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Crowd Psychology and Freud' S Model of Perpetual Decadence

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Crowd Psychology and Freud' S Model of Perpetual Decadence CIIAPTER 5 Crowd Psychology and Freud' s Model of Perpetual Decadence We can hardly realize the whirlwinds of brutality and un­ chained libido that roared through the streets of Imperial Rome. But we would know that feeling again if ever we under­ stood, clearly and in all its consequences, what is happening under our very eyes. The civilized man of today seems very far from that. He has merely becornc neurotic. -CARL JeNe ECAUSE Nietzsche interprets history from the origins of Chris­ B tianity down to the present in terms of decadence, he has fre­ quently been seen in relation to the decadent movement in literature and the arts. The other existentialists from Kierkegaard down to Jean­ Paul Sartre have sometimes also been treated as theorists of decline and faH, while existentialism as a whole has be en viewed, particularly by Marxists, as symptomatic of decay. Thus, Norberto Bobbio's term for existentialism in aH its varieties is "decadentism," defined as "the philosophy of a worn-out generation," trapped in an age "of great and iH-comprehended upheavals." He proceeds to compare existential­ ism, "with its ethic of solitude," to the philosophies that corresponded to the decline and faH of ancient civilization, stoicism and Epicurea­ nism. According to Bobbio: As decadent literature is directly bound up with Romanticism, of which it is the direct, if also the degenerate, descendant, so existen- Crowd Psychology and Perpetual Decadence 155 tialism . is unintelligible save in terms of Romantic thought, of which, through Nietzsche, it forms the extreme development. It harps to an excessive degree on the Romantic motif of the human personality, regarded as the centre, the original individuality, the heroic and solitary singularity .... This quest [for the "single"] is conducted in the form of revelation and intimate confession. The final result is the triumph of the motif-a permanent characteristic of decadentism-of human singularity cast into the world without se­ curity, ensnared in its situation as in a prison, invoking the transcen­ dancy of its own nothingness. l Bobbio's analysis is similar to Paul Bourget's in that both denne decadence in terms of the "anarchy of atoms" and the subjectivism produced by extreme individualismo Other theorists have also seen in such apparently narcissistic phenomena as consumerism and the spread of psychoanalytic ideas symptoms of social morbidity. In Dec­ adence: A Philosophical Inquiry (1948), Cyril Joad refers to a solipsis­ tic "dropping of the object," evident in the "culture of the many" and the modern "'psychologizing' of morals and thinking," as the main cause of "decadence in our time."2 Among other sources of decay, modern psychology, Joad argues, with its belief in "instinct" and the "unconscious," makes objective truth secondary to individual, subjec­ tive motivation. Reference to external authority, which Joad takes to be the measure of a healthy culture, vanishes through the "psychol­ ogizing" of experience. Psychoanalysis is thus a prime culprit in Joad's diagnosis. And with its stress on personality and "intimate confes­ sion," psychoanalysis also may be regarded as a version of "decadent­ ism" in Bobbio' s sense, a modern stoicism. 3 Like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Freud also seeks the redemption of the individual, cast into a hostile social environment. He too views modern society as essentially decadent; he shares with existentialism afear of the de­ structive power of the masses and a pessimism about the development of a democratic civilization. 1. Norberto Bobbio, The Philosophy ofDecadentism: A Study in Existentialism, tr. David Moore (Oxford: Blackwel!, 1948), p. 51. 2. Cyril E. M. Joad, Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), pp. 118, 145, 251. 3. For the treatment of psychoanalysis as a form of decadence see, for example, Russel! Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology fmm Adler to Laing (Boston: Beacon, 1975). For Marxist attitudes toward existentialism, see George Novack, ed., Existentialism versus Marxism: Conflicting Views on Humanism (New York: Del!, 1966), especial!y pp. 134-72 and 258-76. BREAD AND CIRCUSES While Nietzsche, Paul Bourget, William Morris, Max Nordau, and others were mapping the causes of social decadence between the 1880s and 1900, Freud was beginning his explorations of the causes of psychological decadence or neurosis. Once he could explain indi­ vidual mental breakdown, moreover, he turned to the question of social breakdown. The decay and final collapse of the Habsburg Em­ pire formed the background of Freud's education and early career, both of which were impeded by anti-Semitism. "The wider context of Freud' s professional frustrations was a seething atmosphere of almost continuous political crisis," writes