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 onesidedness; this is in accord with the well-known psychological fact that the worst enemy of the wolf is the wolfhound, the greatest despiser of the negro is the mulatto, and that the biggest fanatic is the convert; for I should be a fanatic were I to attack a thing outwardly which inwardly I am obliged to concede is right.

The mentally unbalanced man tries to defend himself against his own unconscious--that is to say, he battles against his own compensating influences. In normal minds opposites of feeling and valuations lie closely associated; the law of this association is called "ambivalence," about which we shall see more later. In the abnormal, the pairs are torn asunder, the resulting division, or strife, leads to disaster, for the unconscious soon begins to intrude itself violently upon the conscious processes.

An especially typical form of unconscious compensation ... is the paranoia of the alcoholic. The alcoholic loses his love for his wife; the unconscious compensation tries to lead him back again to his duty, but only partially succeeds, for it causes him to become jealous of his wife as if he still loved her. As we know, he may go so far as to kill both his wife and himself, merely out of jealousy. In other words, his love for his wife has not been entirely lost. It has simply become subliminal; but from the realm of consciousness it can now only reappear in the form of jealousy.... We see something of a similar nature in the case of the religious convert.... The new convert feels himself constrained to defend the faith he has adopted (since much of the old faith still survives in the unconscious associations) in a more or less fanatical way. It is exactly the same in the paranoiac who feels himself constantly constrained to defend himself against all external criticism, because his delusional system is too much threatened from within.

It is not necessary for us to enter here upon a discussion of the processes by which these compensating devices are wrought out in the psychoneurosis. It is significant, though, that Jung calls attention to the likeness between religious fanaticism and paranoia. Now it is obvious that the fanaticism of the religious convert differs psychologically not at all from that of any other convert. We have already noted the fact that most religious conversions are accomplished by the crowd. Moreover the crowd everywhere tends to fanaticism. The fanatic is the crowd-man pure and simple. He is the type which it ever strives to produce. His excess of devotion, and willingness to sacrifice both himself and everyone else for the crowd's cause, always wins the admiration of his fellow crowd-members. He has given all for the crowd, is wholly swallowed by it, is "determined not to know anything save" his crowd and its propaganda. He is the martyr, the true believer, "the red-blooded loyal American" with "my country right or wrong." He is the uncompromising radical whose prison record puts to shame the less enthusiastic members of his group. He is the militant pacifist, the ever-watchful prohibitionist, and keeper of his neighbors' consciences, the belligerent moral purist, who is scandalized even at the display of lingerie in the store windows, the professional reformer who in every community succeeds in making his goodness both indispensable and unendurable.

One need not be a psychologist to suspect that the evil against which the fanatic struggles is really in large measure in himself. He has simply externalized, or "projected" the conflict in his own unconscious. Persons who cry aloud with horror at every change in the style of women's clothing are in most cases persons whose ego is gnawed by a secret promiscuous eroticism. The scandalmonger, inhibited from doing the forbidden thing, enjoys himself by a vicarious indulgence in rottenness. The prohibition agitator, if not himself an alcoholic barely snatched from the burning, is likely to be one who at least feels safer in a democracy where it is not necessary to resist temptation while passing a saloon door. Notice that the fanatic or crowd-man always strives to universalize his own moral dilemmas. This is the device by which every crowd seeks dominance in the earth. A crowd's virtues and its vices are really made out of the same stuff. Each is simply the other turned upside down, the compensation for the other. They are alike and must be understood together as the expression of the type of person who constitutes the membership of some particular group or crowd.

I'll never use tobacco, it is a filthy weed I'll never put it in my mouth, said little Robert Reed.

But obviously, little Robert is already obsessed with a curious interest in tobacco. His first word shows that he has already begun to think of this weed in connection with himself. Should a crowd of persons struggling with Robert's temptation succeed in dominating society, tobacco would become taboo and thus would acquire a moral significance which it does not have at present. So with all our crowd-ethics. The forbidden thing protrudes itself upon consciousness as a negation. The negation reveals what it is that is occupying the inner psyche, and is its compensation. There are certain psychoneuroses in which this negative form of compensation is very marked. Now it is a noteworthy fact that with the crowd the ethical interest always takes this negative form.

