Ep. 382: Freud on Group Psychology (Part Two)

0:11 Mark: Hey, you're listening to the Partially Examined Life. This is episode 382, part two. We've been talking about Freud's group psychology and the analysis of the ego. I think it spent plenty of time on the psychology of crowds and how they make us dumber and trying to figure out whether, given that we live in the age of the Internet where crowds are not gathered together, they're asynchronous. There are people listening to their podcasts and their newsreels and things.

0:39 Wes: Newsreels? We just went back 60 years, all of us or more than that.

0:45 Mark: Their little Instagram stories. That's what I mean.

0:48 Wes: Filmstrips.

0:49 Mark: Filmstrips going through their microfiche in the privacy of their own public library basements.

0:55 Dylan: We are dating ourselves as Gen Xers.

0:57 Wes: The enemy is on the march in Europe.

1:00 Mark: Can we still be a crowd and have crowd psychology in that respect? Are, you know, our. To what extent are the various kinds of organized groups, which is what, you know, Freud wants to immediately get into, can they be analyzed in terms of the same mechanisms as crowds? So we really want to shift to, like, the weird way that Freud gives his own explanations, not just these common sense things that, you know, of the other authors that he wants to say, you know, they're fine, but. So this is before he came up with the death drive, right, Wes? This book?

1:34 Wes: I think so. So this is 1921.

1:36 Mark: Okay, so he's got it here.

1:38 Wes: So I think, yeah, it doesn't come up here, but it's there in civilization and it's discontents. But, yeah, it's. I guess it's new at this point. So on the beyond the pleasure Principle is the paper where he. Yeah, and that's. You get the date for that? Yeah, well, you just gave it 1920.

1:54 Mark: All right, so just to let me give the. My small understanding and you can correct me and. But if we're saying that the pleasure principle, libido is the main thing that we've got this energy that, you know, really, really the thing that we want. We want to be back in the womb. And so the substitute for that when after we're born, is we have this very connecting, loving relationship, hopefully with our mother. And so that sort of is the primary love object. I'm not, you know, in the womb, it could all just be just all feeling good, not pointing at anything in particular.

Once we are out of the womb, then we focus it with this. This one thing. So that's the sort of the original version of love. But then things can happen with that. And he talks about the Oedipus complex, for instance. And maybe you end up, for instance, identifying, if he has an analysis in here of how people become homosexual as they might identify with the mother. And then sort of look for the substitute object.

2:47 Seth: Not people. Boys.

2:48 Mark: Well, okay, boys. They identify with the mother. So, you know, what was the object becomes the identified subject. And then they look for a replacement for the little baby boy that was them, you know, so that's just, you know, an example of the kind of redirection that can go on normally per civilization's discontents. You know, we would grow up, we would have romantic love would be focused on one person. But even that is a little risky. Right. The one person could reject you could die. So we spread our affection out, we have this aim inhibited.

In other words it's no longer sexual and it's no longer focused on the one person. So we aiming out. This is the story in civilization. It's discontents to the wider group, the wider society. So that holds society together. There is aggression and things that comes in out of the death drive that complicates and interferes with that. But you know, that's the basic glue. Yeah. So to what extent it seems like we have a similar story here.

3:43 Wes: Well you covered a lot. You covered a lot there in that. Maybe we should go, you know, go step by step. But chapter four with suggestion and libido is where we start to get his theory Aim inhibited. I will just point out, right, the inhibition, it's the sexual instincts, broadly speaking because they could be infantile sexual, not just adult sexual get sublimated into affectionate ties, into interest in people as people, into friendship, into ethical comportment towards others, you know, the human moral sentiment about their well being, all of that stuff.

Freud just thinks there's this fundamental psychological energy out of which everything gets crafted ultimately and the. It's a re channeling. So the primary aim of the sexual instinct gets inhibited and therefore it gets re channeled into something higher. So that's the idea with. He's going to use this phrase aim inhibited a lot. But tender, friendly, loving feelings, these all count.

4:42 Dylan: Can I just rephrase? This is a point of confusion for me on Freud that I think was starting to get sorted out. This libido is the general energy or disposition that human beings have towards other things out of themselves that would direct them towards anything. But it's fundamental manifestation and it's not just analogical. Its most paradigmatic manifestation is sexual urges, sexual longing. But this longing, especially maturity isn't manifest only as sexual longing. But it's. The paradigmatic version is that. But it is meant to involve any kind of sense of I am being drawn to something or someone else.

