's college a mile or so away, in order to announce a victory in some intercollegiate contest or other. There was the brazenness--it seems hardly credible now--with which the victors on such occasions would permit themselves to be carried on their comrades' shoulders through the public square, also the deportment with which a delegation of students would announce their arrival in a neighboring college town and the grinning self-congratulation with which we would sit in chapel and hear a wrathful president denounce our group behavior as "boorishness and hoodlumism." There was the unanimous conviction of us all, for no other reason I imagine than that it was graced with our particular presence, that our own institution was the most superior college in existence, and I well remember the priggishness with which at student banquets we applauded the sentiment repeated _ad nauseam_, that the great aim of education and the highest mark of excellence in our college was the development of character. What is it all but a slightly exaggerated account of the egoism of all organized crowds? Persons of student age are for the most part still in the normal "narcissus" period, and their ego-mania is naturally less disguised than that of older groups. But even then we could never have given such open manifestation to it as isolated individuals; it required the crowd-spirit.

The egoism of the crowd commonly takes the form of the will to social dominance and it is in crowd behavior that we learn how insatiable the repressed egoism of mankind really is. Members of the crowd are always promising one another a splendid future triumph of some sort. This promise of victory, which is nearly always to be enjoyed at the expense, discomfiture, and humiliation of somebody else, is of great advantage in the work of propaganda. People have only to be persuaded that prohibition, or equal suffrage, or the single tax "is coming," and thousands whose reason could not be moved by argument, however logical it might be, will begin to look upon it with favor. The crowd is never so much at home as "on the band wagon." Each of the old political parties gains strength through the repeated prediction of victory in the presidential campaign of 1920. The Socialist finds warmth in the contemplation of the "coming dictatorship of the proletariat." The Prohibitionist intoxicates himself by looking forward to a "dry world." So long as the German crowds expected a victorious end of the war, their morale remained unbroken, the Kaiser was popular.

When a crowd is defeated and its hope of victory fades, the individual soon abandons the unsuccessful group. The great cause, being now a forlorn hope, is seen in a different light, and the crowd character of the group vanishes. When, however, certain forces still operate to keep the crowd state of mind alive--forces such as race feeling, patriotism, religious belief, or class consciousness--the ego consciousness of the individuals so grouped finds escape in the promise of heaven, the Judgment Day, and that "far off divine event toward which the whole creation moves." Meanwhile the hope of victory is changed into that "impotent resentment" so graphically described by Nietzsche.

Another way in which the self feeling of the crowd functions is in idealizing those who succeed in gaining its recognition. The crowd always makes a hero of the public person, living or dead. Regardless of what he really did or was, he is transformed into a symbol of what the crowd wishes to believe him to be. Certain aspects of his teaching and various incidents which would appear in his biography are glossed over, and made into supports for existing crowd-ideas and prejudices. Most of the great characters in history have suffered in this way at the hands of tradition. The secret of their greatness, their uniqueness and spiritual isolation, is in great part ignored. The crowd's own secret is substituted. The great man now appears great because he possessed the qualities of little men. He is representative man, crowd man. Every crowd has a list of heroic names which it uses in its propaganda and in its self-laudation. The greatness which each crowd reveres and demands that all men honor is just that greatness which the crowd treasures as a symbol of itself, the sort of superiority which the members of the crowd may suck up to swell their own ego consciousness.

Thus, hero worship is unconsciously worship of the crowd itself, and the constituents thereof. The self-feeling of a crowd is always enhanced by the triumph of its leader or representative. Who, at a ball game or athletic event, has not experienced elation and added self-complacency in seeing the home team win? What other meaning has the excited cheering? Even a horse on a race track may become the representative of a crowd and lift five thousand people into the wildest joy and ecstasy by passing under a wire a few inches ahead of a rival. We have here one of the secrets of the appeal which all such exhibitions make to people. Nothing so easily catches general attention and creates a crowd as a contest of any kind. The crowd unconsciously identifies its members with one or the other competitor. Success enables the winning crowd to "crow over" the losers. Such an occasion becomes symbolic and is utilized by the ego to enhance its feeling of importance.

A similar psychological fact may be observed in the "jollifications" of political parties after the election of their candidates for high office. This phenomenon is also seen, if I may say so without being misunderstood, in the new spirit which characterizes a people victorious in war, and is to no small degree the basis of the honor of successful nations. It is seen again in the pride which the citizens of a small town show in the fact that the governor of the state is a native of the place. This same principle finds place in such teachings of the Church as the doctrine of the "communion of the saints," according to which the spiritual grace and superiority of the great and pure become the common property of the Church, and may be shared by all believers as a saving grace.

Every organized crowd is jealous of its dignity and honor and is bent upon keeping up appearances. Nothing is more fatal to it than a successful assault upon its prestige. Every crowd, even the casual street mob, clothes the egoistic desires of its members or participants in terms of the loftiest moral motive. No crowd can afford to be laughed at. Crowd men have little sense of humor, certainly none concerning themselves and their crowd-ideas. Any laughter they indulge in is more likely to be directed at those who do not believe with them. The crowd-man resents any suspicion of irreverence or criticism of his professions, because to question them is to weaken the claim of his crowd upon the people, and to destroy in those professed ideals their function of directing his own attention away from the successful compromise of his unconscious conflicts which the crowd had enabled him to make. The crowd would perish if it lost its "ideals." It clings to its fixed ideas with the same tenacity as does the paranoiac. You can no more reason with the former than you can with the latter, and for much the same cause; the beliefs of both are not the fruit of inquiry, neither do they perform the normal intellectual function of adjustment to environment; they are mechanisms of the ego by which it keeps itself in countenance.

Much of the activity of the unconscious ego is viewed by psychologists as "compensation." Devices which serve the purpose of compensating the ego for some loss, act of self-sacrifice, or failure, are commonly revealed by both the normal and the unadjusted. The popular notion that unsatisfied desires sooner or later perish of starvation is at best but a half truth. These desires after we have ceased to attend them become transformed. They frequently find satiety in some substitute which the unconscious accepts as a symbol of its real object. Dreams of normal people contain a great deal of material of this sort. So do day-dreams, and art. Many religious beliefs also serve this purpose of compensation. Jung follows Freud in pointing out as a classic example of the compensation in dreams, that of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Bible.

Nebuchadnezzar at the height of his power had a dream which foretold his downfall. He dreamed of a tree which had raised its head even up to Heaven and now must be hewn down. This was a dream which is obviously a counterpoise to the exaggerated feeling of royal power.

According to Jung, we may expect to find only those things contained in the unconscious which we have not found in the conscious mind. Many conscious virtues and traits of character are thus compensations for their opposite in the unconscious.