Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego by Sigmund Freud
One of Freud’s most introducing contributions to the study of psychology, this work explores group solidarity and behavior through the lens of psychoanalysis. While Freud helps to illuminate some of the nuances of group psychology, this work provokes many questions as to what makes people, and groups, think and behave as they do.
Here are some representative quotations from the book:
"(I)n a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses. The apparently new characteristics when he then displays are in fact the manifestations of this unconscious..."
"Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness."
"But we do not separate ... one the one hand, self-love, and on the other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas. Our justification lies in the fact that psychoanalytic research has taught us that all these tendencies are an expression of the same instinctual impulses; in relation between the sexes these impulses force their way toward sexual union, but in other circumstances they are diverted from this aim..."
"From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious."
"The group ... agrees with hypnosis in the nature of the instincts which hold it together, and in the nature of the replacement of the ego ideal with other individuals, which was perhaps originally made possible by their having the same relation to the object."
