Le Bon's Description Of The Group Mind

Instead of starting from a definition, it is more useful to:

• begin with the range of the phenomena
• select from among the phenomena a few striking and characteristic facts

Le Bon’s famous work “Psychologie des foules” does this.[2]

If a Psychology, concerned with exploring the predispositions, the instincts, the motives and the aims of an individual man down to his actions and his relations with those who are nearest to him, had completely achieved its task, and had cleared up the whole of these matters with their inter-connections, it would then suddenly find itself confronted by a new task which would lie before it unachieved.

It would be obliged to explain the surprising fact that under a certain condition this individual whom it had come to understand thought, felt, and acted in quite a different way from what would have been expected. And this condition is his insertion into a collection of people which has acquired the characteristic of a ‘psychological group’.

1. What, then, is a ‘group’?
2. How does it acquire the capacity for exercising such a decisive influence over the mental life of the individual?
3. What is the nature of the mental change which it forces upon the individual?

Theoretical Group Psychology answers these 3 questions. The best way is to start with the third question.

Observation of the changes in the individual’s reactions is what provides Group Psychology with its material; for every attempt at an explanation must be preceded by a description of the thing that is to be explained.

Le Bon says:

‘The most striking in group psychology[3] is that their being part of a group gives their members a sort of collective mind. This mind makes them feel, think, and act in a manner different from how each individual of them would feel, think, and act if he were isolated.

There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group.

The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.’ (p. 29.)[4]

If the individuals in the group are combined into a unity, there must surely be something to unite them, and this bond might be precisely the thing that is characteristic of a group. But Le Bon does not answer this question. He goes on to consider the alteration which the individual undergoes when in a group and describes it in terms which harmonize well with the fundamental postulates of our own depth-psychology.

‘It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a group differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

‘To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life.

The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the conscious[5] motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race.

Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still, of which we ourselves are ignorant.[6] The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.’ (p. 30.)

Le Bon thinks that the particular acquirements of individuals become obliterated in a group. In this way, their distinctiveness vanishes.

The racial unconscious emerges. What is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homogeneous. The mental superstructure, the development of which in individuals shows such dissimilarities, is removed. The unconscious foundations, which are similar in everyone, stand exposed to view.

In this way, individuals in a group would come to show an average character.

But Le Bon believes that they also display new characteristics which they have not previously possessed. He seeks the reason for this in 3 different factors.

1. The individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power. This allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint.

He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a group being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.’ (p. 33.)

From our point of view we need not attribute so much importance to the appearance of new characteristics. For us it would be enough to say that in a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instincts.

The apparently new characteristics which he then displays are in fact the manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition. We can find no difficulty in understanding the disappearance of conscience or of a sense of responsibility in these circumstances. It has long been our contention that ‘dread of society [soziale Angst]’ is the essence of what is called conscience.[7]

2. Contagion intervenes to determine the manifestation in groups of their special characteristics, and at the same time, the trend they are to take.

Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain.

It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a group every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a group.’ (p. 33.)

We shall later on base an important conjecture upon this last statement.

' 3. The suggestibility of which the contagion mentioned above is only an effect.

This is the most important. This determines in the individuals of a group special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual.

‘This can be explained by recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful investigations seem to prove that an individual immersed for some length of time in a group in action soon finds himself—either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the group, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser…. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.

‘Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological group. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of groups than in that of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the group, it gains in strength by reciprocity.’ (p. 34.)

‘We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a group. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.’ (p. 35.)

Le Bon explains the condition of an individual in a group as being actually hypnotic, and does not merely make a comparison between the two states.

We have no intention of raising any objection at this point, but wish only to emphasize the fact that the two last causes of an individual becoming altered in a group (the contagion and the heightened suggestibility) are evidently not on a par, since the contagion seems actually to be a manifestation of the suggestibility. Moreover the effects of the two factors do not seem to be sharply differentiated in the text of Le Bon’s remarks.

We may perhaps best interpret his statement if we connect the contagion with the effects of the individual members of the group upon one another, while we point to another source for those manifestations of suggestion in the group which are put on a level with the phenomena of hypnotic influence.

But to what source?

We cannot avoid being struck with a sense of deficiency when we notice that one of the chief elements of the comparison, namely the person who is to replace the hypnotist in the case of the group, is not mentioned in Le Bon’s exposition. But he nevertheless distinguishes between this influence of fascination which remains plunged in obscurity and the contagious effect which the individuals exercise upon one another and by which the original suggestion is strengthened.

Here is yet another important consideration for helping us to understand the individual in a group: ‘Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.’ (p. 36.) He then dwells especially upon the lowering in intellectual ability which an individual experiences when he becomes merged in a group.[8]