Being in the Crowd: Pt. I - The Theory
The global situation through the lens of psychoanalytic theory
It is unbelievable mindlessness and arrogance that produces events on the global scene of which we are all witnesses and which are leading us straight toward the precipice. Wars, economic crises and inequality, pandemics, authoritarianism on the rise, and the escalating danger of a nuclear war and the climate crisis which threaten us with extermination—all these things affirm that the Latin name of our species is undeserved, but the fact that we nevertheless did name ourselves wise gives us a hint at a more appropriate, but not so flattering attribute. And that attribute is essential for the explanation why all this is happening, so everything seems to fit together.
We can reason about individual character traits and say that one individual acts, say, rationally and empathetically, and another one irrationally and egotistically, but how do those translate to mentality of whole populations and social processes? How do individual actions translate to those of mass movements? Why do people follow leaders with destructive agendas and how do movements with humane ideologies shift into destructive ones? Why are they so susceptible to simple, polarizing narratives and why do they tolerate injustice and inequality in their societies? There has been an effort throughout the history of psychoanalytic thought to use its theory to research and explain the dynamics of group and mass psychology, and I think it would be interesting and very relevant for the point in history we’re in right now to go through at least the basics and try to use them to gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on.
As social beings, we are all members of various groups, be those a family, a work collective, a learning community, a club or an organization, or very large groups like nations, religious or ethnic groups, and in the end the all-encompassing one—mankind. We have the need to interact with others and to be affiliated with various groups, which gather us around some common interest and values we identify with. We bring something of our individuality to the group, but as members we also have to conform to the overall group mentality, at least to a certain extent. It’s a dynamic interaction. We may behave quite differently in one group than we would as members of another one, and this depends on what kind of group we’re in and our own dispositions as personalities. The interesting thing is that in groups, under certain circumstances, we tend to (re)act in certain intrinsic ways which are outside the realm of reason.
It already became evident more than 100 years ago that the Enlightenment’s belief in reason had been too optimistic and that people are mostly led by emotions, as Freud suggested, and as it was proven by the horrors of the Great War. Starting with it and up until the present day, we’ve had the most turbulent time in history, produced by the worst in human nature, amplified by the technology. The mass media, starting with news papers, through radio and television, and culminating with the Internet, enabled increasingly faster and diverse ways to deliver information to the public, but also to propagate certain values and ideologies, changing the way the political and economic elites interact with the masses, influence the social processes and shape the public opinion. The irrationality of the masses and ideological and identity groups can be and is exploited to the maximum, in order to push the agenda of small groups that are in power, and this happens in both authoritarian and relatively democratic societies. But how does that really work? The first thing that comes to mind is that the level of control that the elites can exert over the masses depends on the extent to which they control the mass media, and also the level of education, intellectual capacity, moral standards and social awareness of each individual comprising the mass. This is true, of course, but the extent to which the masses get swayed by a narrative or not depends essentially on another individual factor: that of the psychological structure, which actually underpins the mentioned attributes, as it is crucial for one’s capacity for critical, rational and balanced thinking, a more realistic and mature sense of the world, meaningful connection with others and well established moral standards.
The Theory
In the psychoanalytic object relations theory, psychological structure is an intrapsychic organization of internalized self and object1 representations, numerous dyadic relationships that are bound with certain affects. These representations are our subjective experience of particular aspects of ourselves, and particular aspects of other persons, each of these pairs being contextualized with some affective state that binds them together. These are called object relations dyads (an example of one would be: a weak and helpless self, and an aggressive other, bound with an emotion of fear). From birth on, these dyads are being formed in interaction with others, and throughout the development of the mind they get organized in a certain way, into more complex and mature structures (if everything goes well). At first, the baby splits all experiences strictly into two segments: one with all-positive and one with all-negative experiences. These contain contradictory representations of a frustrated self and a frustrating other which are connected with negative affects, and a gratified self and a gratifying other which are connected with positive affects. The self and the objects cannot be at any one point experienced in a more nuanced way, as having both good and bad aspects, but as either all good in one moment, or all bad in another one, and in addition to that, the associated affect is particularly strong. This is what Melanie Klein (1946) called the “paranoid-schizoid position”2 [1]. In the next stage of development, if positive experiences predominate, an integration of these two segments—the idealized and the persecutory one—happens, and the child starts seeing the self and others in an increasingly mature way, as complex persons who have good and bad sides at the same time, and is able to experience more tempered affects in relations to others, both in satisfying and frustrating situations. This is what Klein called the “depressive position”3. With this more mature and integrated structure, the person is able to tolerate imperfections in oneself and others, as opposed to either completely idealizing or completely devaluing self and others which happens in the paranoid-schizoid position. If the negative experiences predominate during the development of the child, this integration does not happen fully—as the mind needs to keep the oppositely valenced experiences separate, so that the majority of bad ones do not overwhelm the minority of good ones and thus leave the child with a perception of the world that feels like an utter hell—and hence comes the personality pathology in a lower or higher degree, with one of its consequences being the tendency to have a simplistic, black and white view of the world.