The healthy moral will is characterized by a constant restating of the problem of living in terms of richer and higher and more significant dilemmas as new possibilities of personal worth are revealed by experience. New and more daring valuations are constantly made. The whole psychic functioning is enriched. Goodness means an increase of satisfactions through a more adequate adjustment to the real--richer experience, more subtle power of appreciation and command, a self-mastery, sureness, and general personal excellence--which on occasions great and small mark the good will as a reality which counts in the sum total of things. Something is achieved because it is really desired; existence is in so far humanized, a self has been realized. As Professor Dewey says:

If our study has shown anything it is that the moral _is_ a life, not something ready-made and complete once for all. It is instinct with movement and struggle, and it is precisely the new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift it to higher levels.

It is not so with the crowd-ethic. It is interesting to note that from the "Decalogue" to Kant's "Categorical Imperative," crowd-morals always and everywhere take the form of prohibitions, taboos, and ready-made standards, chiefly negative. Freud has made an analytical study of the Taboo as found in primitive society and has shown that it has a compensatory value similar to that of the taboos and compulsions of certain neurotics.

The crowd admits of no personal superiority other than that which consists in absolute conformity to its own negative standards. Except for the valuations expressed by its own dilemmas, "one man is as good as another"--an idea which it can be easily seen serves the purpose of compensation. The goodness which consists of unique personal superiority is very distasteful to the crowd. There must be only one standard of behavior, alike for all. A categorical imperative. The standard as set up is of the sort which is most congenial, possible of attainment, and even necessary for the survival of the members of some particular crowd. It is _their_ good, the converse and compensation of their own vices, temptations, and failures. The crowd then demands that this good shall be THE GOOD, that it become the universal standard. By such means even the most incompetent and unadventurous and timid spirits may pass judgment upon all men. They may cry to the great of the earth, "We have piped unto you and you have not danced." Judged by the measure of their conformity to the standards of the small, the great may be considered no better, possibly not so good as the little spirits. The well are forced to behave like the spiritually sick. The crowd is a dog in the manger. If eating meat maketh my brother to be scandalized, or giveth him the cramps, I shall remain a vegetarian so long as the world standeth. Nietzsche was correct on this point. The crowd--he called it the herd--is a weapon of revenge in the hands of the weaker brother. It is a Procrustean bed on which every spiritual superiority may be lopped off to the common measure, and every little ego consciousness may be stretched to the stature of full manhood.

V

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

Probably the most telling point of likeness between the crowd-mind and the psychoneurosis--paranoia especially--is the "delusion of persecution." In cases of paranoia the notion that the patient is the victim of all sorts of intrigue and persecution is so common as to be a distinguishing symptom of this disease. Such delusions are known to be defenses, or compensation mechanisms, growing out of the patient's exaggerated feeling of self-importance. The delusion of grandeur and that of being persecuted commonly go together. The reader will recall the passage quoted from the pamphlet given me by a typical paranoiac. The author of the document mentioned feels that he has a great mission, that of exposing and reforming the conditions in hospitals for the insane. He protests his innocence. In jail he feels like Christ among his tormentors. His wife has conspired against him. The woman who owns the hotel where he was employed wishes to put him out of the way. The most fiendish methods are resorted to in order to end his life. "Some one" blocked up the stovepipe, etc., etc.

Another illustration of a typical case is given by Doctor Brill. I quote scattered passages from the published notes on the case record of the patient, "E. R."

He graduated in 1898 and then took up schoolteaching.... He did not seem to get along well with his principal and other teachers.... He imagined that the principal and other teachers were trying to work up a "badger game" on him, to the effect that he had some immoral relations with his girl pupils....

In 1903 he married, after a brief courtship, and soon thereafter took a strong dislike to his brother-in-law and sister and accused them of immorality.... He also accused his wife of illicit relations with his brother and his brother-in-law, Mr. S.