5:31 Wes: So what he might have said is the kind of thing that Jung said, which is there's just a generic non sexual psychological energy and then one form of that is sexual sexual which I think is more. It's more amenable in a way to me and probably to a lot of other people. And Freud and Jung had a falling out over that. So Freud wants to say at bottom it is sexual and he sees himself as in line with Plato and Eros and all that stuff. But what he means by sexual. And this is where it gets confusing, right? It's not just, oh, I want to have sex with that person as an adult.

It's more like I get pleasure from these erogenous zones. And I get them when I'm a child. And they're important because I survive by way of them. So, for instance, you know, the fact that the. My lips are erogenous zone and there's pleasure in sucking is important to me. Getting fed, you know, it's sucking on the breast and getting the milk and staying alive. And that is sexual. According to Freud. These are. And you know, which is all forms

6:29 Dylan: of pleasure are that.

6:30 Wes: Right. It's up for debate. But of course it does. It is weird, right? It is pleasurable for infants to suck. It's also just very. It's a reflex, you know, it's an instinct. So what role does pleasure actually play in that? But also, you know, it plays a role in adult sexual life as well. So there is that interesting. One of the things Freud is onto is that interesting crossover between something infants do, things infants do, and things adult do in foreplay. But, yeah, I wouldn't. You know, it is. I. I still find it confusing. You know, I find the death drive confusing.

I find the role of libido confusing. I think I tend to think of it more in terms of generic psychological energy. And that's the way Freud often talks about it. He uses this word, cathexis, where it's. It's like investment in the German. It's really. He's his metaphors of an occupying army. When we get interested in an object, which is to say an object of desire or an object of the instinct, more accurately, we. It's almost like we put energy into it. We invest mental energy in that. That object and that investment. That's what the libido does.

It's an out. You know, as Dylan, you pointed out, it's the arrow that points outward.

7:38 Dylan: Yes.

7:39 Wes: Until it points inward, it can go back towards the ego. And that's narcissism. And that's implicated in identification. Because when we take. When we say, I want to be a great writer or I want to be good, or I embrace a certain set of values, that's a narcissistic investment in myself. It's like I no longer. And putting my energy into, hey, I want mommy, and I want to be fed or I want to be taken care of by society or others. Suddenly I want to be something, I want to be this type of person, I want to accomplish things, I want to have aspirations that.

So an important part of development is identification, where the libido suddenly starts curling inwards back towards the self. We usually associate narcissism with something negative and it can be. It's implicated for Freud in various pathologies, but it's just a normal. It's there from the very beginning what he calls primary narcissism. But also these secondary forms of narcissism and identification are just normal parts of development.

8:37 Mark: So I like thinking of this as a will to life, you know, sort of will to power in Nietzsche's sense, but without maybe the specific power over somebody or something like that. But you know, the kind of thing that Nietzsche would give a thumbs up to. And so it's just this, I want to enjoy things, I want to embrace things, I want to say yes and I wanna. And so it's, you know, a focusing of the energy and that could be focused back on yourself. You know, you want to feel good about yourself. And none of this is, you know, it should be all fundamentally positive.

9:09 Seth: Right.

9:09 Mark: It is a yes saying. It's just as Wes was saying, like when you're saying yes to something in neglect of something else. Right. Narcissism is bad because you're not paying attention to other people. It's not bad because you're self affirming. Self affirming is just fine. Having ambitions for your, yourself is just fine. But it's when you're neglecting the rest of things or fixation. Right. Love is romantic, love is wonderful. But a stalking fixation on a person that is regardless of their actual attitude back toward you or neglecting other things in your life or whatever, or codependence, this kind of thing.

9:42 Seth: Yeah.

9:42 Mark: So it's always the extremes. If you sort of take an Aristotelian take of this will to life, the libido is good, let's flash it around. But yeah, we just need to do it in moderation and in the right, the right time, the right circumstance.

9:55 Wes: And it's a form of substitute gratification. So it's not just about aspiration, but it is about aspiration. But it's also about I'm not allowed to do as I am raised, as I develop as a child. And I'm given a lot of prohibitions, no, you can't do this, no, you can't do that, no, you can't hit your sister. You got to share this and that. That's frustrating. And so for Freud, well, you got to pay me something for that. And what do I get paid? I get gratification out of being a good person. I get gratification out of observing the frustrating norms.