This is a really short and basic explanation of psychoanalytic object relations theory, but I hope that you can already see how this relates to the topic of this essay. In any case, it is an important introduction for an overview of psychoanalytic perspective on group and mass psychology and its social and political implications that I’ll further present. For this, I’ll mostly use Kernberg’s paper “Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression” [2] as the source. In this paper, Kernberg analyzes the psychoanalytic understanding of regressive processes in groups, and the relationship between this regression and the emergence of particular type of leadership, as well as the social forces triggered by such an interaction.
It was noted by Freud in his 1921 work [3] which drew upon the previous works of Le Bon et. al., that the individual who senses himself as a part of a mass movement acquires a reduced capacity for independent judgement and rational decision making (Kernberg 2020), and instead receives a sense of power through the identification with the movement and its leader while at the same time relinquishing all individual responsibility and initiative to that leader. It is a scary prospect and we all know well from the experiences of the 20th century how dangerous this mechanism can be when it operates on a large scale. In the face of great social and economic upheaval, the fear of breakdown of the social contract, and the loss of trust in the established institutions and the ideology behind them to maintain safety, order and prosperity, appearance of leaders and messiahs with new narratives that promise a solution and their scared, humiliated, enraged and hopeful followers is imminent. But to understand some intrinsic psychological propensities of individuals as members of groups in general, exploration of groups on a much smaller scale, and in much less dramatic circumstances, is of great value.
British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Wilfred Bion researched small groups of 5-12 people in 1940s which he wrote about in his “Experiences in Groups” published in 1961 [4]. He differentiated structured groups, which have some task to perform, and unstructured or unorganized ones, which were assembled for the sole purpose of observing its member’s behavior. Structured groups operate rationally, and its members cooperate toward achieving the set goal. In unstructured groups, Bion noted, a regressive process inevitably occurs that leads to psychological states which he called “basic assumptions”. There are three basic assumptions: dependency, fight-flight and pairing.
In the group with the basic assumption dependency, the group members have a sense of insecurity, uncertainty and immaturity, and tend to look for a self-assured, narcissistic leader whom they can idealize and who can provide security, reassurance, knowledge and guidance. If the leader does not meet the needs of the group, the members experience disillusionment, devalue the leader and search for a new one. This type of basic group has a narcissistic orientation, it is static and acts soothingly to its members and relieves them of the need to think for themselves. There is activation of primitive idealization, regressive dependency, and denial of all conflicts around authority issues. In Bion’s words:
The basic assumption in this group culture seems to be that an external object exists whose function it is to provide security for the immature organism. This means that one person is always felt to be in a position to supply the needs of the group, and the rest in a position in which their needs are supplied. (Bion, 1961, p. 74)
The group with the basic assumption fight-flight fosters feelings of tension and conflict and has a paranoid orientation. The group looks for a paranoid personality as a leader—strong, self-righteous, distrustful and controlling—who brings everyone together in unity to fight an out-group. If there is no out-group, the group itself tends to split into a subgroup that stands with the leader and then fights the “bad” remainder of the group. So there is splitting between “us” and “them”, idealization of the group and projection of aggression and everything perceived as bad to the out-group, and a tendency to submit to the leader, stemming from the shared sense of discipline.
