The Behavior of Crowds Part 2

Pick up an old newspaper and read about the great movements and causes which were only a short time ago stirring the public mind, many of them are now dead issues. But they were not answered by argument; we simply "got over" them.

Not all crowd-movements, however, are local and temporary. There are pa.s.sing moments of crowd-experience which are often too sweet to lose.

The lapse into everyday realism is like "falling from grace." The crowd state of mind strives often to keep itself in countenance by perpetuating the peculiar social-psychic conditions in which it can operate. There are certain forms of the ego consciousness which are best served by the fictions of the crowd. An a.n.a.logy here is found in paranoia, where the individual's morbid fixed ideas are really devices for the protection of his self-esteem. The repressed infantile psyche which exists in us all, and in certain neurotics turns back and attaches itself to the image of the parent, finds also in the crowd a path for expression. It provides a perpetual interest in keeping the crowd-state alive. Notice how invariably former students form alumni a.s.sociations, and returned soldiers at once effect permanent organizations; persons who have been converted in one of Mr. Sunday's religious campaigns do the same thing--indeed there are a.s.sociations of all sorts growing out of these exciting moments in people's common past experience, the purpose of which is mutually to recall the old days and aid one another in keeping alive the enlarged self-feeling.

In addition to this, society is filled with what might be called "struggle groups" organized for the survival and dominance of similarly const.i.tuted or situated people. Each group has its peculiar interests, economic, spiritual, racial, etc., and each such interest is a mixture of conscious and unconscious purposes. These groups become sects, cults, partisan movements, cla.s.s struggles. They develop propaganda, ritual, orthodoxies, dogma, all of which are hardly anything more than stereotyped systems of crowd-ideas. These systems differ from those of the neurosis in that the former are less idiosyncratic, but they undoubtedly perform much the same function. The primary aim of every such crowd is to keep itself together as a crowd. Hardly less important is the desire of its members to dominate over all outsiders. The professed purpose is to serve some cause or principle of universal import. Thus the crowd idealizes itself as an end, makes sanct.i.ties of its own survival values, and holds up its ideals to all men, demanding that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess--which is to say, that the crowd believes in its own future supremacy, the members of the group knowing that such a belief has survival value. This principle is used by every politician in predicting that his party is bound to win at the next election.

Hence the crowd is a device by which the individual's "right" may be baptized "righteousness" in general, and this personality by putting on impersonality may rise again to new levels of self-appreciation. He "belongs to something," something "glorious" and deathless. He himself may be but a miserable clod, but the glory of his crowd reflects upon him. Its expected triumph he already shares. It gives him back his lost sense of security. As a good crowd man, true believer, loyal citizen, devoted member, he has regained something of his early innocence. In other members he has new brothers and sisters. In the finality of his crowd-faith there is escape from responsibility and further search. He is willing to be commanded. He is a child again. He has transferred his repressed infantilism from the lost family circle to the crowd. There is a very real sense in which the crowd stands to his emotional life _in loco parentis_.

It is to be expected, therefore, that wherever possible the crowd-state of mind will be perpetuated. Every sort of device will be used to keep the members of the crowd from coming to. In almost every organization and social relations.h.i.+p there will be a tendency on part of the unconscious to behave as crowd. Thus permanent crowds exist on every hand--especially wherever political, moral, or religious ideas are concerned. The general and abstract character of these ideas makes them easily accessible instruments for justifying and screening the unconscious purpose. Moreover it is in just those aspects of our social life where repression is greatest that crowd-thinking is most common, for it is by means of such thinking and behavior that the unconscious seeks evasions and finds its necessary compensations.

The modern man has in the printing press a wonderfully effective means for perpetuating crowd-movements and keeping great ma.s.ses of people constantly under the sway of certain crowd-ideas. Every crowd-group has its magazines, press agents, and special "literature" with which it continually harangues its members and possible converts. Many books, and especially certain works of fiction of the "best-seller" type, are clearly reading-mob phenomena.

