The Psychology and Politics of the Collective

Ruth Parkin-Gounelas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136337802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia sociale

What are the psychological factors in operation when we form groups or crowds, and how are these affected by socio-historical circumstances? History offers endless examples of different forms of human collectivity, both private and public, small-scale and large: from the primal horde to the modern nuclear family, from the Athenian polis to virtual internet communities. Within the context of shifting social bonds in global culture, this book brings together debates on the left from political philosophy, psychoanalysis, social psychology and media and cultural studies to explore the logic of the formation of collective identities from a new theoretical perspective. Challenging liberal-capitalist models of individualism, as well as postmodern identity politics, analysts here turn to Continental philosophy (Lacan, Derrida, Agamben, Laclau, Badiou, among others) in order to re-think collectivity in relation to questions of agency, alterity, affect, sovereignty, the national imaginary and the biopolitical. In the aftermath of the great mass movements of the twentieth century (Marxist-Leninism, Mao), which resulted in bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State, the fate of our collective identity today raises urgent questions about the future of collaborative activity, the role of mediating institutions in shaping mass psychology, what is at stake in a radical democracy, and what happens in a crowd.

Part I

Psychoanalysis and the Group

1 Brother Animal’s Long Tail

Sigmund Freud, Victor Tausk and Intellectual Influence

Mandy Merck

AN OPEN QUESTION

Sigmund Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” is no tes-tament to the wisdom of crowds. It begins by endorsing Gustave Le Bon’s description of the credulous, emotional and exaggerated thinking of social groups and ends with a summary of the neurotic impulses argued to stim-ulate the formation of religious and philosophical communities. “Great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries,” the essay proclaims, “are only possible to an individual working in solitude” (111). But, in a brief qualification of this argument, Freud goes on to concede society a few accomplishments—folklore, folk music and “language itself.” Moreover, he allows, “it remains an open question... how much the indi-vidual thinker or writer owes to the stimulation of the group in which he lives, and whether he does more than perfect a mental work in which the others have had a simultaneous share” (111).

Freud had reason to pose this question. “Group Psychology” was begun in the winter of 1919–20, after one of the periodic crises that beset his movement. In July 1919, Victor Tausk, a psychiatrist and prominent mem-ber of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, committed suicide. Tausk was an extremely able intellectual, who had practised law and worked as a writer and journalist before a breakdown precipitated by the failure of a love affair prompted him to contact Freud. So impressed was Freud with the younger man that he not only encouraged him to study psychoanalysis but arranged and contributed to the financial support for his medical training as well.

By 1909 Tausk was appointed an Associate of the Vienna Society, fre-quently offering papers and later giving public lectures on psychoanalysis— the only member besides Freud to do so in Vienna. In 1912 he became an intimate friend, or possibly even a lover, of Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had arrived in the city to pursue her own study of psychoanalysis. Salomé’s journal of the period discusses Tausk at length, declaring him of all Freud’s followers “the most unconditionally devoted to Freud and at the same time the most prominently outstanding” (57). But the two men were often at odds, and Salomé observes that

any independence around Freud, especially when it is marked by aggression and display of temperament, worries him and wounds him quite automatically in his noble egotism as investigator, forcing him to premature discussion... he longs in his heart for the peace of undisturbed research which he enjoyed... until the founding of his school. (Andreas-Salomé 97–98)

