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Published in International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 15:183-192, 2006.
MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LED AND THE LEADERS
Masses and Mobs, Democracy and Demagogues
Or how Prejudice of the Leader becomes Mass Paranoia
With Some Thoughts on the Current World Events
Zvi Lothane, M. D.
PREAMBLE
In the thought of Freud and most analysts, there is a perennial split between conceptions
of the method of therapy and the theory of disorder. Writing about the method of
psychotherapy, Freud was an interpersonal psychologist even though he did not know the
term 'interpersonal', i.e., social, as clearly reflected in his papers on technique. As a
theorist of disorders and their causes, Freud used the terms 'interplay' and 'interaction' as
a scientist does, writing about sexual and aggressive forces and instincts, not persons. For
example, with a few exceptions when he mentioned social intercourse, Freud wrote
predominantly about sexual intercourse. Like the proverbial M. Jourdain who did not
know he spoke prose, Freud was an interpersonalist from the get go (Lothane, 1997a), the
claims of the currently fashionable "relational school" notwithstanding (Lothane, 2003a).
Before Freud turned monadic in his theories of disorder, he had been a dyadic
practitioner of the arts of hypnosis and suggestion, arts based in interpersonal influence.
At a later phase, some of the phenomena classed as due to transpersonal influence were
included in the concept transference. Last but not least, the most important kind of dyadic
relation, communication, influence, and transference is the love relation between two
persons .
The interpersonalism of the method is but a reflection of the interpersonal reality
of psychological life of persons and people in collectives. Persons live as either as
monads, or self-enclosed individuals, or as dyads, in relation with others as couples;
further, dyads are part of small collectives, or groups such as family and community;
beyond that we have masses of people in nations, in the world. As psychological
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monads, people perceive, think, remember, dream, or imagine; but monads do not exist in
an interpersonal vacuum, for a solitary thinking and feeling person is still potentially
engaged in his emotions and thoughts with another person who is not present but is
represented, i.e., re-presented, present again, not in the flesh, but in thought, as someone
thought of, as someone who is an object of another's thought, emotion, dream, or desire.
The reality of thinking in absence is based the acquisition of speech, by which one
communicates thoughts to oneself, as a monad, or as a dyad, in acts of social, or
interpersonal, communication.
In psychiatry and psychoanalysis, under the sway of the medical model of disease,
i.e., a condition of the organism, manifesting symptoms and signs of disorder, we use the
term symptom when we actually refer to the conduct of persons, manifesting reciprocal
acts and behaviors. The various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the
American Psychiatric Association and the glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms & Concepts
of the American Psychoanalytic Association perpetuate this monadic conception, i.e.,
tend to reduce the interpersonal conducts and conflicts of persons to intrapsychic
conditions of monads. However, delusions, fantasies, hallucinations, obsessions, phobias
are both intrapsychic acts and interpersonal trans-actions. It takes one person to develop
pneumonia, a monadic disorder of the body; it takes two to develop paranoia, it is an
intrapsychic emotional reaction to and a judgment of the actions of another person; thus,
pneumonia is condition, but paranoia is a conduct, a conflict, and a communication
between two or more persons, that can generate other communications and to other
actions. I am indebted to Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal theory of psychiatry and
thus, in the spirit of patriotism, I prefer American interpersonal relations to the British
solecism, 'object relations,' for persons are no 'objects' engaged in 'object relations', nor of
'subjects' in 'intersubjective' ones (Lothane, 2003b).
Freud's first model of the millennia-old disorder called hysteria was interpersonal:
a disorder of memory, imagination, and communication, as set forth in The Studies on
Hysteria in 1893-1895. A decade later he took the next step in his epochal Jokes and
their relation to the unconscious of 1905: humor is a social phenomenon: it takes one
person to laugh at himself, as in self mockery, but then the audience he addresses is in his
imagination, or in effigy; it takes two persons to engage in the comic, for example a
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circus clown and a member of the audience in the flesh; it takes either two or three people
to appreciate a joke: "A joke … is the most social of all mental functions that aim at a
yield of pleasure" (1905c, p. 179); "the psychical processes in jokes … take place
between two persons" (p. 156); "it is the generally recognized experience that no one can
be content with having made a joke for himself alone. An urge to tell the joke to someone
is inextricably bound up with a joke-work; … I myself cannot laugh at a joke that has
occurred to me, that I have made, in spite of the unmistakable enjoyment that the joke
gives me. It is possible that my need to communicate the joke to someone else is in some
way connected with the laughter produced by it, which is denied to me but is manifest in
the other person" (p. 143). Joke-work was a methodological concept homologous with
dream work that would later include "delusion work" in the Schreber analysis (Lothane,
1992): dream-work, joke-work and delusion-work were all based on the confluence and
conjunction of unconscious processes of dream and image formation in one person and
their transmission, via language and metaphor, to another person in the process of
speaking and listening (Lothane, 1984, 1994).
