Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/114

 I06 BOOK REVIEWS

on these subjects compare p. 184.) The French ideal of equality and the British of liberty are both specially powerful reaction-formations against the encroachments of a tyrannous aristocracy suffered in the past, and both correspond to the infantile wish to be equal with the adults and not hampered by their will. Hunian nature really finds its pleasure only in the repetition of the past; conservatism is the natural attitude of mankind (See Freud: Jenseits des Lustprinzips), so that we must class the ideal of progress as another reaction-formation — this time against the tendency to relapse into the past — as a libidinisation of tlie comparative readjustments dictated by the Reality Principle, The influence of the past is rightly insisted on throughout the book; public opinion, we are told, is not a mere sum of individual opinions upon any particular question, it is rather the expression of that tone or attitude of mind which prevails throughout the nation and owes its quality far more to the influence of the dead than of the living (p. 1S9).

But it is the third part of the book (Chapters XIV— XX) which is concerned with the processes by which national mind and character are gradually built up and shaped in the long course of ages. For 'just as we cannot understand individual minds, their peculiarities and differ- ences, without studying their development, so we cannot hope to understand national mind and character and the peculiarities and differ- ences of nations without studying the slow processes tlirough which they have been built up in the course of centuries ' (p. 200J. Psycho- Analysis can with full right lay claim to the merit ot having made more headway in the genetic study of the individual mind than any other method, and can therefore expect to find the same or analogous mechan- isms at work in the formation of the group spirit. McDougall starts on his road with a remark which seems to be strikingly correct and of great importance for future investigation. 'The differentiation of racial types in the prehistoric period must have been in the main the work oJ differences of physical environment, operating directly by way of selection, by way of adaptation of each race to its environment through the extermination of the strains least suited to exist under those physical conditions. But this process, this direct moulding of racial types by physical environment must have been well-nigh arrested as soon as the nations began to form. For the formation of nations implies the beginning of civilisation; and civilisation very largely con- sists in the capacity of a people to subdue their physical environment to their needs to a degree that renders tliem far less the sport of it than was primitive man ; it consists in short, in replacing man's natural environment by an artificial environment largely of his own choice and creadon' (pp. 201, 202). If races must have been formed before the social and religious evolution of mankind began, the problem of psych- ical differences and psychical parallelism between nations belonging