Mr. S., his brother-in-law, was the arch conspirator against him. He also (while in the hospital) imagined that some women made signs to him and were in the hospital for the purpose of liberating him. Whenever he heard anybody talking he immediately referred it to himself. He interpreted every movement and expression as having some special meaning for himself....

Now and then (after his first release by order of the court) he would send mysterious letters to different persons in New York City. At that time one of his delusions was that he was a great statesman and that the United States government had appointed him ambassador (to Canada), but that the "gang" in New York City had some one without ability to impersonate him so that he lost his appointment. (Later, while confined to the hospital again) he thought that the daughter of the President of the United States came to visit him....

After the patient was recommitted to Bellevue Hospital, he told me that I (Doctor Brill) was one of the "gang." I was no longer his wife in disguise (as he has previously imagined) but his enemy.

Brill's discussion of this case contains an interesting analysis of the several stages of "regression" and the unconscious mechanisms which characterize paranoia. He holds that such cases show a "fixation" in an earlier stage of psychosexual development. The patient, an unconscious homosexual, is really in love with himself. The resulting inner conflict appears, with its defense formations, as the delusion of grandeur and as conscious hatred for the person or persons who happen to be the object of the patient's homosexual wish fancy. However this may be, the point of interest for our study is the "projection" of this hatred to others. Says Brill:

The sentence, "I rather hate him" becomes transformed through projection into the sentence, "he hates (persecutes) me, which justifies my hating him."

The paranoiac's delusional system inevitably brings him in conflict with his environment, but his feeling of being persecuted is less the result of this conflict with an external situation than of his own inner conflict. He convinces himself that it is the other, or others, not he, who is the author of this hatred. He is the innocent victim of their malice.

This phenomenon of "projection and displacement" has received considerable attention in analytical psychology. Freud, in the book, _Totem and Taboo_, shows the role which projection plays in the primitive man's fear of demons. The demons are of course the spirits of the dead. But how comes it that primitive people fear these spirits, and attribute to them every sort of evil design against the living? To quote Freud:

When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called "obsessive reproaches," which raise the question whether she herself has not been guilty, through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt, can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainspring of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified.... Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person; indeed, it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions....

By assuming a similar high degree of ambivalence in the emotional life of primitive races such as psychoanalysis ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it becomes comprehensible that the same kind of reaction against the hostility latent in the unconscious behind the obsessive reproaches of the neurotic should also be necessary here after the painful loss has occurred. But this hostility, which is painfully felt in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction with the demise, experiences a different fate in the case of primitive man: the defense against it is accomplished by a displacement upon the object of hostility--namely, the dead. We call this defense process, frequent in both normal and diseased psychic life, a "projection."... Thus we find that taboo has grown out of the soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The taboo of the dead also originates from the opposition between conscious grief and the unconscious satisfaction at death. If this is the origin of the resentment of spirits, it is self-evident that the nearest and formerly most beloved survivors have to feel it most. As in neurotic symptoms, the taboo regulations evince opposite feelings. Their restrictive character expresses mourning, while they also betray very clearly what they are trying to conceal--namely, the hostility toward the dead which is now motivated as self-defense....

The double feeling--tenderness and hostility--against the deceased, which we consider well-founded, endeavors to assert itself at the time of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction. A conflict must ensue between these contrary feelings, and as one of them--namely, the hostility, is altogether, or for the greater part, unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a conscious difference in the form of hostility or tenderness, as, for instance, when we forgive an injury inflicted upon us by some one we love. The process usually adjusts itself through a special psychic mechanism which is designated in psychoanalysis as "projection." This unknown hostility, of which we are ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected from our inner perception into the outer world and is thereby detached from our own person and attributed to another. Not we, the survivors, rejoice because we are rid of the deceased, on the contrary we mourn for him; but now, curiously enough, he has become an evil demon who would rejoice in our misfortune and who seeks our death. The survivors must now defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression, but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction from without.