So my ego, in a way, becomes like a pacifier or an ego, an ideal self, what it is I want to be. And that's kind of how self restraint works. Often if I'm studying at my desk when I'd rather be doing something else, I'm motivated by the idea of some future self who has certain types of properties, this idealized version of myself. So I can get gratification out of that. And that gratification can drive me to do what are otherwise very frustrating things. Observing prohibitions or hard work or whatever.

10:57 Mark: So, Seth, you wanted to launch us into something in particular from the text, based on what we've said here. Is this chapter four, are you looking at?

11:04 Seth: Yeah. So I think the first thing is just to establish the connection between the characterization of the group that we got in the first couple of chapters with this structure that you all just were talking about. So we. One of the precepts he reiterates on page 33, why does the individual get more emotional and less intelligent in a group? And he says, there's something in us that when we see an emotion in another, we tend to fall into it. But we do resist it as well, often. So why is it the opposite in groups? Why do we have this capacity to resist the urge to.

I won't say sympathize or empathize, but kind of co. Emote. Co. Feel. When we're by ourselves, we have a stronger will to resist. But when you're in the group, if many people are grieving, you will feel the urge to grieve. If many people are angry, you will find yourself getting angry. And so he says a little later on in page 37, he calls this influence without adequate logical foundation. How do we explain influence without adequate logical foundation, which I thought was a nice turn of phrase? So he says that on page 40, we will try our fortune then with the supposition that love, relationships, or to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties also constitute the essence of the group mind.

So, in short, what Freud is proposing and that he's going to go on and develop is to say we've established that groups behave in a certain way. We've talked about the use of the term suggestibility or suggestion or some other terms, but those aren't explanatory enough. So what would be a sufficiently explanatory term or structure to explain why individuals behave the way they do in groups. And this is where he says, essentially it's because they're experiencing a form of love or a libidinal relationship. It's, in short, what I think he was saying here is he's saying the only way we can explain the behaviors that we've agreed upon, or the only way we can explain the sublimate or the disappearance of resistance and the increase in the emotional ties.

The only way that can be explained is if we understand the participation in the group to be something libidinal. And then the question becomes, what form or what kind of libidinal structure does the individual enter into? Is that fair?

13:30 Wes: Yeah. So I think he kind of sums it up on page 40, although I am inclined to read his little defense of himself about the libido and saying, I cannot see the merit and being ashamed of sex and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, on page. He's very cantankerous at this point about people's reactions to his sex stuff. But. So our hypothesis finds support in the first instance from two passing thoughts, that a group is clearly held together by a power of some kind. And to what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, who holds together everything in the world?

You can see he's retreating a little bit there when he uses this more philosophical word. Right. Secondly, that if an individual gives up his distinctiveness in a group and lets its other members influence him by suggestion, it gives one the immediate impression that he does it because he feels a need to be in harmony with them rather than opposition to them. So that perhaps, after all, he does it for their sake. But it's a German idiom that's literally for love of them. So he's, you know. Yeah. The basic idea is, how do we explain suggestion, the thing that Le Bon and others have left unexplained?

We have to appeal to love. As weird as it sounds, there's some kind of libidinal, erotic thing going on between the group members and the dynamic.

14:45 Mark: As he sketches these out in going into chapter five, talking about the church and the army and forward from that is, there's love for the leader, and there's the sort of imagined love that we think the leader has for the group members. And for. He emphasizes, for all the group members equally. And this transfers, or at least he's sort of asking, it's a puzzle, how is that relationship to the leader and our relationship then to the other people in the group? How are those connected? And I think his. Right, his ultimate answer to this is connection with the other members of the group is more identification.

15:21 Wes: Right.

15:22 Mark: We're in the same position with regard to the leader as the other members of the group are. We all love our leader to that extent. Just like he gives this example of girls at a boarding school who one of them has received a letter from a lover. And all the other girls get giddy and sort of imitate the symptoms, the characteristics of the girl who received the letter, not because they love the girl who received the letter, but because they can sort of see themselves as being in the same situation. So we sort of mirror each other, we identify each other.

15:52 Wes: Right.

15:52 Mark: Is that the upshot?