That Freud’s early research was conducted in peaceful solitude is cer-tainly disputable, and the later conflicts within his school have become notorious. He anxiously sought to control the development of psycho-analysis, and he greatly valued his own eminence as its founder. In this he was often supported by his followers, who backed their man against his rivals in order to win Freud’s favour as well as to ensure that their faction prevailed. Tausk himself was deployed to see off the formidable Jung at the Munich Congress of 1913. “Clever and dangerous,” Freud remarked of Tausk at the time; “he can bark and bite” (Andreas-Salomé169). But if Freud sought the support of his disciples against the apostasy of rivals like Jung, he resented their intrusion into his own theoretical proj-ects, particularly their development of his unpublished observations. In a milieu in which new hypotheses were constantly circulating in discussion, not least in the confidences of the consulting room, there were frequent contests over authorship and attribution. Freud’s devoted friendship with Wilhelm Fliess concluded with an angry exchange of this kind. During an analytic session with the young psychologist Hermann Swaboda, Freud mentioned Fliess’s unpublished theory of cellular bisexuality (arguing that in our derivation from male and female zygotes, human beings are physi-cally bisexual). Swaboda then repeated it to his friend Otto Weininger, who promptly developed the notion into a book-length study. When Fliess protested this “misuse of someone else’s property” (Masson 463), Freud defensively replied that Krafft-Ebing and his predecessors had also inves-tigated bisexuality, and that he was endeavoring for Fliess’s sake to avoid the topic “as far as possible” (Masson 464) in his forthcoming “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” But after a few days’ reflection Freud wrote to Fliess admitting that his disclosure of his theory revealed his own desire to “rob you of your originality” (Masson 466) and he offered him the proofs of the “Three Essays” to alter if necessary. His final letter in their correspondence recommended withholding ideas prior to their publi-cation, but it was not a rule Freud always observed himself.

After Freud had confided the fundamentals of the unwritten Totem and Taboo to Salomé, he was particularly unnerved to hear Tausk (who was already complaining that Freud appropriated his ideas) lecturing on “The Father Problem” a few weeks later. During the talk Freud anxiously passed her a note asking if Tausk “knew all about it already?” (Andreas-Salomé 114). Salomé assured Freud that she had not disclosed his theories, and Tausk’s lecture actually focused on primitive matriarchy rather than parricide; but she soon concluded that he did have a serious father problem. In a sad farewell to their relationship, an entry in her journal of August1913 laments “the whole tragedy of Tausk’s relation with Freud”:

he will always tackle the same problems, the same attempts at solution, that Freud is engaged in. This is no accident, but signifies his “mak-ing himself a son” as violently as he “hates the father for it.” As if by thought transference he will always be busy with the same thing as Freud, never taking a step aside to make room for himself. (166– 67)

Tausk spent the war years as an army psychiatrist, publishing in 1916 papers on soldiers’ psychoses and the psychology of the deserter. After-wards he returned to Vienna, and, although still no closer to Freud, he again received some assistance from him in patient referrals and teaching appointments. At the January 6, 1918, meeting of the Vienna Psychoana-lytic Society, the ill-fated analyst read the paper that would become his best-known contribution to psychoanalytic literature. Its subject was intel-lectual influence.

“On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” con-cerns a conviction widespread among psychotics that their mental activity is under the control of a distant apparatus operated by an enemy. Tausk did not purport to discover this symptom, which entered psychiatric his-tory with the case of James Tilly Matthews, an English tea merchant and self-appointed peace emissary to France during the Napoleonic Wars. After shouting “Treason” from the visitors’ gallery during a debate in the House of Commons, Matthews was sent to London’s “Bedlam,” Bethlem Royal Hospital. There he invoked, as sufferers typically do, the new technology of his time to claim that he was being controlled by a device he called the “air loom,” by whose “pneumatic chemistry” a gang of spies was siphon-ing magnetic fluid into his skull. Reviewing the general features of such claims, Tausk writes that patients characteristically describe a machine that transmits and removes “thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces”—a “suggestion-apparatus” (Tausk 187). When the machine made his early twentieth-century patients see images, he notes that it was typically compared to “a magic lantern or cinematograph” (187) in its production of two-dimensional images on a picture plane, an observation—from one of the few early psychoanalysts engaged by moving pictures—that has survived in the theorisation both of paranoia and of the cinema.¹ (Contemporary delusions of this type include being influenced by a chip planted in one’s brain, being a character in a computer game and—as a repeated theme—control via the internet.)²