But the leader in crowd-thinking _par excellence_ is the daily newspaper. With few exceptions our journals emit hardly anything but crowd-ideas. These great "molders of public opinion," reveal every characteristic of the vulgar mob orator. The character of the writing commonly has the standards and prejudices of the "man in the street."

And lest this man's ego consciousness be offended by the sight of anything "highbrow"--that is, anything indicating that there may be a superior intelligence or finer appreciation than his own--newspaper-democracy demands that everything more exalted than the level of the lowest cranial alt.i.tude be left out. The average result is a deluge of sensational scandal, cla.s.s prejudice, and special pleading clumsily disguised with a saccharine smear of the cheapest moral plat.i.tude. Consequently, the thinking of most of us is carried on chiefly in the form of crowd-ideas. A sort of public-meeting self is developed in the consciousness of the individual which dominates the personality of all but the reflective few. We editorialize and press-agent ourselves in our inmost musings. Public opinion is manufactured just as brick are made. Possibly a slightly better knowledge of mechanical engineering is required for making public opinion, but the process is the same. Both can be stamped out in the quant.i.ty required, and delivered anywhere to order. Our thinking on most important subjects to-day is as little original as the mental processes of the men who write and the machines which print the pages we read and repeat as our own opinions.

Thomas Carlyle was never more sound than when railing at this "paper age." And paper, he wisely asked us to remember, "is made of old rags."

Older writers who saw the ragged throngs in the streets were led to identify the mob or crowd with the tattered, illiterate populace. Our mob to-day is no longer merely tramping the streets. We have it at the breakfast table, in the subway, alike in shop and boudoir, and office--wherever, in fact, the newspaper goes. And the raggedness is not exterior, nor is the mob confined to the cla.s.s of the ill-clad and the poor. The raggedness, and tawdriness have now become spiritual, a universal presence entering into the fabric of nearly all our mental processes.

We have now reached a point from which we can look back over the ground we have traversed and note the points of difference between our view and the well-known theory of Le Bon. The argument of the latter is as follows: (1) From the standpoint of psychology, the crowd, as the term is here defined, is not merely a group of people, it is the appearance within such a group of a special mental condition, or crowd-mind. (2) The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction. (3) Conscious personality vanishes. (4) A collective mind is formed: This is Le Bon's "Law of the mental unity of crowds." (5) This collective mind consists in the main of "general qualities of character" which are our common racial inheritance. It is an "unconscious substratum" which in the crowd becomes uppermost, dominating over the unique personal consciousness. (6) Three causes determine the characteristics of the crowd-mind, (a) From purely numerical considerations, the individual acquires a sentiment of invincible power which encourages him in an unrestrained yielding to his instincts, (b) Contagion, or imitation, and (c) hypnotic suggestion cause the individuals in the crowd to become "slaves of all the unconscious activities of the spinal cord." (7) The resulting characteristics of the crowd are (a) a descent of several rungs in the ladder of civilization, (b) a general intellectual inferiority as compared with the isolated individual, (c) loss of moral responsibility, (d) impulsiveness, (e) credulity, (f) exaggeration, (g) intolerance, (h) blind obedience to the leader of the crowd, (i) a mystical emotionalism.

(8) The crowd is finally and somewhat inconsistently treated by Le Bon as being identical with the ma.s.ses, the common people, the herd.