15:54 Wes: Yeah, that's getting ahead to his identification chapter. But he. And there are these pathological versions of identification. So we might take on the cough of someone because we want to be in that their position relation to some other love object. We want to take their place so we become like them. And that means coughing is a good compromise formation because it also punishes us. We feel guilty about trying to supplant that person. And so we could not only in fantasy take their place by developing the cough if we could punish ourselves for it at the same time.

But in this case, yeah, Mark, I think you're right. He's going to say that group cohesion, it does involve love between group members, but it also turned out more importantly to involve identification. And this is grounded on this idea that the leader loves the group and loves them equally, right? So that we don't have to get aggressive with each other and compete for that love the way children sometimes do with parents. And then we love the leader back. So in a way, our love for others is mediated by love of the leader. And you can see this more with a leading idea, right?

So I if the leader in this situation, the leading idea could just be America. America is the greatest. You know, what are people doing when they chant usa, USA at these rallies? They are in a way trying to give some foundation to positive feelings for each other. Look, we love the the same object. It loves us back, right? And America's in some way good for us. It's benevolent to us. It's the thing that makes our lives good. America rightly conceived. And therefore we can bond with each other over that. If we didn't have that in common, we might be fighting each other for a parking space or for whatever else people fight each other for.

We would succumb to our pettier self interests.

17:47 Mark: I think about that when I go to a concert. And right. We're all there because we love this band, because we want. But then I try to get there early and get a spot at the front. And, like, if you're right at the front, there's often a railing or something you can hold onto, but it really becomes. Especially if you don't get to the railing. So you're just like one or two people behind in the mosh pit area, behind. And people will just come in and, like, just stand right in front of you. They'll just weasel in, get there at the last minute, and you're like, I got here, you know? So, like, we're engaged in this brutal competition in which I do not care. I know that I'm taller than you, but I'm not going to let you move and stand in front of me because you're going to bring your boyfriend. It's gonna, you know, it's gonna be a whole thing out of our supposed shared love of this band.

18:34 Wes: Yeah, that's hilarious.

18:36 Seth: It's funny you mentioned that, Mark, because it was in reading this, I was thinking about that very thing, like, the experience of going to a concert. And does that create a spontaneous group? And it wasn't. And does the band or the lead singer or whatever act as the leader, you know, and do we. And I was given to think of this documentary that I saw about King Crimson. So it's funny, when they do a concert, you're not permitted to take pictures or even have your phone out or do anything or make any noise during the songs. You can only clap in between songs, and then at the end of the show, they'll stay on stage and you can come and take pictures and do whatever. But. And this is specifically Robert Fripp's direction, it's because he says he's trying to create a moment of presence, immediate presence, during the.

19:28 Wes: Forcing it.

19:30 Seth: Yeah, exactly. I love the intention. I'm not sure about the execution, but it made me think, like, my own experience of being at shows. Certainly I have been in mosh pits and seen concerts where I felt like I was part of a group and there was something bigger than me happening and whatever. But certainly also I've had the experience where it was just very much internal, kind of like a solo me focused on what was happening and that sort of thing. And it just made me think about that. There's still a lot of work to be done, and I'm sure somebody has done it already, but a lot of work to be done on that definition of what constitutes a Group and the mechanics of the group. Because a concert is not a rally. It's just not the same thing. It's not the same experience. And it could be because of the content or it could be because of the format. I don't know.

20:22 Wes: As evidence for this, he's, you know, now that he's advanced his thesis that there are libidinal ties between group members and that's important to his cohesion, he has a very. What I think is one of the more clever arguments in the book. He wants to say, well, take the case of panic. Why does that happen? Sometimes within army units, they're at the front. Sometimes they can run into danger courageously or withstand it, withstand assaults and not panic at all. But other times they might panic. So real danger isn't the factor. It's not like the danger gets higher and then suddenly everyone panics.

There must be of some other psychological dynamic at work, according to Freud. And that's the idea that they disintegrate. Their libidinal ties to each other become loosened because the leader either is killed, right? And that's a real thing, right? When the leader gets killed and then suddenly the unit panics, or they lose confidence in the leader for some reason. So your general, suddenly he's fleeing on his horse and then everyone else flees. So I thought that was quite clever.