Another decade passed and in 1921 Freud finally wrote in Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego: "It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the
individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his
instinctual impulses but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual
psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the
individual's mental life someone else in invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a
helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended
but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well"
(Freud 1921, p. 69). Social psychology begins with the group of two of mother and child,
deriving from the animal biology that guarantees the satisfaction of the basic needs of
offspring for food and shelter, thus survival and learning by imitation. It continues in the
couples of friendship and marriage, and ends, for us, in the twosome of the analysand and
analyst. The laws of imitation and its chief psychological human derivative, imagination,
are the basis of the reality that acts of thought and emotion are communicated either
verbally or nonverbally, are both self-directed and other-directed, both intrapsychic and
interpersonal, or trans-personal, that every action is an inter-action and a trans-action.
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Freud revived Aristotle's pithy "man is a social animal" (anthropos zoon
politicon): "Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied,
and natural science … For sociology, too, dealing as it does with the behaviour of people
in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology" (Freud, 1933a, p. 179). There
was an inescapable consequence: "we must conclude," wrote Freud, "that group
psychology (die Psychologie der Masse) is the oldest human psychology; what we have
isolated as individual psychology, by neglecting all the traces of the group (Massenreste,
also=mass residues), has only since come into prominence out of the old group
psychology, by a gradual process which may still, perhaps, be described as incomplete"
(1921:123). Translator James Strachey had a tough choice to make: for there are smaller
groups and there are large masses, such that a change in quantity entails an important
change in quality. For Freud the concern was the mass vs. the primal horde; For Karl
Marx, the large proletarian masses were pitted vs. the elite; for Wilhelm Reich, who in
1933 published his land-mark The Mass Psychology of Fascism, it was the German
masses who that year voted for Hitler en masse and thus paved the way for his becoming
the Nazi dictator. Briefly: a mass may function as a group, but a group is not yet a mass.
Furthermore, a given population may have its masses and its mobs. There is thus a need
to differentiate group from mass psychology, and the latter from mob psychology.
MASSES AND MOBS
In his famous 1930 essay, The Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset describes a
new modern phenomenon: "The multitude has suddenly become visible, installing
itself in the preferential positions in society...Before it passed unnoticed, occupying
the background of the social stage; now, it has advanced to the footlights and is the
principal character. There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus" (p. 13).
He went on to define the "notion of the 'social mass' ":
Society is always a dynamic unity of two component factors: minorities and
masses. The minorities are individuals or groups of individuals which are
specially qualified. The mass is an assemblage of persons not specifically
qualified. By masses, then, is not to be understood, solely or mainly, "the
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working masses." The mass is the average man. It this way what was mere
quantity -- the multitude -- is converted into a qualitative determination: it
becomes the common social quality, mans as undifferentiated from other men,
but as repeating in himself a generic type. …
Strictly speaking, the mass [is] a psychological fact. … In the presence of
one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that
which sets no value on itself--good or ill--based on specific grounds, but
which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless not concerned about
it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else (pp. 14-15).
… The functions of government and political judgment in public affairs …
were previously exercised by qualified minorities, the mass asserted not right
to intervene in them. … The political innovations of recent times signify
nothing less than the political domination of the masses (pp. 16-17).
And he characterized this mass "modern culture" thus:
We are, in fact, confronted with a radical innovation in human destiny,
implanted by the 19th century. A new stage has been mounted for human
existence, new both in the physical and the social aspects. Three principles
have made possible this new world: liberal democracy, scientific experiment,
and industrialism. The two latter may be summed up in one word: technicism
(p. 61).
Ortega was right on target in emphasizing the unprecedented role of the masses in
shaping the politics of states and nations in the modern world. Ortega's analysis
focused on the modern mass movement inspired by the American and the French
revolutions and the Americanization of Europe. While historically correct, it could
fairly be characterized as being a rationalist and intellectualist critique of mass man;
but as such it misses the emotional side of the masses, the role of love, power and
specific ideologies, and the essential role of the leader in mass formation. These two
crucial factors, mass emotions and the interaction between the leader and the led,
mark a transition from group psychology to a new interpersonal psychology: the
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emergence of mass psychology. This new psychology was formulated by a number of
late 19th and early 20th century sociological thinkers, such as Tarde, Le Bon, Trotter,
and McDougall, that was incorporated by Freud and expanded, as a major exercise in
applied psychoanalysis, in his 1921 essay on Massenpsychologie (Lothane, 1997b).