Without pausing to review the criticisms of this argument which were made at the beginning of our discussion, our own view may be summarized as follows: (1) The crowd is not the same as the ma.s.ses, or any cla.s.s or gathering of people as such, but is a certain mental condition which may occur simultaneously to people in any gathering or a.s.sociation. (2) This condition is not a "collective mind." It is a release of repressed impulses which is made possible because certain controlling ideas have ceased to function in the immediate social environment. (3) This modification in the immediate social environment is the result of mutual concessions on the part of persons whose unconscious impulses to do a certain forbidden thing are similarly disguised as sentiments which meet with conscious moral approval. (4) Such a general disguising of the real motive is a characteristic phenomenon of dreams and of mental pathology, and occurs in the crowd by fixing the attention of all present upon the abstract and general. Attention is thus held diverted from the individual's personal a.s.sociations, permitting these a.s.sociations and their accompanying impulses to function unconsciously. (5) The abstract ideas so entertained become symbols of meanings which are unrecognized; they form a closed system, like the obsessions of the paranoiac, and as the whole group are thus moved in the same direction, the "compulsory"

logic of these ideas moves forward without those social checks which normally keep us within bounds of the real. Hence, acting and thinking in the crowd become stereotyped and "ceremonial." Individuals move together like automatons. (6) As the unconscious chiefly consists of that part of our nature which is habitually repressed by the social, and as there is always, therefore, an unconscious resistance to this repressive force, it follows that the crowd state, like the neurosis, is a mechanism of escape and of compensation. It also follows that the crowd-spirit will occur most commonly in reference to just those social forms where repression is greatest--in matters political, religious, and moral. (7) The crowd-mind is then not a mere excess of emotion on the part of people who have abandoned "reason"; crowd-behavior is in a sense psychopathic and has many elements in common with somnambulism, the compulsion neurosis, and even paranoia. (8) Crowds may be either temporary or permanent in their existence. Permanent crowds, with the aid of the press, determine in greater or less degree the mental habits of nearly everyone. The individual moves through his social world like a popular freshman on a college campus, who is to be "spiked" by one or another fraternity competing for his members.h.i.+p. A host of crowds standing for every conceivable "cause" and "ideal" hover constantly about him, ceaselessly screaming their propaganda into his ears, bullying and cajoling him, pus.h.i.+ng and crowding and denouncing one another, and forcing all w.i.l.l.y-nilly to line up and take sides with them upon issues and dilemmas which represent the real convictions of n.o.body.

III

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Throughout the discussion thus far I have been making repeated reference to the psychology of the unconscious, without going into detail any more than was necessary. Let us now take a closer look at some of Freud's discoveries. In this way, what Brill would call the "psychogenesis" of certain characteristic ideas and practices of crowds will be, I think, made clear. Up to this point we have dealt generally with those mental processes by which the crowd is formed. There are certain traits, tendencies, ways of thinking which crowds so uniformly display that one is justified, in want of other explanation, in a.s.suming them to be unconsciously determined. The remarkable blindness of organized crowds to the most obvious of their own performances is so common as to be the regularly expected thing--that is, of crowds other than our own. Long and extensive operations may be carried on for years by crowds whose members repeatedly declare that such things are not being done. The way in which a nation will carefully prepare for war, gradually organizing its whole life on a military basis with tremendous cost and effort, all the while declaring that it is interested only in peace, denying its warlike intentions, and even in the moment of picking a quarrel with its neighbors declare to all the world that it had been wantonly and unexpectedly attacked, is all a matter of general comment. The American colonists, during the decade before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, of course had no conscious thought of separating from Great Britain. Almost to the very last they professed their loyalty to the King; but looking back now it is clear that Independence was the motive all along, and doubtless could not have been achieved more opportunely or with greater finesse if it had been deliberately planned from the start. The Hebrew Scriptures contain a story which ill.u.s.trates this aspect of crowd-behavior everywhere. The Children of Israel in bondage in Egypt merely wished to go out in the wilderness for a day or so to wors.h.i.+p their G.o.d. All they asked was religious liberty. How unjust of the authorities to a.s.sume they were planning to run away from their masters! You will remember that at the last moment they incidentally borrow some jewelry from their Egyptian neighbors. Of course they will pay it back after their little religious holiday, but ... later a most unforeseen thing happens to that jewelry, a scandalous thing--it is made into an idol. Does it require that one be a psychologist to infer that it was the unconscious intention all along to use this metal for just that, the first good chance they had--and that, too, notwithstanding repeated prohibitions of idolatry? The motive for borrowing the jewelry is evident.