Totem, taboo, demon worship, etc., are clearly primitive crowd-phenomena. Freud's main argument in this book consists in showing the likeness between these phenomena and the compulsion neurosis. The projection of unconscious hostility upon demons is by no means the only sort of which crowds both primitive and modern are capable. Neither must the hostility always be unconscious. Projection is a common device whereby even normal and isolated individuals justify themselves in hating. Most of us love to think evil of our enemies and opponents. Just as two fighting schoolboys will each declare that the other "began it," so our dislike of people often first appears to our consciousness as a conviction that they dislike or entertain unfriendly designs upon us. There is a common type of female neurotic whose repressed erotic wishes appear in the form of repeated accusations that various of her men acquaintances are guilty of making improper advances to her. When the "white slavery" reform movement swept over the country--an awakening of the public conscience which would have accomplished a more unmixed good if it had not been taken up in the usual crowd-spirit--it was interesting to watch the newspapers and sensational propagandist speakers as they deliberately encouraged these pathological phenomena in young people. The close psychological relation between the neurosis and the crowd-mind is shown by the fact that the two so frequently appear at the same moment, play so easily into each other's hands, and are apparently reactions to the very same social situation.

In Brill's example of paranoia, it will be remembered that the patient's delusions of persecution took the form of such statements as that the "gang" had intrigued at Washington to prevent his appointment as ambassador, that certain of his relatives were in a "conspiracy against him." How commonly such phrases and ideas occur in crowd-oratory and in the crowd-newspaper is well known to all. We have already seen that the crowd in most cases identifies itself with "the people," "humanity," "society," etc. Listen to the crowd-orator and you will also learn that there are all sorts of abominable "conspiracies" against "the people." "The nation is full of traitors." The Church is being "undermined by cunning heretics." "The Bolshevists are in secret league with the Germans to destroy civilization." "Socialists are planning to corrupt the morals of our youth and undermine the sacredness of the home." "The politicians' gang intends to loot the community." "Wall Street is conspiring to rob the people of their liberties." "England plans to reduce America to a British colony again." "Japan is getting ready to make war on us." "German merchants are conducting a secret propaganda intending to steal our trade and pauperize our nation." "The Catholics are about to seize power and deliver us over to another Inquisition." "The liquor interests want only to make drunkards of our sons and prostitutes of our daughters." And so on and so forth, wherever any crowd can get a hearing for its propaganda. Always the public welfare is at stake; society is threatened. The "wrongs" inflicted upon an innocent humanity are rehearsed. Bandages are taken off every social wound. Every scar, be it as old as Cromwell's mistreatment of Ireland, is inflamed. "The people are being deceived," "kept down," "betrayed." They must rise and throw off their exploiters, or they must purge the nation of disloyalty and "anarchy."

It cannot be denied that our present social order is characterized by deep and fundamental social injustices, nor that bitter struggles between the various groups in society are inevitable. But the crowd forever ignores its own share in the responsibility for human ills, and each crowd persists in making a caricature of its enemies, real and imagined, nourishing itself in a delusion of persecution which is like nothing so much as the characteristic obsessions of the paranoiac. This suspiciousness, this habit of misrepresentation and exaggeration of every conceivable wrong, is not only a great hindrance to the conflicting groups in adjusting their differences, it makes impossible, by misrepresenting the real issue at stake, any effective struggle for ideals. As the history of all crowd movements bears witness, the real source of conflict is forgotten, the issue becomes confused with the spectacular, the unimportant, and imaginary. Energy is wasted on side issues, and the settlement finally reached, even by a clearly victorious crowd, is seldom that of the original matter in dispute. In fact, it is not at all the function of these crowd-ideas of self-pity and persecution to deal with real external situations. These ideas are propaganda. Their function is to keep the crowd together, to make converts, to serve as a defense for the egoism of the crowd-man, to justify the anticipated tyranny which it is the unconscious desire of the individual to exercise in the moment of victory for his crowd, and, as "they who are not for us are against us," to project the crowd-man's hatred upon the intended victims of his crowd's will to universal dominion. In other words, these propaganda ideas serve much the same end as do the similar delusions of persecution in paranoia.