Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/108

 jqo BOOK REVIEWS

largely independent of the qualities of the individuals who enter into its composition and take part for a brief time in its life' (p. 9). Such a society, our author tells us, has the power of perpetuating itself as a self-identical system. He refers to the German naUon in connection with the Great War as a proof that society is not merely the sum-total of the individuals it is composed of. After the war Germany may have become organized on a completely different basis from pre-war Ger- many, so that the type of society and the attitude of the world towards the Germans as a nation may be completely changed, although the group called 'German nation' is made up of exactly the same indivi- duals as before. Or, we may add, generation after generation may come and go, without changing the psychical portrait of a group which is united by race and common tradition.

After accepting the idea of a group mind but rejecting that of a 'superindividual consciousness' McDougall tells us that the essential theme of his book is the 'resolution of a paradox'. 'Participation in group life degrades the individual, assimilating his mental processes to those of a crowd's, whose brutality, inconstancy and unreasoning im- pulsiveness have been the tiieme of many writers; yet only by parti- cipation in group life does man become fully man, only so does he rise above die level of the savage' (p. 20). Here again we must raise the same protest as before. We asked what have political ideas to do witii these questions and now we feel that caution is needed when the author, at the very outset, applies a standard of absolute ethics to human actions. We know very well that a successful general or popular leader is a hero, but that defeat inevitably (or frequently) stamps him as a criminal for whom a common jail is tiiought even too good by his one-time adulators. With a legion of these examples under our eyes it is better to take up a standpoint 'beyond good and evil" and then try and see whetiier we cannot rather deduce tiie moral categories from group life, instead of applying certain concepts to modes of behaviour which are probably far more archaic than die concepts in question.

A homogeneous group without any organisation of any sort is what we usually call a crowd (Chapter II). In a crowd the individual sur- passes his own boundaries and is carried out of his own self, for all the emotions are intensified by the similar emotions of his fellows. 'The panic is the crudest and simplest example of collective mental life. Groups of gregarious animals are liable to panic; and die panic of a crowd of human beings seems to be generated by tiie same instinctive reactions as the panic of animals. The essence of the panic is the collective intensification of the instinctive excitement widi its emotion of fear and its instinct to flight' (pp. 24, 25). An important factor is the consciousness of being on die same side as tiie majority, which is always the 'right' side in any given question and hence frees the m-

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