In these writing human multitudes were called herds, hordes, and crowds, suggesting
swarms of people teeming with primeval emotions and impervious to the voice of
conscience and reason. Freud quoted Le Bon's definition of the mass man and his
relation to mass behavior:
first, the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical
considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to
instincts, which, had he been alone, he would perforce kept under restraint ... a
crowd being anonymous [so that ] the sentiment of responsibility disappears
entirely. The second cause [is] contagion ... classed among phenomena of a
hypnotic order ... A third cause is ... suggestibility. ... Isolated, a person may be a
cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian -- that is a creature acting by
instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the
enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings (Le Bon, 1897, pp. 9-12; Freud,
1921, pp. 74, 77].
To which Freud adds his analytic insight about omnipotence: “in the group the individual
... throws off the repressions of his unconscious impulses ... all that is evil in the human
mind, [leading to] a disappearance of conscience. ... [the group] has a sense of
omnipotence, the notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a group” (Freud,
1921, pp. 74, 77; emphasis added). Remarkably, Freud also adds here the ethical aspect
of the problem, the concept of evil, following Kant's concept of human or "radical evil,"
and here applied not to individuals but to masses. Freud also borrows from McDougall’s
1920 book The Group Mind, which should properly be called the mass mind, additional
descriptions of the motions and emotions of a mindless mass. Since in the mass direct
induction of emotion prevails,
the individual loses his power of criticism, [to become] emotional, impulsive,
violent, fickle, inconsistent, irresolute and extreme in action ... extremely
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suggestible, careless in deliberation, hasty in judgment, easily swayed and led,
lacking in self-consciousness, devoid of self respect and a sense of responsibility,
and apt to be carried away by the consciousness of its own force, so it tends to
produce all the manifestations we have learnt to expect of any irresponsible or
absolute power. Hence its behaviour is like an unruly child or an untutored
passionate savage ... like that of a wild beast rather like that of human beings
[Freud 1921, p. 85; emphasis added].
It was Wilfred Trotter (1916), an early British champion of Freud's psychoanalysis, who
did not simply use the above pejorative comparisons but advanced a synthesis of
ethology and sociology in his concept of man as a gregarious animal. Based on Freud's
individual instinct psychology, Trotter added to "self-preservation, nutrition, and sex" a
new instinct: the herd instinct, with this consequence: "The essential specific
characteristic of the mind of the gregarious animal is this very capacity to confer upon
herd opinion the psychical energy of instinct" (82). Whereas Ortega wrote of the power
of public opinion as the bedrock of mass power and mass rule, Trotter added the
emotional, instinctual, and energetic explication of mass power. Like Ortega, Trotter sees
man as influenced by "herd suggestion": he is susceptible to "the voice of the herd" and
rejects the voice of experience in favor of "herd belief," supported by "social habit."
Moreover, Trotter added the role of the leader and the connection between the leader and
the herd, characterizing the human sheep in the herd as follows:
1. He is intolerant of solitude, physical or mental. … [his] resistance to a new
idea is always primarily a matter of prejudice, the development of intellectual
objections … This intimate dependence on the herd … betrays itself as … as
sense of incompleteness which compels the individual to reach out towards some
larger existence than his own, some encompassing being in whom his perplexities
may find a solution and his longings peace, … toward religious feelings. 2. He is
more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or
stimulate his thoughts and conduct. It is the source of his moral code, of the
sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage,
and endurance, and can as easily takes these away. … It is in this acme of the
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power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable
gregarious nature of man. 3. He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob
violence and the passions of the herd in its panics. 4. He is remarkably susceptible
to leadership. … The successful shepherd thinks like his sheep, and can lead his
flock only if he keeps no more than the shortest distance of advance. He must
remain, in fact recognizable as one of the flock, magnified no doubt, louder,
coarser, above all with the more urgent wants and ways of expression than the
common sheep, but in essence to their feeling of the same flesh with them. In the
human herd the necessity of the leader bearing unmistakable marks of
identification is equally essential. 5. Speech at the present time retains strong
evidence of the survival in it of the function of herd recognition. [But] the
conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it (pp. 113-119).
To Trotters vivid description of the herd and the leader Freud added two great binding
social forces: love and work. On the one hand, Freud advanced “the supposition that love
relationships (or, to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties) also constitute the
essence of the group mind” (Freud, 1921, p. 91), for “Eros holds everything together in
the world” (Freud, 1921, 18:92). The love bond becomes the basis for “a new perception
of a common quality shared with some other person,” or persons: ‘the mutual tie between
the members of a group is in the nature of an identification of this kind, based on an
important emotional common quality; and ... this common quality lies in the nature of
the tie with the leader” (Freud, 1921, p. 108). A good example of a common work and
love bond is offered by the army and a church (“a community of believers”), where love
gives rise to
the same illusion: ... the head -- Christ, the Commander-in-Chief -- loves all the
individuals in the group with an equal love ... [acting as] a kind of elder brother,
[as] their substitute father ... the similarity ... [with] the family is invoked ... [as
well as ] the possibility of a leading idea being substituted for the leader and
upon the relations between the two [Freud, 1921, pp. 94-95; emphasis added].