Certain crowd-movements in America to-day give marked evidence of this unconscious motivation. Notice how both the radical and reactionary elements behave when, as is frequently the case with both, the crowd-spirit comes over them. Certain radicals, who are fascinated with the idea of the Russian Revolution, are still proclaiming sentiments of human brotherhood, peace, and freedom, while unconsciously they are doing just what their enemies accuse them of--playing with the welcome ideas of violence, cla.s.s war, and proletarian dictators.h.i.+p. And conservative crowds, while ostensibly defending American traditions and ideals against destructive foreign influence, are with their own hands daily desecrating many of the finest things which America has given to the world in its struggle of more than a century for freedom and justice. Members of each crowd, while blissfully unaware of the incompatibility of their own motives and professions, have no illusions about those of the counter-crowd. Each crowd sees in the professions of its antagonist convincing proof of the insincerity and hypocrisy of the other side. To the student of social philosophy both are right and both wrong. All propaganda is lies, and every crowd is a deceiver, but its first and worst deception is that of itself. This self-deception is a necessary step in crowd-formation and is a _sine qua non_ of becoming a crowd. It is only necessary for members of a crowd to deceive themselves and one another for the crowd-mind to function perfectly; I doubt if they are often successful in deceiving anybody else. It was this common crowd-phenomenon of self-deception which led Gobineau and Nietzsche to the conclusion that the common people are liars. But as has been said, the crowd is by no means peculiar to the working cla.s.s; some of its worst features are exhibited these days among employers, law-makers, and the well-to-do cla.s.ses. This deception is moreover not really conscious and deliberate. If men deliberately set about to invent lies to justify their behavior I have little doubt that most of them would be clever enough to conjure up something a little more plausible. These nave and threadbare "hypocrisies" of crowds are a commonplace mechanism of the unconscious. It is interesting to note that the delusions of the paranoiac likewise deceive no one but himself, yet within themselves form a perfectly logical _a priori_ system. They also serve the well-understood purpose, like that of crowd-ideas, of keeping their possessor in a certain fixed relation toward portions of his own psychic material. As Brill says, they are "compromise formations."

Those who have read Freud's little book, _Delusion and Dream_, an a.n.a.lysis of a psychological romance written by Wilhelm Jensen, will recall how extensive a fabric of plausibilities a delusion may build up in its defense in order at the same time to satisfy a repressed wish, and keep the true meaning of the subject's acts and thoughts from conscious attention. In the story which Freud has here taken as his subject for study, a young student of archaeology has apparently conquered all adolescent erotic interest and has devoted himself whole-heartedly to his science. While at the ruins of ancient Pompeii, he finds a bas-relief containing the figure of a young woman represented in the act of walking with peculiar grace. A cast of this figure he brings home. His interest is curiously aroused. At first this interest appears to be scientific only, then aesthetic, and historical. Finally he builds up about it a complete romance. He becomes restless and very much of a misogynist, and is driven, he knows not why, again to the ruins.

Here he actually meets the object of his dreams in the solitude of the excavated city. He allows himself to believe that the once living model of his treasured bas-relief has again come to life. For days he meets and talks with the girl, living all the while in a world of complete unreality, until she finally succeeds in revealing herself as the young woman who lives next door to him. It also appears that in their childhood he and this girl had been playmates, and that in spite of all his conscious indifference to her his unconscious interest was the source of his interest in the bas-relief and the motive which led him to return to Pompeii, where he unconsciously expected to find her. The interesting thing about all this for our present study is the series of devices, fictions, and compromises with reality which this repressed interest made use of while having its way with him, and at the same time resisting whatever might force it upon his conscious attention, where a recognition of its significance might result in a deliberate rejection.