Tausk also notes that the influencing machine is often said to produce physical reactions, notably “erections and seminal emissions, that are intended to deprive the patient of his male potency” (187). The operator of the machine is similarly characterized as male, exclusively so in Tausk’s view, “predominantly physicians by whom the patient has been treated” (187). But it is Tausk’s discussion of two women patients that distinguishes his psychoanalytic contribution to the literature on this condition. His first example is a patient cited earlier by Freud, “Emma A,” who believed that her eyes were being twisted out of position by the influence of a deceitful lover, who had “made her as evil as himself” (190). Here Tausk echoes Freud’s argument that Emma unconsciously identified with her persecutor, projecting her sense of inner change outward onto an external cause. Such an identification is wonderfully demonstrated in Tausk’s second case study, that of his own patient Natalija A, a former philosophy student who main-tained that she was under the influence of an electrical machine operated by her rejected suitor, a college professor.

Natalija A’s influencing machine was unusually anthropomorphic: she detailed its resemblance to a woman’s body, with a coffin-shaped trunk containing batteries and lined with silk or velvet. The limbs were drawn on the lid, but she could not see the head. A blow to this mechanical double was felt in the corresponding place in her own body. At first manipulation of the machine’s genitalia caused Natalija to experience arousal, but when the machine lost its genitalia, she lost all sexual sensation. She attributed this persecution to the professor’s jealousy. He had, she claimed, first tried to charm her relatives by suggestion, but when that failed he employed the machine to control all those close to her, including her physicians, who con-sequently misdiagnosed her ailments. “On her third visit,” Tausk writes, “she became inaccessible and only stated that the analyst, too, was under the influence of the apparatus, that he had become hostile to her, and that they could no longer understand each other” (195).

Natalija’s vivid description of the influencing machine as an unacknowl-edged projection of her own body led Tausk back to infancy, when an absence of ego boundaries encourages the child to believe that others know its thoughts. Here, among several citations of Freud, he notes his observa-tion during the initial discussion of this paper that this belief

has its source in the process of learning to speak. Having obtained its language from others, the infant has also received thoughts from them; and the child’s feeling that others know his thoughts as well as that others have “made” him the language and, along with it, his thoughts, has therefore some basis in reality. (215n5)

Natalija’s sexual characterisation of the machine (the trunk pregnant with its batteries, the soft skin of its lining, the absence of a ruling head, the arousal which it seems to turn on and off uncontrollably) linked it to the pre-genital stage in which “the entire body is a libidinal zone” seeking a return to the womb. “Such fantasies,” Tausk observes, are also evident in the wishes of the extremely infantile neurotic who desires “to creep completely into the genital from which he came, refusing to content himself with any lesser satisfaction” (212).

The intimations of the unheimliche with which Tausk concludes his paper were not the only ones in this affair. His ability to channel Freud’s ideas, “as if by thought transference,” would be declared uncanny by Freud in the months to come (Roazen 170). Even more uncannily, the lure of the mother’s womb, the sinister professor, the mechanical woman, displaced eyes, the power of thought and the phenomenon of doubling would all find their way into Freud’s own study of strange coincidences published almost two years after Tausk’s lecture.³ And to this list of coincidences I will add one more, that of another conflict between Freud and a different disciple eight years earlier, in the summer of 1910, when he abruptly withdrew from a planned collaboration with Sandor Ferenczi. Here again, the question of influence arose, this time because Ferenczi refused to let Freud literally dictate to him their supposedly co-authored text, but also because the study in question was of Daniel Paul Schreber, the German jurist whose own father complex manifested itself in paranoid delusions of divine dictation. In her entertaining account of this episode, Pamela Thurschwell notes that in his commentary on Schreber’s autobiography, Freud anxiously asserts that he had already “devel-oped my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber’s book,” as though he might be accused of plagiarising the author (Thurschwell 161; Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes” 79). Influence seems to seep everywhere in this affair, since key elements of the Schreber case—nota-bly Freud’s argument that the divine rays that plagued Schreber were actu-ally “projections outward of libidinal cathexes” (“Psycho-Analytic Notes”78)—also feature in Tausk’s interpretation of the influencing machine.