21:24 Dylan: I think so, too. But the qualification I would make is it's not just confidence in the leader. Could be the dread of their leader versus the dread of the thing in front of them become out of balance. Because a lot of times. So I've been watching the new American Revolution series, and so I just got. Besides hearing names of things that made me think of Wes, because Wes lives in Boston. And so there's all these places like St. Charles and all these places that are really important at the beginning of the Revolution. The taking of one of the first big battles is the taking of his Breed's Hill and Bunker Bunker Hill, both those.

And it is a kind of Pyrrhic victory for the English because they lose something like 40% of their force. And one of the commentators said the British had never lost that many percentage of their force, and they never would again until the first days of the Battle of the Somme in World War I. But in that description, they're fighting uphill. And so they have, you know, the American militia is at the top of the hill. And there are these of these soldiers, many of whom are early recruits and their commanders are on the field with them. And in fact, like three or Four of them get killed.

Howe doesn't get killed. So what is keeping them staying there? They're being mowed down, just one after the other. And in fact, in the second day of the battle, the Americans are amazed because they are one after the other. They're lined up and the first row gets killed and the second row steps up on top in front of their bodies and starts firing. So what's keeping them from retreating? Right. Is it the fear of the punishment that they'll get? You know, is it the group psychology that every. The guy next to me isn't running, so I'm not going to run.

Is it really the faithfulness of the leader? Is it really because they believe in

23:28 Wes: how or they're all the leading idea?

23:31 Dylan: Yeah. Or is it because I believe in England and these damn colonists?

23:36 Mark: Well, so discipline. So this is what I feel like you're going to talk about habit. Again, discipline doesn't necessarily have to refer to the leader and it doesn't necessarily have to mean, as Freud says in these examples, that if the leader runs away or the leader dies, that you just break discipline. No, because you've got your, your. You could say that. Oh, well, it's actually because it's the ideal. It's not this particular leader. It's the ideal of discipline and the ideal of we're in the British Army,

24:04 Wes: I'm not the type of person who does this. All of this links back to Korsgaard on identity and ethical action. We can be self destructive, we can be self sacrificing because we've become attached to a certain identity. And that is very much relevant to this attachment to a leader or leading idea.

24:21 Seth: Yeah, that's true. But then also, as part of the Freudian explanation, panic is when fear of something outside of the group overcomes. Because stronger than that bond of love. Not just the leader, but the bond of love between the individuals. And the British are famously, famously disciplined. Right. And, and it's funny because there's a kind of a weird way where the Freudian explanation kind of does and doesn't make sense. Thinking about British discipline. British are also famous for social conventions and shame that, you know, it would just be so shameful.

It would be hard for a British soldier to live with themselves if they were to break ranks just because her fear of shame. And is that a manifestation or a form of the libidinal relationship or is it something else? I think Freud would say yes, but I just, it's just funny because also just recently I came across something where a person was talking about Canadian soldiers who fought in World War II, but in the context of talking about them, they were talking about the Germans. You know, they said we're afraid of the Americans technology, we're afraid of the British discipline and we're afraid of the Canadians just because they're bloodthirsty.

But

25:40 Wes: anyway, I would say shame, yeah, as a super ego or Thomas related emotion or affective state. And so I think yeah, shame could be the thing. It could be felt right, as I don't want to do this because it would be shameful to do it and sometimes or I would feel guilty. And that is often a moral motivation as well. And here we're talking nominally about what could ground the virtue of courage. And that's not unrelated to Korsgaard's question about what could ground moral action, especially when it's very much against my self interest. And the grounding must come in the concept of identity. I'm attached to being this type of person and I would lose my identity and I in a sense psychologically cease to exist if I went against it. So I will even risk physical death in order to preserve my psychological self concept. And that is all about ego ideal.

26:34 Dylan: I mean what's nice about that, that is it accomplishes the case where my identity is I'm not the kind of person that's going to desert the guy next to me who's my friend or I'm not the kind of person that's going to betray my country. So it works at different circles of connection for different levels of reasoning because I think both those are going on for different soldiers. So you don't have to because it's going through your individual identity through that door. But what is the content of that identification could be from any number of different circles of connection. It could be just this individual person. It could be an idea that is a causal mechanism really feels like it

27:19 Wes: works and it could be more or less related to whether or not people are seeing me do it. Right. I may have internalized things enough where I is at the Red Badge of Courage, does he run away? Where at the point where he thinks he cannot be seen running away? Or am I just imagining that people remember that story that we all had to read in high school?

