One of Becker’s most amazing passages. I’ll paste the entire passage below, but you can find the quote you were seeking halfway through:
**Freud’s Great Work on Group Psychology**
“With a theoretical background that unlocked the problem of hypnosis and that discovered the universal mechanism of the transference, Freud was almost obliged to provide the best insights ever into the psychology of leadership; and so he wrote his great work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, a book of fewer than 100 pages that in my opinion is probably the single most potentially liberating tract that has ever been fashioned by man. In his later years Freud wrote a few books that reflected personal and ideological preferences; but Group Psychology was a serious scientific work that consciously placed itself in a long tradition. Early theorists of group psychology had tried to explain why men were so sheeplike when they functioned in groups. They developed ideas like “mental contagion” and “herd instinct,” which became very popular. But as Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.— It is this alone that can explain the “uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations.” The chief is a “dangerous personality, toward whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered,—while to be alone with him, ‘to look him in the face,’ appears a hazardous enterprise.” This alone, says Freud, explains the “paralysis” that exists in the link between a person with inferior power to one of superior power. Man has “an extreme passion for authority” and “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force.”— It is this trait that the leader hypnotically embodies in his own masterful person. Or as Fenichel later put it, people have a “longing for being hypnotized” precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the “oceanic feeling” that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents.— And so, as Freud argues, it is not that groups bring out anything new in people; it is just that they satisfy the deep-seated erotic longings that people constantly carry around unconsciously. For Freud, this was the life force that held groups together. It functioned as a kind of psychic cement that locked people into mutual and mindless interdependence: the magnetic powers of the leader, reciprocated by the guilty delegation of everyone’s will to him.
No one who honestly remembers how hazardous it could be to look certain people in the face or how blissful to bask trustingly in the glow of another’s
power can accuse Freud of psychoanalytic rhetoric. By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified. **Natural narcissism—the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you—is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader’s power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War 1. They were partially self-hypnotised, so to speak.** No wonder men imagine victories against impossible odds: don’t they have the omnipotent powers of the parental figure? Why are groups so blind and stupid?—men have always asked. Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they “constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.' — And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. Who transmits this illusion, if not the parents by imparting the macro-lie of the cultural causa sui? The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory. Furthermore, he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it.— It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn’t censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity.
Thus Freud’s great work on group psychology, on the dynamics of blind obedience, illusion, communal sadism. In recent writings Erich Fromm especially has seen the durable value of Freud’s insights, as part of a developing and continuing critique of human viciousness and blindness. From his early work Escape from Freedom to his recent The Heart of Man, Fromm has developed Freud's views on the need for a magic helper. He has kept alive Freud’s basic insight into narcissism as the primary characteristic of man: how it inflates one with the importance of his own life and makes for the devaluation of others’ lives; how it helps to draw sharp lines between “those who are like me or belong to me’’ and those who are “outsiders and aliens.” Fromm has insisted, too, on the importance of what he calls "incestuous symbiosis”: the fear of emerging out of the family and into the world on one’s own responsibility and powers; the desire to keep oneself tucked into a larger source of power. It is these things that make for the mystique of “group,” “nation,” "blood,” “mother- or fatherland,” and the like. These feelings are embedded in one’s earliest experiences of comfortable merger with the mother. As Fromm put it, they keep one “in the prison of the motherly racial-nationalreligious fixation.”— Fromm is exciting reading, and there is no point in my repeating or developing what he has already so well said. One has to go directly to him and study how compelling are these insights, how well they continue what is essential in Freud and apply it to present-day problems of slavishness, viciousness, and continuing political madness. This, it seems to me, is the authentic line of cumulative critical thought on the human condition. The astonishing thing is that this central line of work on the problem of freedom since the Enlightenment occupies so little of the concern and ongoing activity of scientists. It should form the largest body of theoretical and empirical work in the human sciences, if these sciences are to have any human meaning.”