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In this passage we reach the last issue in our analysis of mass mind, ideology.
The community of believers, the group that prays together and stays together, is unified
by an additional bond: that of commonly shared ideas and ideals. At this stage of
delineating his ego-psychological “anatomy” of the person Freud has not yet coined the
term superego -- that is yet to come -- as his technical term for “conscience, a critical
agency within the ego, which ... takes up a critical attitude towards the ego” (Freud,
1921, p. 109), is here “called ... the ‘ego ideal’, ... the moral conscience, ... the chief
influence of repression” (Freud, 1921, p. 110).
But since these various parts of the person called ego and superego are only
metaphorical parts and truly refer to various functions of the person, I shall stick to the
word conscience and reserve the term ego ideal or ideal ego, Freud’s Ichideal and
Idealich, to mean what the words express: the function of choosing and following ideas
and ideals embodied in leaders, historical personalities, and ideologies, on the one hand,
and to public opinion and prejudice, on the other. This will pave the way for combining
the forces of love, suggestion, identification, and ideology into an integrated dynamic
whole.
"In individual love relations, Freud says, "everything that the object does and
asks for is right and blameless. Conscience has no application to anything that is done for
the sake of the object; in the blindness of love remorselessness is carried to the pitch of
crime. The whole situation can be summarized in the formula: The object has been put in
the place of the ego ideal [Freed, 1921, p. 113; emphasis Freud’s]. Earlier Freud used
the term 'love object', now contracted to 'object,' again, the other person. If we restore the
superseded term, then the last sentence in the just quoted passage will read: the (loved)
person has been put in the place of conscience and ideals. This applies, of course, not
only to lovers, a “group formation with two members,” but also to masses in relation to
their leaders, where people “put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal”
and also “identif[y] themselves with one another in their ego” (Freud, 1921, p. 116;
emphasis Freud’s). Keeping the double meaning of ego ideal as conscience and
ideology, if we substitute here “the object” with “the leader” in the just quoted definition,
we can see how replacing one’s individual conscience with that of a powerful leader, and
accepting his ideals, or ideology as one’s own, the result is that
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the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal as
embodied in the leader. ... The selection of the leader is very much facilitated by
this circumstance. ... the need for a strong chief will often meet him half-way and
invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise perhaps have had
no claim [Freud, 1921, p. 127].
In a group of two shared love and delusional beliefs create a folie à deux: in crowds,
mobs and masses we reach the level of mass neurosis (Fromm, 1941; Fenichel, 1946;
Reich, 1933, 1942), or mass madness, a folie à millions. Faced with a charismatic leader
acting on the mass hypnotically, and in conditions conducive to mass fascination, the
mass is only too ready and willing to give up moral conscience and its former ideals, to
espouse the ideals of the leader, and act criminally at his behest, as we see repeatedly in
the descent to barbarism in peace and war. In war, Trotter wrote, "primitive instincts,
normally vestigial or dormant are aroused into activity by the stress of war, and there is a
rejuvenation of "lower" instincts at the expense of the "higher" (p. 139).
In line with Trotter's allegiance to psychoanalysis, Freud devoted a whole chapter
to Trotter's ideas about the herd instinct and war but noted his omission of the role of the
leader. Freud did not mention Trotter's remarks on Germany: Trotter starkly contrasted
"Germany [as] the very type of a perfected aggressive herd," a "lupine society," as
against "England [as ] perhaps the most complete example of a socialized herd" (p. 201),
likened by him to a society of bees. His patriotism notwithstanding, Trotter was
uncannily prescient in 1916 of the future Third Reich, when he doubted "that it will ever
be possible for Europe to contain a strong Germany of the current type and remain
habitable by free peoples," advocating "the destruction of the German Empire as an
indispensable preliminary to the making of a civilization tolerable by rational beings" (p.
157). The Germans were chastised by Trotter for their "simplicity or even childishness,
ass a boorish cunning, as an incredible ant-like activity, as a sudden blast of maniacal
boasting, a reckless savagery of gloating in blood, a simple minded-sentimentality, as
outbursts of idolatry, not of the pallid, metaphorical, modern type, but of the full-blooded
African kind, with all the apparatus of idol and fetish and tom-tom, and with it all a
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steady confidence that these are the principles of civilization, of truth, of justice, of
Christ" (p. 173). Here, too, Trotter was prophetic of Hitler and the Nazi pageantry driving
the German masses into frenzy at the Nuremberg rallies. Strongly identified with the panGermanism of Austria and Germany, the Central Powers, and with his two sons drafted,
Freud did not endorse Trotter's characterizations of Germany. However, neither Trotter
nor Freud fully addressed the political realities that led to the war: the British and
German rivalry in the African colonies and on the seas and German expansionism
pursued by the Kaiser and his Junkers; the nationalist turmoil in the Austrian Empire and
annexations in the Balkans; the crumbling Russian empire; the ruling elites choosing war
as redress for their internal problems, instead of avoiding war. Germany attacked France
by invading neutral Belgium, followed by Austria attacking Serbia, to be met by the bloc
of England, Russia and France. Previously, the minority, the ruling classes -- the king, the
aristocracy and the church -- sated their greed and gluttony at the expense of the toiling
masses, while the king's generals sated their hunger for glory by grabbing and gobbling
lands and with the help of armies conscripted from the oppressed and gullible masses. It
happened again on an unprecedented scale in the Great War. Freud (1915) wrote ruefully
about the disasters of the war and Realpolitik of states:
the war which we had refused to believe broke out and brought disillusionment.
