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Ideology and identity: A psychoanalytic investigation of a social phenomenon

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Abstract

This paper uses psychoanalytic thinking to understand the way individuals come to be in a social group that develops an ideology. LeBon was one of the earliest to consider destructive groups and the distortion of individuality within crowds and mobs, and his work formed the basis of Freud's thinking. Destructive groups are contrasted with constructive ones that can achieve creative and work-oriented functioning. Destructive groups have various characteristics, one of which is the place that ideas have in the group and in the minds of the members. When ideas become overvalued and thus an ideology, the relation between the individual and the ideas changes. On one hand, in ordinary constructive work and groups, the idea is an abstract notion useable in aspirations and achievements; and on the other hand, in ideological and destructive groups, the individual is equated with the idea, which becomes an end in itself. This movement involves the pressure of social forces upon forms of individual distress that affects their sense of themselves. Following Freud's views on the group ideal, it is possible to understand the excitement in primitive destructive groups, their unreality and the erosion of individuality as coming from the equation of self with the ideal.

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Notes

  1. This paper was published (2007) in an earlier and rather different version in French, as ‘Idéologie et identité: une étude psychanalytique d'un phénoméne social’, in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 71, pp. 1027–1045.

  2. Ever since the revolutionary experiments following the American and French revolutions in the eighteenth century sent shock waves through the ruling elite in the rest of Europe, there has been a preoccupation with how to manage society in a rational way. Conservative elements have worried about crowd behaviour, and especially how to control it and prevent revolutions (see Nye, 1975; Moscovici, 1985).

  3. This distinction is vividly indicated in Bion's division between the work group and the ‘basic assumption’ groups. Bion explicitly connected the ‘work group’ with McDougal's (1920) ‘organized’ group, which contrasts with psychologically primitive groups where quasi-instinctual processes dominate. Later (1952), Bion explored the possibility of re-interpreting these instinctual group processes in terms of very early anxieties of the infant, which are stirred in the process of becoming a member of a group. Nitsun (1996) called the negative state, the ‘anti-group’.

  4. Freud comes close to giving a priority to the social dimension: ‘individual psychology … is at the same time social psychology as well’ (Freud, 1921, p. 69).

  5. There is a coherent view that it is not ideas which determine the inclusion in, and boundaries of, a group, but that like many other primates and mammals, there is a primitive, and instinctual herd-like quality which brings people together (see for instance, Trotter, 1916). Bion, in his earlier writing on groups (excluding his review – Bion, 1952), followed this tradition. While I do not want to exclude this possibility or other reasons for association together, this paper is concerned with sophisticated groups, in working organizations and in political societies. Indeed, Bion's work on the innate valency to form groups still described the phenomenon as manifesting itself in shared ideas and assumptions – the basic assumption groups.

  6. Many would say that these are not different; rather the exploitation in gender and race relations is also due to a hidden economic dominance – of men, of whites and so on.

  7. Social attitudes, assumptions and myths have some similarities with individual unconscious phantasies, and are unfortunately sometimes confused with each other. Freud insisted the Oedipus complex was ubiquitous and the motivation for all social institutions (Freud, 1913), as well as individual personalities. Roheim (1950), for one, enthusiastically applied this psychoanalytic calculus to the mythologies of actual tribal cultures. For various attempts to solve this psychological–political interaction, see Parker and Spiers (1996), which includes Hinshelwood (1996).

  8. This sharing may extend to colleagues, who are then frequently estranged from some other group, and form sects, esoteric schools and cabals. Psychoanalytic groups, for all their beneficial work for patients, also cling to certain ideas that can have damaging ideology-like effects and the groups can exhibit behaviour like sects.

  9. Similarly, one could make the case that in September 2001, when the twin towers collapsed after the al-Qaeda attack, the majority of US egos also collapsed with the towers, leaving them open to the persuasion of a leader who could promise their re-inflation through military conquest, based in turn on belligerent inter-group relations. This remained somewhat precarious because of the failure of the military adventure in Iraq.

  10. I do not claim this as scholarly historiography, but merely illustrative of the kinds of dynamic processes that a psychoanalytic approach might expose.

  11. In fact, only 42 per cent of the population voted for the National Socialists in 1933, but it was nevertheless the group with the largest vote.

  12. I leave aside Therese Benedek's (1936) original use of the term ‘overvalued idea’.

  13. I take the term ‘primary task’ from the concepts of the group relations model. A group has a boundary, and it also has a central focus, like a cell with its membrane and its nucleus. The primary task is the means by which the group and its members coordinate their thinking about reality.

  14. Originally, a ‘triumph’ was a public ceremony celebrating an overwhelming military victory by a general of the Roman Empire.

  15. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Triumph of the Will (1935), filmed at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi party, was an extraordinary evocation of the truly triumphal union of leader with the populace and with German ideals. Sixteen psychobiographies of leaders, such as the study of Woodrow Wilson attributed to Freud and Bullitt (1967), naively derive Wilson's leadership and policies merely from the subject's own personality development. See also Abse's (1989) execrable psychologizing of Margaret Thatcher's monetarism on the basis of her upbringing in a grocer's shop. The social forces that bring the leader to the fore are often too difficult for biographers.

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Hinshelwood, R. Ideology and identity: A psychoanalytic investigation of a social phenomenon. Psychoanal Cult Soc 14, 131–148 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.37

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