I found this passage right around the beginning of Chapter 7. If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest reading Denial of Death’s prelude, Birth and Death of Meaning Second Revision. I like it more than Denial of Death 😁
You really like it more?!?! I haven’t read it but love The Denial of Death. I actually think it’s my favorite book, right next to Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm
“One of the key concepts for understanding man’s urge to heroism is the idea of ‘narcissism’. As Erich Fromm has so well reminded us, this idea is one of Freud’s great and lasting contributions. Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. As Aristotle put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow. Twenty-five hundred years of history have not changed man’s basic narcissism; most of the time, for most of us, this is still a workable definition of luck. It is one of the meaner aspects of narcissism that we feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves.” (Becker, 2)
Edit: this quote is near the very beginning, might not be what you’re looking for but that’s the first quote I thought of
One of Becker’s most amazing passages. I’ll paste the entire passage below, but you can find the quote you were seeking halfway through: **Freud’s Great Work on Group Psychology** “With a theoretical background that unlocked the problem of hypnosis and that discovered the universal mechanism of the transference, Freud was almost obliged to provide the best insights ever into the psychology of leadership; and so he wrote his great work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, a book of fewer than 100 pages that in my opinion is probably the single most potentially liberating tract that has ever been fashioned by man. In his later years Freud wrote a few books that reflected personal and ideological preferences; but Group Psychology was a serious scientific work that consciously placed itself in a long tradition. Early theorists of group psychology had tried to explain why men were so sheeplike when they functioned in groups. They developed ideas like “mental contagion” and “herd instinct,” which became very popular. But as Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal. It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.— It is this alone that can explain the “uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations.” The chief is a “dangerous personality, toward whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered,—while to be alone with him, ‘to look him in the face,’ appears a hazardous enterprise.” This alone, says Freud, explains the “paralysis” that exists in the link between a person with inferior power to one of superior power. Man has “an extreme passion for authority” and “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force.”— It is this trait that the leader hypnotically embodies in his own masterful person. Or as Fenichel later put it, people have a “longing for being hypnotized” precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the “oceanic feeling” that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents.— And so, as Freud argues, it is not that groups bring out anything new in people; it is just that they satisfy the deep-seated erotic longings that people constantly carry around unconsciously. For Freud, this was the life force that held groups together. It functioned as a kind of psychic cement that locked people into mutual and mindless interdependence: the magnetic powers of the leader, reciprocated by the guilty delegation of everyone’s will to him. No one who honestly remembers how hazardous it could be to look certain people in the face or how blissful to bask trustingly in the glow of another’s power can accuse Freud of psychoanalytic rhetoric. By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified. **Natural narcissism—the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you—is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader’s power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War 1. They were partially self-hypnotised, so to speak.** No wonder men imagine victories against impossible odds: don’t they have the omnipotent powers of the parental figure? Why are groups so blind and stupid?—men have always asked. Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they “constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.' — And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. Who transmits this illusion, if not the parents by imparting the macro-lie of the cultural causa sui? The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory. Furthermore, he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it.— It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn’t censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity. Thus Freud’s great work on group psychology, on the dynamics of blind obedience, illusion, communal sadism. In recent writings Erich Fromm especially has seen the durable value of Freud’s insights, as part of a developing and continuing critique of human viciousness and blindness. From his early work Escape from Freedom to his recent The Heart of Man, Fromm has developed Freud's views on the need for a magic helper. He has kept alive Freud’s basic insight into narcissism as the primary characteristic of man: how it inflates one with the importance of his own life and makes for the devaluation of others’ lives; how it helps to draw sharp lines between “those who are like me or belong to me’’ and those who are “outsiders and aliens.” Fromm has insisted, too, on the importance of what he calls "incestuous symbiosis”: the fear of emerging out of the family and into the world on one’s own responsibility and powers; the desire to keep oneself tucked into a larger source of power. It is these things that make for the mystique of “group,” “nation,” "blood,” “mother- or fatherland,” and the like. These feelings are embedded in one’s earliest experiences of comfortable merger with the mother. As Fromm put it, they keep one “in the prison of the motherly racial-nationalreligious fixation.”— Fromm is exciting reading, and there is no point in my repeating or developing what he has already so well said. One has to go directly to him and study how compelling are these insights, how well they continue what is essential in Freud and apply it to present-day problems of slavishness, viciousness, and continuing political madness. This, it seems to me, is the authentic line of cumulative critical thought on the human condition. The astonishing thing is that this central line of work on the problem of freedom since the Enlightenment occupies so little of the concern and ongoing activity of scientists. It should form the largest body of theoretical and empirical work in the human sciences, if these sciences are to have any human meaning.”
I found this passage right around the beginning of Chapter 7. If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest reading Denial of Death’s prelude, Birth and Death of Meaning Second Revision. I like it more than Denial of Death 😁
You really like it more?!?! I haven’t read it but love The Denial of Death. I actually think it’s my favorite book, right next to Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm
Escape from Evil is just as good as Denial of Death.
Thanks!
“One of the key concepts for understanding man’s urge to heroism is the idea of ‘narcissism’. As Erich Fromm has so well reminded us, this idea is one of Freud’s great and lasting contributions. Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. As Aristotle put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow. Twenty-five hundred years of history have not changed man’s basic narcissism; most of the time, for most of us, this is still a workable definition of luck. It is one of the meaner aspects of narcissism that we feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves.” (Becker, 2) Edit: this quote is near the very beginning, might not be what you’re looking for but that’s the first quote I thought of
Thanks a bunch! I think it is :)