Not only was it more bloody and more destructive that any war of other days,
because of enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defense …
it disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, … the distinction
between civil and military sections of the population, the claims of private
property. … The state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing,
not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it. A
belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as
would disgrace the individual. It makes use of … deliberate lying and deception
as well… The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its
citizens, but at the same time it treats them like children by an excess of secrecy
and censorship upon news and expression of opinion" (p. 278-279).
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This applied not only to the undreamed of mass atrocities of World War II, which added
crimes against humanity on a mass scale: the genocide in forced labor camps in Stalin's
Russia and Hitler's Germany, in Nazi death camps, the saturation bombing of cities, and
it applies to conflicts today. Prior to 1921 Freud saw Freud such behavior as caused by
"the deepest essence of human nature [that] consists of instinctual impulses … the
selfish and cruel ones" (1915, p. 281). The latter could be applied not only to the lack of
conscience in rulers and in mobs, and the phenomenon of the demagogue as well. The
Oxford English Dictionary defines mob as "the disorderly and riotous part of the
population, the roughs, the rabble, a tumultuous crowd bent on, or liable to be incited to,
acts of lawlesness and outrage"; the inciter is the demagogue, the leader of the mob "in
the bad sense: a political agitator who appeals to the passions and prejudices of the mob
in order to obtain power or further his own interests; an unprincipled or factious popular
orator." In ancient times mobs were interchangeable with crowds and masses: "A terrible
thing is a mob, when it has villains to lead it," says Euripides in Orestes (1. 772) and in
Suppliants he wonders "How should the mob, which cannot form true judgments, Be able
rightly to direct the state" (1.417). Eramus advised to "disdain the unhallowed mob
(Prophanum vulgus), while Thoreau saw that the "mob degrades itself to a level with the
lowest" (Journal, 14/3/1838) and Emerson the mob man as "voluntarily descending to
the nature of the beast … a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason"
(Essays: Compensation, 1841). The beast should feel defamed, because human intraspecies aggression is both a qualitative (cultural) and quantitative leap from animal
behavior in the food chain.
While the passions are rooted in the instincts, to the extent that they are, the
prejudice has to do with ideas. What remained yet to be fully plumbed was what Trotter
adumbrated as "the idea" in 1916 and Freud as "the leading idea" in 1921: the role of
ideology in serving and arousing such instincts in the masses, by whom and by what
means, and what made the masses respond to the call to arms with such delirious
enthusiasm in August of 1914 and in Nazi Germany prior to 1939.
THE CENTRAL ROLE OF IDEOLOGY AND PREJUDICE
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Ideology, the origin, history and science of ideas, pervades every area of knowledge, be it
theoretical or practical, be it in the humanities, the arts, economics, or the sciences. It is
more than any particular theory or doctrine. Defined as a Weltanschauung, world view,
world outlook, or viewpoint, it is a system of ideas and ideals used to explain life and to
live by, characteristic for an individual, a social class, or a collective, and usually
expressed by adding the suffix ‘ism’ to some root word; and it plays a leading role in the
life of persons, groups, nations and governments from democracies to dictatorships.
Ideology often polarizes people into adherents and opponents, such s materialism vs.
idealism in philosophy, mechanism vs. vitalism in physiology, capitalism and socialism
in economics, despotism and democracy in politics. Even when rational in their content
and structure, polarized beliefs can lead to rivalry, hatred, persecution, and violent mass
wars, is shown in the history of capitalism, socialism, communism, and, last but not least,
German National Socialism, or Nazism. How much more injurious are ideologies that
from the start bear the stamp of unreason, such as wars of religion in the history of the
churches, racism of any kind and anti-Semitism in particular, and the recurrent mystical
secret and esoteric doctrines and cults that have thrived in Europe down the centuries, but
more strikingly in the last three centuries, coeval with the growth of modern science. It is
the latter that concern us here, especially in regard to their affinity to superstition and
prejudice, their intoxicating mass appeal, and the ability to produce pathological
omnipotence.
In the positive sense, as first formulated around the turn of the 18th century by the
Frenchman Destutt de Tracy, it meant the science of ideas, of the origin of ideas.