Carl Schorske in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. "During the last five years of the nineteenth century Austria­ Hungary seemed to be serving, as one of its poets observed, as 'a little world in which the big one holds its tryouts'-tryouts for Europe's social and political disintegration."4 The years down to Freud's death in 1939 formed aclimate even less conducive to the development of an optimistic social philosophy. Freud's writings are punctuated by asides about the historical crises he was living through. His 1915 essay "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" points to the theory of the "death instinct" developed in Beyond the PIeasure PrincipIe (1920). In the midst of his last completed work, Moses and Monothe­ ism (1939), appear the paragraphs describing the disruption of his work and his emigration to England to escape the Nazis, in which he says: "We are living in a specially remarkable periodo We find to our astonishment that progress has allied itself with barbarismo "5 Even without his keen interests in archaeology and the classics, Freud might have been driven by the polítical chaos and violen ce of his era to try to explain how "progress" or civilization could produce "barbarism. " Freud's approach to the problem of civilization as the source of barbarism is neither directly historical nor polítical. He psycho­ analyzes civilization much as he psychoanalyzes his patients, by trac­ ing it back to its roots, to what he conceives to be mankind' s earliest memories in rnythology and classicallíterature. Outside psychology, Freud's first intellectuallove was archaeology, and the two are inti- 4. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Polities and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 184-85. 5. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, tr. James Strachey, Works, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1964), XXIII, 54. Crowd Psychology and Perpetual Decadence 157 mately related in his writings. 6 Far more than a mere analogy, archae­ ology was Freud's main way of connecting the history of the individual with the history of the species. He declares in The Interpretation of Drearns (1900): "Dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer' s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of ex­ pression which were then available to him."7 What is more, because "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," the dreams of the individual re­ capitulate the dreams or buried memories of the species. "Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogene­ tic childhood-a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual's development is in fact an abbreviated re­ capitulation influenced by the chance circumstances of life." Recalling Nietzsche's speculations about dreams as the origin of myths in The Birth of Tragedy, Freud quotes him to the effect that in dreams "sorne primaeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely r.each any longer by a direct path," and he concludes: "We may expect that the analysis of dreams willlead us to a knowledge of man's archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruc­ tion of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race" (549). Freud writes to Stefan Zweig that "1 have sacrificed a great de al for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities [and] have actually read more archaeology than psychology." What is more, he te lIs Zweig, "before the war and once after its end 1 felt compelled to spend every year at least several days or weeks in Rome."8 Freud elsewhere speaks ofhis "Rom e neurosis," based on his youthful "long- 6. Philip Rieff points out that "dream-interpretation becomes a form of archaeol­ ogy in which the analyst has the task of recovering 'mental antiquities'" (Freud: The Mínd afthe Maralist [Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961], p. 208). See also Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, "Freud and Archaeology," American Imaga, 8 (1951), pp. 107-28. 7. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretatían af Dreams, tr. James Strachey, Warks (London: Hogarth, 1958), v, 548. Abbreviated ID in the texto 8. Sigmund Freud, leUer to Stefan Zweig, 7 February 1931, in Lefters af Sígmund Freud, 1873-1939, ed. Ernst L. Freud (London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 402. BREAD AND ClRCUSES ing to go to Rome," which expressed itself in several of his fantasies in The lnterpretation of Dreams; through his fascination with Roman antiquities, Rome emerges in his writings as a complex symbol both for historical permanence and for decay. (J Toward the beginning of Civilization and lts Discontents (1930), Freud points to "the history of the Eternal City" to illustrate his thesis that "in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish."1O The actual Eternal City is in fact not eternal; it is instead an architectural graveyard, ruin s piled on ruins.
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