We shall not go into Freud's ingenious a.n.a.lysis of the mental processes at work here. The following pa.s.sage is sufficient for our purpose:

There is a kind of forgetting which distinguishes itself by the difficulty with which memory is awakened, even by strong appeals, as if a subjective resistance struggled against the revival. Such forgetting has received the name of "repression"

in psychopathology ... about repression we can a.s.sert that certainly it does not coincide with the destruction, the obliteration of memory. The repressed material can not of itself break through as memory, but remains potent and effective.

From this, and from what was said in our previous chapter, it is plain that the term "unconscious" as used in psychology does not mean total absence of psychic activity. It refers to thoughts and feelings which have _purposefully_ been forgotten--to experiences or impulses to which we do not pay attention nor wish to attend to, but which influence us nevertheless. Everyone of us, when he dreams, has immediate knowledge of the unconscious as here defined. Certainly we pa.s.s into unconsciousness when we sleep. Yet something is unquestionably going on inside our heads. One wakens and says, "What strange, or exciting, or delightful dreams I have had!" Bergson says that sleep is due to the relaxing of attention to our environment. Yet in dreams attention is never turned away from ourselves. Possibly instead of the word "unconscious" the term "unattended" might be used with less danger of confusion.

Consciousness is, therefore, not the whole of our psychic activity. Much of our behavior is reflex and automatic. James used to be fond of showing how much even of our higher psychic activity was reflex in its nature. We may be conscious of various portions of our psychic material, but never of all of it at once. Attention is like a spotlight thrown on a semi-darkened stage, moving here and there, revealing the figures upon which it is directed in vivid contrast with the darkly moving objects which animate the regions outside its circle. A speaker during his discourse will straighten his tie, make various gestures, and toy with any object which happens to be lying on the desk, all without being aware of his movements, until his attention is called to the fact.

Absent-minded persons habitually amuse us by frequently performing complete and rather complex series of actions while wholly oblivious to what they are doing. Everyone can recall numerous instances of absent-mindedness in his own experience.

Now all pathological types of mental life have in common this quality of absent-mindedness, and it is held that the thing said or done absent-mindedly has in every instance, even when normal, a meaning which is unconscious. But the unconscious or unattended is by no means confined to the infrequent and the trivial. As temperament, or character, its activity is a determining factor in all our thought and conduct. Dream fancies do not really cease when we awake; the dream activity goes on all about our conscious thoughts, our a.s.sociations now hovering near long-forgotten memories, now pulled in the direction of some unrecognized bit of personal conceit, now skipping on tiptoe over something forbidden and wicked and pa.s.sing across without looking in; only a part of our mental processes ever directly finding expression in our conscious acts and words. The unchosen and the illogical run along with the desired and the logical material, only we have learned not to pay attention to such things. Under all our logical structures there flows a ceaseless stream of dream stuff. Our conscious thought is like little planks of attention laid end to end on the stones which here and there rise above the surface of our thinking. The mind skips across to a desired conclusion, not infrequently getting its feet wet, and, on occasion, upsetting a plank or slipping off and falling in altogether.

We have only to relax our attention a little to enter the world of day dreams, of art, and religion; we can never hold it so rigid as to be wholly rational for long.

Those interested in the general psychology of the unconscious are referred to the writings of such authorities in this field as Freud, Jung, Adler, Dr. A. A. Brill, and Dr. William White. In fact, the literature dealing with psychoa.n.a.lysis is now so widely read that, unless the reader has received his information about this branch of science from hostile sources alone, it is to be a.s.sumed that he has a fairly accurate acquaintance with its general history and theory. We must confine our discussions to those aspects of unconscious behavior which can be shown by a.n.a.logy with the psychoneurosis to be determinants of crowd-thinking. As the details and technical discussions of psychoa.n.a.lytical material belong strictly to the psychiatric clinic, any attempt at criticism by the medical layman of the scientific processes by which they are established is of course impossible. Consequently, I have sought to make use of only those principles which are now so well established as to become rather generally accepted commonplaces of psychopathology.