Already with Karl Marx a certain pejorative nuance was added to 'ideology' indicating a
"superstructure" of beliefs and values determined by social and economic conditions. The
most negative view is of an ideology as an assemblage of ideas nourished by prejudice.
Now prejudice is pre-judgment, that is judgment stemming from insufficient knowledge,
faulty knowledge, and a host of unreflected emotional factors: temperament and tradition,
conditioning and habit, the satisfaction of needs and desires. The clamoring emotional
nature of prejudice makes it impervious to the quiet voice of experience and reason. The
close-minded non-rational nature of prejudice can easily slip into the intransigent
irrational fixity of paranoia.
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In addition, along with Kant and Freud, I consider that the irrational is not only to
be judged by the criterion of truth and common sense, but also by the criterion of ethics.
Adolf Hitler, rejecting traditional religious and secular ethics, formulated a new, allembracing national-socialistic or Nazi Aryan-Nordic-Germanic ideology of "blood," that
is, "race," superseding all the previous "-isms" (e.g., Semitism, Catholicism, liberalism,
individualism, intellectualism, and rationalism) and paired with the specific national (in
German: völkisch from Volk =nation, people)-socialistic ethic which proclaimed: "no
more spiritual growth, no more humanity, no more culture as the highest goal and
fulfillment of life's goals but the education of the will and formation of character,
justification of the deed in the service of the national-historical becoming. This national
world-view is expressed by the concepts: organic -- völkisch--total--heroic--political-historical", as defined in the nazified edition of a leading philosophical dictionary
(Schmidt, 1934, p. 706, my translation). Based on Hitler's "Führer-principle," or absolute
allegiance to and mass oath of obedience to Hitler to the death, the will of the dictator
became Nazi party law and then the law of the land. Not only the uneducated masses, but
hundreds of university professors and thousands of students enthusiastically recited took
the oath to the Führer in mass meetings. Under the Nazis prejudice and irrational, nay,
delusional, ideology led to the destruction of ethics so as to serve the ends of radical
evil: abuse of violent police power, mob destruction of law and order, mass terror,
culminating in crimes against humanity (Lothane, 1997b): slaughter of civilian
population in the conquered countries by army and police, looting of their wealth, slave
labor, and genocide.
Six years after WW II Hannah Arendt published her classic work, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951), a profound analysis of the phenomena of masses, mass leaders,
mass ideology, mass terror, and mass propaganda. "An ideology," states Arendt, "differs
from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history or the solution
of all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal
laws which are supposed to rule the nature of man" (p. 159). Such a totalizing ideology is
used by a totalitarian state not only to beat a population into submission by means of
terror but also "to realize constantly its ideological doctrines and its practical lies" (p.
341). The Nazi ideology was based on a demoniacal mish-mash of myths, such as the
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Aryan myth of a superior, heroic and pure Aryan race as propagated by such modern
occult bodies of belief as armanism, ariosophy, and theozoology (Lothane, 1997b);
superstitious and monstrous lies, such as the Jewish blood libel and the fiction of the
Jewish world conspiracy, as in the Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and copiously cited in Hitler's 1924 tract, Mein Kampf; and prejudice, not only in the
general sense of a preconceived judgment or opinion adverse to true knowledge, but in
the specific sense of racial prejudice, or racism, bolstered by the pseudo-science of race,
turned into a pseudo-religion, and used in the service of the hatred and persecution of the
Jews (also extended to Gypsies and other groups), not just because of what they do but
who they are, to be written into the constitution and laws of the Nazi state and become
the foundation of Nazi domestic and international politics, climaxing the "Final
Solution," the program to exterminate the Jews as a race and a culture. During the 19th
and 20th centuries, with the advances in science and the spread of democratic trends, the
old religious persecution of Jews as Christ-murderers was converted into a secular, class
and state, persecution of the Jews as impostors and exploiters of the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat in France, Austria, Russia, Germany and elswhere (Poliakov, 1971). In both
the religious and the secular variants, prejudice can easily morph into irrationality, or
paranoia, such as delusions of persecution by the Jews. The Jew, proclaimed Adolf Hitler
in his Mein Kampf, the bible of Nazi political and irrational ideology, penetrated
inside the body of other peoples ... the eternal blood sucker ... which attaches
itself to the body of the unfortunate people ... the Jewish danger. He poisons the
blood of others but he guards his own. The Jew does not marry a Christian
woman, but always a Christian a Jewess. Yet the bastards take to the Jewish side.
Under [the Jew's] cloak of social thought, there are hidden some more truly
diabolical intentions, ... the Marxist ‘view of life.’ The final aims [are] the
economic conquest of the world [and] the political subjection of the latter. ... For
hours the black-haired Jew-boy, diabolic joy in his face, waits in ambush for the
unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood and thus robs her from her
people. With the aid of all means he tries to ruin the racial foundation of the
peoples to be enslaved. ... [via] the organized mass of Marxism ... the blood Jew
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and the people’s tyrant ... has killed or starved about thirty million people with a
truly diabolic ferocity, under inhuman tortures. [Hitler, 425-451].