That paper was the last Tausk would read to the Vienna Society. At a time when training analyses were becoming the norm, and apparently troubled by his failure to sustain relationships with women, he asked Freud for analysis. Freud declined, later explaining to a pupil that, if he analyzed Tausk, “he would never be able to publish another line without Tausk’s thinking Freud had stolen it” (Roazen 78). In his stead, he nominated Helene Deutsch, another psychiatrist who was embarrassingly junior to Tausk in years and analytical experience. Deutsch was being analyzed by Freud, and the triangular transference that ensued, in which Tausk’s inces-sant remarks about Freud were passed on by Deutsch in her analysis, lasted three months—until Freud insisted that she choose between them. Deutsch terminated her analysis with Tausk at the end of March. In July, after an allegedly impotent tryst with his fiancée (a former patient whom—accord-ing to Kurt Eissler [ Victor 91]—he had seduced, gotten pregnant and very reluctantly consented to marry), Tausk committed suicide. On the night in question he went home, wrote out his bequests and farewells (including a letter to Freud professing his admiration and lack of resentment), tied a noose around his neck and shot himself.

This “overkill,” as it has been unsurprisingly described, was potentially scandalous for a movement that purported to cure psychological distress. To avert criticism, Freud published with Tausk’s paper on the influencing machine a highly complimentary obituary, attributing his suicide to the rigours of the war. But in a letter to Salomé he confided: “I do not really miss him; I had long taken him to be useless, indeed a threat to the future.” The personal nature of this threat was spelled out in Freud’s valedictory phrase: “he fought out his day of life with the father-ghost” (Roazen 140). In her reply Salomé readily concurred with Freud’s description of Tausk as a threat “to you as also to the cause” of psychoanalysis, despite, as she care-fully added, his advocacy of it “with such enthusiasm and sincerity” (Roa-zen 144). At the end of their relationship she had remarked in her diary on the “irreconcilable contradictions” between Tausk’s “maternal” sensitivity and the aggression that led Freud to call him a “beast of prey,” describing his travails as “the struggle of the human creature. Brother-animal. You” (Andreas-Salomé 167– 68).

In 1969 Paul Roazen took Salomé’s tender epithet (or not so tender, if we recall the bark and the bite) as the title for a biography of Tausk that was highly critical of Freud. The ensuing reaction yielded Francois Roustang’s excellent study Dire Mastery , on the difficulties that the phe-nomenon of the transference presents to professional psychoanalytic insti-tutions. It also spawned (the word is deliberate) the analyst Kurt Eissler’s obdurately non-psychoanalytic commentary on the affair, Talent and Genius. As secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives and his ardent apolo-gist, Eissler wrote 400 pages asserting the derivative character of Tausk’s research and the originality of Freud’s: Tausk may have coined the term “ego boundary,” but Freud had identified structural changes in the ego five years earlier. Tausk’s theory of the influencing machine as a projec-tion of the patient’s body was indebted to Freud’s interpretation of the imagined camera in “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Theory of the Disease” (1915). If Tausk was first to use the term “identity” in psychoanalysis, it was not in the correct sense. Tausk may have published his essay on melancholia before Freud’s, but Freud had been discussing the idea for at least as long. And so on.

Genius, argues Eissler, in a not very original invocation of Thomas Kuhn, discovers paradigms. Talent merely recombines and modifies them. Tausk may have penned the occasional eloquent phrase but this is “as far as talent can go” (Eissler, Talent 274). Confessing his desire “to glorify the genius,” Eissler does not hesitate to pursue the broader political implications of his argument. It may be contrary to “the American democratic tradition,” he avers, but “the development of culture and civilization depends on more than the huge numbers of people who keep society going... Mankind would still be living in caves... had there not been the few who were able to ‘unthink’ the world as it was” (250 –51). Nor does he refrain from an explicitly male characterisation of these few. Quoting Freud...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Psychoanalysis and the Group
• PART II What’s in a Crowd?
• PART III Global Networks and Mass Identifi cations
• Epilogue Pluralities to Come
• Contributors
• References
• Index