Finally, the pairing basic assumption group has a less regressive orientation compared to the other two, as this group has sexual, Oedipal elements that foster creation of pairs, and selects a leader who encourages this. The group selects a couple for which it expects a love relationship to happen, takes care of and admires the pair, as this corresponds to its wish of establishing an ideal love relationship but also the need to fight off envious feelings.
In all three types of unorganized groups, members tend to unconsciously relinquish their individuality and subordinate their existence to the function of group preservation. The group itself has no function, as it’s not organized around some task, and thus no meaning, but nevertheless everyone feels on some implicit level that the group must keep going. If there is no goal of a higher order, the members of the group automatically revert to these basic assumptions, a specific mood pervades the whole group, in which a need for a leader occurs whose function is to soothe the group and provide the sense of security, either through: attribution of omnipotence and omniscience to him by the members of the group, which stems from their feelings of inadequacy and frustration in the dependency group; feelings of unity, courage and self-sacrifice which occur when he’s leading everyone in fight or flight; or feelings of love when he facilitates pairing. These circumstances are charged with strong emotions and group members consequently loose their capacity for critical judgement, which has an effect of disabling any rational conversation within the group.
These regressive patterns seem to extrapolate to large groups and masses. Pierre Turquet studied unstructured large groups of 100-300 people. One kind of development in such a large group is that its members experience a sense of loss of personal identity, after which efforts emerge to establish subgroups on the basis of various commonalities (race, language, appearance), but when these efforts fail, the group develops a collective sense of intense anxiety. Intelligent, self-reflective individuals who try to analyze the situation rationally tend to be envied and ostracized, and mediocre individuals who make simplistic statements that have a calming effect tend to be supported. Another kind of development happens when there is too much anxiety and aggression in the group, in which case the group finds a paranoid individual who finds a cause to fight against. In contrast to Turquet and Bion, Vamik Volkan studied naturally occurring groups in times of crisis, and found that in traumatic situations where the traditional structures that define and regulate the daily life of the individual collapse, there is a natural tendency of the large group to regress. There is a threat to the identity of individuals, who then tend to search for what Volkan called a “second skin”, which represents a new external social structure. In this kind of situation, a natural regressive dynamics takes place, the masses search for a leader who will provide them with the second skin, and an opportune immergence of an individual with narcissistic and/or paranoid traits happens, who presents himself as the voice of the people, provides reassurance and cohesion which is based around the new social structure and the fight against the designated external enemy.
We can see that the same kind of psychological processes seem to occur in groups that do not have any structure, or suddenly loose one.
The motive for group regression, in all cases, is a loss of the functional relationship of individuals within a stable, small or large social and cultural structure. This social and cultural structure is given by an ordinary living situation within a stable social environment not threatened by major political, international, or economic catastrophes or nature determined calamities. And, in the case of small groups, the loss of the functional tasks of the group by design or other circumstances replicates temporarily that loss of functional stability of the individual. This loss of the traditional social structure signifies a threat to individual identity, and it signals the extent to which normal identity function is supported and assured by the individual’s psychosocial environment. [my emphasis] Massive loss of such a protective environment that simultaneously affects a selected group or an entire community leads to powerful anxiety and initiates regressive functions. (Kernberg, 2020)
So the loss of social structure threatens individual identity, and when individual identity is threatened, regressive functions are initiated. It is important to note, and also very interesting, that Kernberg (2006) defines identity as “the psychological structure that organizes the individual’s experience of self and the experience of others in interaction”. This means that our identity is not just how we experience ourselves, but also how we experience others (this was surprising to me when I first heard it). In other words, others are a part of our own identity—this reflects our nature as social beings. Normal identity is an integrated sense of self and an integrated sense of significant others. This integration is the process of the movement from Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. Experiencing regression means reverting back to the paranoid-schizoid position as a defensive maneuver, where primitive defenses can be used in response to a dramatic, emergency situation, so that an individual can adapt to the new dangerous circumstance. All these defenses are based on splitting, the central defense mechanism of the paranoid-schizoid position that strictly separates all experience into an idealized and a persecutory segment. To what extent a particular individual is susceptible to the regressive process, depends on that individual’s current psychological structure: the more integrated identity an individual has, the less susceptible he or she is to the regressive process, because there is a healthy integrated core that tends to remain constant whatever the external circumstances are; if the structure has identity diffusion, the person already functions on this primitive level (called borderline personality organization4 by Kernberg), so one might say that the person a priori had a sense of the world that is essentially dangerous and polarized, and will thus react more readily in the sense of primitive defenses to the actual external turmoil. Individuals who do not have an integrated sense of self base their identities mostly on the external structures (religion, ethnicity, nationality, specific cultures and subcultures…), and when those external structures are shaken, their very core is shaken itself; these people are essentially struggling to keep their mind together as they experience intense fear and uncertainty. The leader who provides them with a new structure or promises to repair the existing one, gives an easily digestible, simple explanation for their situation, tells them that they are perfect and that those “bad others” are to blame for everything, basically strikes a chord within them and saves them from this instability, so they are ready to follow him or her blindly.