The perverse neurotic nature of the sexual projection was authoritatively laid bare by
Reich (1933, 1942). As to the world domination fantasy, the shoe was clearly on Hitler's
foot.
Armed with such paranoid ideology Hitler would become the diabolical
demagogue of the 20th century, achieving perfect mastery over the gullible mobs:
the psyche of the great masses is not receptive to half-measures or weakness.
Like a woman, whose psychic feeling is influenced less by abstract reasoning than
by an indefinable, sentimental longing for complementary strength, ... the masses
love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by
a doctrine which tolerates no rival ... They neither realize the impudence with
which they are spiritually terrorized, nor the outrageous curtailment of their
human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them. ...
The importance of physical terror against the individual and the masses also
became clear to me. Here, too we find exact calculation of the psychological
effect. The terror in the workshops, in the factory, in the assembly hall, and on
occasion of mass demonstrations will always be accomplished by success as long
as it is not met by an equally great force of terror [Hitler, 1940, pp. 56, 58; first
emphasis added, last in the original].
Hitler emerges as a master of mass psychology using methods far beyond the 19th
century simple ways described by Le Bon, to wit: first, magician-like, by hypnotizing
the masses by his demagogical fiery oratory, appealing to them on a visceral and
emotional level; second, in the cynical and calculated manipulation of the masses by
means of lies and deceptions; third, by totalitarian tactics of terror and intimidation,
because “only the Jew can praise [present-day democratic parliamentarism] an institution
that is as dirty and false as he is himself." The emotional appeal of this ideology and its
exploitation to overpower the masses was brilliantly analyzed by Wilhelm Reich (1933),
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which was met with opposition from Freud and the Freudians and led to Reich's
expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934 (Lothane, 2001b,
2003c).
To sum up: Freud's analysis addressed the passions in the leader-led relationship,
the emotional character of the masses and the messiahs, Arendt -- the ideological and
socio-political prejudices in that relationship. The complete picture of that relationship
must include both the emotional and the ideational aspects.
SOME CURRENT APPLICATIONS
Superstition, the belief in idols, fetishes, and fantasies, and prejudice, or opinion hostile
to knowledge, truth, and science, are intimately related to each other. Francis Bacon, the
father of science, who proclaimed that knowledge is power, listed religion as the fifth
idol, or illusion. The attack on institutionalized religion, as practiced in synagogues,
churches and mosques -- as distinct from the tradition of Eastern and Western
spirituality, e.g., Buddha, the Sufi Jalal-Uddin Rumi, Meister Eckart -- was continued by
the Enlightenment in the 18th century, Freud's chief ideology, here in the positive sense of
the word. Inspired by Voltaire's attack on the papacy and Ludwig Feuerbach's criticism of
religion as rooted in mankind's dependent helplessness, Freud drew an analogy between
neurosis and religion, qualifying obsessional ritual is private religion and religion is a
public obsessional ritual, such that religion became an institution “distorting the picture of
the real world in a delusional manner ... by forcibly fixing [mankind] in a state of psychical
infantilism and by drawing them into a mass delusion” (Freud, 1930, p. 85).
The three reigning monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are
based on mythological cosmogonies and cosmologies, each with its sacred writ, the
Bible, the Gospels, and the Koran. All three have displayed various degrees of religious
fundamentalism, or religious totalitarianism at the expense of their rivals. All three have
in the past pursued the politics of conquest and proselytizing by fire and sword and all
were genocidal. The Hebrews exterminated the Baal and female divinity worshippers,
men women and children, in the Land of Canaan but have not proselytized since. The
Christians did the same with their crusade in Europe and in the Americas, but are no
longer the ecclesia militans, the fighting church. It leaves the Moslems still fighting wars
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of religion between the Sunnis and the Shias and the persistent declarations of an Islamic
Jihad, or holy war, upon infidels.
My aim is not to deny the world religions their legitimate rights and goals, or the
contribution they can make to the spiritual welfare of mankind, and build social cohesion
and ethics, but rather to underscore how religious beliefs, superstitions, and prejudices,
are repeatedly harnessed in the service of political platforms and pursuits, at the expense
of peoples, persons and the individual right to choose in a democracy. Leaders have used
religion to sanctify and legitimize their power and to exploit the religiosity of the masses
so as to make them obedient. Such abuses of religious ideology and sentiment can be
seen in a number of domains.
1. PAN- MOVEMENTS. In the past we have seen ideology-driven totalitarian
movements, which Arendt called "pan-movements," such as Russian panSlavism, followed by the pseudo-religion of communism, or the panGermanism of the Wilhelmine Second Reich followed by that of the Hitlerite
Third Reich, with its murderous slave colonialism and dreams of world
domination.