All a.n.a.lysis reveals the fact that the unconscious of the individual is concerned primarily with himself. This is true in the psychosis, and always in dreams. Freud says:

Every dream is absolutely egotistical; in every dream the beloved ego appears, even though it be in a disguised form. The wishes that are realized in dreams are regularly the wishes of this ego; it is only a deceptive appearance if interest in another person is thought to have caused the dream.

Freud then proceeds to give a.n.a.lyses of several dreams in which the nave egoism of childhood which lies at the core of the unconscious psyche is apparently absent, and shows that in each and every case it is there. The hero of our dreams, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, is always ourself.

Brill, in his book, _Psychoa.n.a.lysis_, says of the neurosis:

Both hysteria and compulsion neurosis belong to the defense neuropsychoses; their symptoms originate through the psychic mechanism of defense, that is, through the attempt to repress a painful idea which was incompatible with the ego of the patient.

There is still another more forceful and more successful form of defense wherein the ego misplaces the incompatible idea with its emotions and acts as though the painful idea had never come to pa.s.s. When this occurs the person merges into a psychosis which may be called "hallucinatory confusion."

Thus the psychoneurosis is in all its forms, I believe, regarded as a drama of the ego and its inner conflicts. The egoism of the unconscious belongs alike to the normal and the unadjusted. The mental abnormalities appear when the ego seeks to escape some such conflict by means of a closed system of ideas or symbolic acts which will divert attention from the unwelcome psychic material. Adler, in _The Neurotic Const.i.tution_, is even, if possible, more emphatic in affirming the egoism of the unconscious as revealed in neurotics. His thesis is that the mainspring of all the efforts of achievement and the source of all the vicissitudes of the psyche is a desire to be important, or will to "be above," not wholly unlike Nietzsche's theory of the "will to power." The neurosis goes back to some organic defect or other cause of childish humiliation. As a result, the cause of such humiliation, a defective bodily organ, or whatever it may be, gains special attention. The whole psyche is modified in the process of adjustment. In cases where the psyche remains normal, adjustment is achieved through stimulation to extra effort to overcome the disadvantage, as in the triumph of Demosthenes, Byron, Pope.

On the contrary, this disadvantage may result in a fixed feeling of inferiority. Such a feeling may be brought about in the sensitive child by a variety of circ.u.mstances, physical facts such as smallness of stature, adenoids, derangements of the alimentary organs, undersized genitals, homeliness of feature, or any physical deformity or weakness; again by such circ.u.mstances as domineering parents or older brothers and sisters. The child then thinks always of himself. He forms the habit of comparing himself with others. He creates, as a protection against the recognition of this feeling of inferiority, what Adler calls the "masculine protest."

The feeling which the individual has of his own inferiority, incompetency, the realization of his smallness, of his weakness, of his uncertainty, thus becomes the appropriate working basis which, because of the intrinsically a.s.sociated feelings of pleasure and pain, furnishes the inner impulse to advance toward an imaginary goal....

In all similar attempts (and the human psyche is full of them), it is the question of the introduction of an unreal and abstract scheme into actual life.... No matter from what angle we observe the psychic development of a normal or neurotic person, he is always found ensnared in the meshes of his particular fiction--a fiction from which the neurotic is unable to find his way back to reality and in which he believes, while the sound and normal person utilizes it for the purpose of reaching a definite goal ... the thing which impels us all, and especially the neurotic and the child, to abandon the direct path of induction and deduction and use such devices as the schematic fiction, originates in the feeling of uncertainty, and is the craving for security, the final purpose of which is to escape from the feeling of inferiority in order to ascend to the full height of the ego consciousness, to complete manliness, to attain the ideal of being "above."...

Even our judgments concerning the value of things are determined according to the standard of the imaginary goal, not according to "real" feelings or pleasurable sensations.

That repressed s.e.xuality plays an important part in the conflicts of the ego is well known to all who are acquainted with a.n.a.lytical psychology.