The type of the leader as well as the ideology behind the social structure that he promotes can oscillate between a narcissistic and a paranoid one. Both narcissistic and paranoid personality disorders are at the borderline organization of personality (as all the personality disorders in general) and are each other’s counterpart on the extroverted and introverted parts of the spectrum, respectively. Paranoid personalities use the defensive mechanism of projection, whereby one attributes to others what one cannot tolerate in oneself, and in that way they see aggression coming from others and deem themselves as victims, while at the same time being mistrustful and aggressive towards others. Narcissists who function at a higher level can regulate aggression because their structure operates in the way that permits them to devalue others, whom they perceive as inferior, insignificant, incompetent and unworthy. As they move toward the lower level of personality organization, paranoia and aggression increase, and at some extreme point of severity, paranoia and narcissism fuse together into the syndrome of malignant narcissism. This kind of personality, beside the typical narcissistic features of grandiosity and devaluation of others, is also characterized by ego syntonic5 aggression, as well as paranoid and antisocial features. Appearance of such a personality as a leader in times of social turmoil—a situation with which such a personality would feel completely in tune—in combination with regressive processes that happen in the masses who would pick such a leader—that may be in addition facilitated by the possible general prevalence of poor mental health within the population—presents an extremely dangerous and chilling prospect. We know it happened before and that it can happen again.
In the next part, I shall describe the two dominant ideologies and then try to analyze the current global situation using the psychoanalytic theory which has been presented here.
Relevant literature:
[1] Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms”, 1946.
[2] Otto F. Kernberg, “Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression”, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 89(1), pp. 1-24, 2020.
[3] Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”, W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.
[4] Wilfred R. Bion, “Experiences in Groups and Other Papers”, Routledge, 1968.
[5] Mark F. Lenzenweger, John F. Clarkin, “Major Theories of Personality Disorder”, The Guilford Press, 2005: Chapter 3 “A Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality Disorders” by Otto F. Kernberg and Eve Caligor.
‘Object’ means other person, as experienced by the subject.
‘Paranoid’ refers to a sense of persecution by a bad object (called paranoid anxiety by Klein); ‘schizoid’ refers to the splitting of the aspects of self and objects into idealized and persecutory segments.
This position is called ‘depressive’ to reflect the fact that the integration of idealized and persecutory experiences produces the sense of a more realistic world with imperfections in the self and others, as opposed to the romanticized world where the ideal self and other figures exist, that are clearly distinguished from the persecutory ones. So this term doesn’t have anything to do with depression, the mood disorder, although it is a typical occurrence in therapy that patients at some point when their identity becomes more integrated experience feelings of sadness as the part of this positive development, due to the loss of the ideal images of the self and objects.
Borderline personality organization should not be confused with borderline personality disorder. On the spectrum ranging from a healthy psyche to the most severe psychopathology, Kernberg defines 4 main segments: healthy, neurotic, borderline and psychotic. I might write about these in an another essay.
Ego syntonic emotion or behavior is the one which a person perceives on the conscious level as fully acceptable and appropriate. The opposite would be ego dystonic.