2. POWER POLITICS. The churches often gave their blessing to wars and
warlords. Politics and policies decisions are undertaken in the name of God
and religion and justified as God's will, in the manner of kings of yore. How
does God manage to decide which enemy's prayers to grant?
3. PARTY POLITICS. Currently in the Unites States the rivalry in domestic and
international politics between the Republicans and Democrats is cast in
religious and fundamentalist terms. Similarly, the current politics in the
Middle East, both in Israel and the Arab states, are intertwined with religious
fundamentalism.
4. POLICE STATES: the rule through violence and terror, again, sanctified by
religion. The recent example of a theocratic police state were the Taliban in
Afghanistan and still Iran and Saudi Arabia.
5. PRODUCTION AND ECONOMY. In the current world confrontation, oil
and illegal drug economies are intertwined with fundamentalist propaganda
between East and West, for example, the USA and Iran calling each other
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"evil" and "Satan." To one nation under God Eisenhower offered the term the
military-industrial complex: actually, the military-industrial-financial
complex, which exploits religious an ethnic strife.
6. PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER POLITICS: worship of the false idols of victory
and defeat. However, the victors of today can become losers of tomorrow, and
the losers -- victors, as for instance the USA and Germany and Japan after
WW II. States and governments fan the flames of vanity and grandiosity in the
populace and in the end everybody loses and individual dignity is degraded.
7. PSYCHOLOGY AND POWER EMOTIONS: glory and honor, the
glorification of dying for honor; hoping to find in the heroism of death
everlasting fame and a happiness in paradise. This inflated glory is contrasted
with the shame of defeat in this life. Religious triumphalism, for the greater
glory of God, was used to bolster military and political triumphalism. While
states were falsely personalized as suffering the shame of defeat, the fact is
that political entities, states and governments, have no feelings of shame, only
persons do; the real sufferers are the individuals that become cannon fodder or
surviving victims of war, plagued by chronic posttraumatic stress syndrome.
However, consider the paradoxical phenomenon of the shame of the victor, as
for example the fire-bombing of Dresden, or the malaise (the so-called
Mehdal) in the Israeli Army a few years after the victorious Six Day War.
Leaders and politicians are devoid of conscience or shame and their
shamelessness and aggressive posturing are vicariously enjoyed by the
envious and frustrated masses.
8. PATHOLOGY: paranoia, projection, and psychopathy. This pathology is
based on the dialectics of external, perceptual, and the internal, or psychic,
reality. The various religions tend to cast the other as infidel and enemy, to be
devalued and destroyed. In the past the Moslem Turkish Ottoman Empire and
European kingdoms fought each other, under the banner of religion, for
domination of Europe, up until the end of World War II. External persecution,
whether in the perpetrator or in the victim, can become the soil of internal
paranoid attitudes of feeling persecuted, causing an unending cycle of
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aggression and revenge. It may entail the special kind of paranoia of
dehumanization of the external and internal enemy in caricature, defamation,
stereotyping and scorn, all compounded by the psychopathy of shameless
lying.
Where do we go from here?
9. PACIFICATION: the pursuit of dialogue, communication, conversation,
understanding, negotiation, and, above all, eros, e.i., love writ large, the
Mosaic injunction: love your neighbor as yourself. This was the recipe Freud
(1933a) offered Albert Einstein in 1932. However, it was not through this
sermon of love that Germany changed its ways: like the military superpower
that preceded it, Sweden, Germany has become a nation of peace following its
near destruction in WW II. This should not be the solution in the Middle East.
There is a new dawn in the Middle East, the democratic elections in Gaza and the
West Bank that brought Hamas to power. Palestine is arguably the most blood drenched
strip on this globe, including the blood of the Savior, who preached forgiveness from the
cross. And yet, ironically, so much blood was shed in Palestine and elsewhere in the
name of Christ. While "Jews go to Palestine" was an anti-Semitic slogan in Europe,
Palestine and Palestinian are today applied to Arabs, not Israelis, such are the twists of
history.
The Israelis and the Palestinians, still caught in a deadly clinch, now have the
historical opportunity to fulfill the peace vision of the prophet: "and they shall beat their
swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up
sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah, ii, 4), words carved
at the entrance to the United Nations in New York. Until now, based upon mutual
paranoia and prejudice the Israelis and the Arabs have painted each other as animals and
monster, as external and internal enemies, as mortal enemies vying for the same strip of
land. Both have to give up their fundamentalist dreams and ambitions. Both have to start
as partners for peace. There is no military solution to this problem, there is only one
solution, the peaceful solution of negotiation, negotiation, negotiation.
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Zvi Lothane, M. D.
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
New York City
Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry
1435 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10128
(212) 534 5555
[email protected]