According to Freud, the s.e.xual impulse dates from earliest childhood and is an essential element in every stage of self-appreciation. A summary of the process by which the infantile ego develops to maturity is as follows: The child is by nature "polymorphous perverse"--that is, both physically and psychically he possesses elements which in the mature individual would be considered perversions. Physiologically, what are known as "erogenous zones"--tissue which is capable of what in mature life is s.e.xual excitation--are diffused through the organism. As the child pa.s.ses through the "latent period" of later childhood and adolescence, these "erogenous zones" are concentrated as it were in the organs which are to serve the purpose of reproduction. If for any reason this process of concentration is checked, and remains in later life incomplete, the mature individual will be afflicted with certain tendencies to s.e.x perversion.

Similarly the psychos.e.xual pa.s.ses through a metamorphosis in normal development. The erotic interest of the child, at first quite without any object at all, is soon attached to one or the other of the parents, then, in the "narcissus period" is centered upon the individual himself, after which, normally, but not without some storm and stress, it becomes detached and capable of "object love"--that is, love of a person of the opposite s.e.x. This psychic process is by no means a smooth and easy matter. It is attended at every stage with such dangers that a very large number of people never achieve it entire. Various kinds of "shock"

and wrong educational influence, or overindulgence on the part of the parents, may cause the psychos.e.xual interest of the ego--or "libido"--to remain "fixed" at some point in its course. It may retain vestiges of its early undifferentiated stage, appearing then in the perverted forms of "masochism"--s.e.xual enjoyment of self-torture--or "sadism"--s.e.xual pleasure in torturing others. Or the libido may remain fixed upon the parent, rendering the individual in some degree incapable of a normal mature love life. He has never quite succeeded in severing his infantile attachment to his mother and transferring his interest to the world of social relations and mature experiences. If he meets with a piece of misfortune, he is likely to seek imaginary security and compensation by a "regression" of the libido and a revival of childlike affection for the mother image. As this return is, in maturity, unconsciously resisted by the horror of incest, a conflict results. The individual then develops certain mechanisms or "complex formations" in defense of his ego against this painful situation. The withdrawal of the libido from the ordinary affairs of life renders the latter valueless. Thoughts of death and like compulsory mechanisms ensue. The patient has become a neurotic.

Psychoa.n.a.lysts make much of this latter situation. They term it the "Oedipus complex." They a.s.sert that in its severer forms it is a common feature of psychoneurosis, while in less marked form, according to Jung, it underlies, and is the real explanation of the "birth of tragedy,"

being also the meaning of much religious symbolism, including the Divine Drama of Christian tradition. It is not, therefore, only the psychoneurotic whose unconscious takes the form of the "Oedipus complex." Under certain conditions it is manifest in normal people. I have already indicated that the crowd is one of those conditions, and shall have something a little more specific to say about this later on.

Again the growing libido may become fixed in the "narcissus stage."

Between the period of love of parents and object love, the adolescent youth pa.s.ses through a period when he is "in love with himself." The fact that many people remain in some measure fixed in this period of their development is not surprising when we remember that self-feeling occupies a central place in the unconscious at all times. Many of the world's greatest men have doubtless been characters in which there was a slightly more than average fixation at this point. Inordinate ambition is, I should say, an evidence of such a fixation. If one possesses great natural ability he may under such circ.u.mstances be able to forge ahead to his goal, overcoming the conflicts which such a fixation always raises, and show no greater evidence of pathology in his career than is seen in the usual saying that "genius is always a little queer." The typical crowd-leader would, on a.n.a.lysis, I think, show something of this "narcissus complex," as would doubtless the great run of fanatics, bigots, and doctrinaires, "hundred per cent" crowd-men all.

According to Brill, these "auto erotic" persons are always h.o.m.os.e.xual, their h.o.m.os.e.xuality 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 const.i.tute 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 pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l-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 h.e.l.l-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 fict.i.tious 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.