27:36 Mark: Never had to read it.

27:37 Dylan: I had to do the Grapes of Wrath, not the Red Badge of Courage.

27:39 Wes: So I just remember he takes off running at some point and then. So it's all about being a coward and. But yeah, some soldiers might be there just because, yeah, they don't want to be seen to be cowardly one, even though they actually are cowardly and some of them might actually be courageous. So it gets. The motivations get complicated. It could be somewhere in between some extra.

27:57 Dylan: Yeah, it is. He flees from the field of battle and overcome with shame, he longs for a wound, the red badge of courage, to counteract his cowardice.

28:05 Mark: So Freud's conclusion in this section, I think he's arguing against McDougal about panic. In particular, that McDougal says that it's dread brings about the breakup of the group. And Freud doesn't admit this can happen. Right. If something. If. Oh, you see, there's a whole extra army there, Right. They're bringing us their super weapon. Like, yeah, people could just freak out because the objective danger has actually changed. But in these situations where that does not happen, then it's more. The cessation of the group ties makes the danger look much worse. Right. So it's the group ties come first. It is not the dread, it is not panic that defeats groups. Groups, an effective group can stand up against panic.

28:45 Dylan: And that sounds right, like if you felt like you were still going to be safe with your group, you might face the danger. But if the danger you're facing and your group dissolves, you lose your leader and now all of a sudden your sense is that the whole thing is lost. And now I'm sitting duck because my leader is dead.

29:03 Wes: Yeah. So it's in. Well, sorry, I just thought that was a good segue into six, where he begins that with talking about how leaders can be substituted by leading ideas or common interests. So it doesn't literally have to be a person, some abstraction, some shared wish or interest.

29:20 Mark: And this, you know, I think we've said already this is that the connection with the leader is more important. Right. The connection with the other people, sort of via the leader or via the leading idea. And even though he doesn't have this idea of the death drive yet, in his. At least it's showing up in this text. He recognizes the ambivalence. He says all emotional relationships have a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility.

29:42 Seth: Right.

29:42 Mark: Which are if your loved ones, they're typically repressed. If you're just talking about people you're in business with or whatever, then your boss, then you're going to recognize those. And he gives this reference to Schopenhauer on. It's like we're like freezing porcupines that we want to huddle together in groups, but then we poke each other and we have to move apart. That the sort of aggressiveness that is built into us puts some limits on how tightly the libido can knit a group.

30:08 Dylan: That's a little bit of projection on Schopenhauer's, I think, because of himself understanding himself as a porcupine.

30:15 Wes: I think his quills are longer than the average.

30:17 Dylan: I think their quills are longer and sharper than most. But this concept of the idea being somehow the leader, it does make me think a lot about the political scenarios where there's a desertion. So take a political right or a disposition. At what point does being a partisan for that idea become untenable? So say it's freedom of the press. You're in a country where people are speaking out for independent press. How many members of the press have to get thrown in jail or executed? Or what kinds of actions have to happen before effective desertion happens? And that desertion is people aren't willing to speak up about it anymore. People aren't willing to take the risk anymore. That's true for any number of other political positions. When it becomes too much dread associated with it.

31:12 Wes: Yeah. I mean, here we get the tension between self interest and group interest.

31:16 Dylan: Exactly.

31:17 Wes: Part of Freud's point here is that he's associating aversion to others. That one side of ambivalence and self interest. And so the leader, the leading idea, the libidinal ties that bond groups together, part of the way they're functioning is to. To reduce that aversion and to reduce self interest. Yeah, to at least reduce the aversion part of it. So if we really feel like we belong to a group, in other words, we're more inclined to be tolerant of them, and we're certainly less tolerant of outsiders. And something that reminded me of Royce a little bit, you know, that this is something that is enhanced further by cooperative work.

31:56 Mark: You know, I answer my own question. There's a footnote on page 56 where he refers to. He says, in a recently published study, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I've attempted to connect the polarity of love and hatred with a hypothetical opposition between instincts of life and death, and to establish the sexual instincts as the purest example of the former, the instincts of life. So it's as if maybe he had written most of this, and then he wrote beyond the Pleasure Principle. And then he felt that he. Like, I'm not going to rework this whole thing to work in the death drive, but I'm just going to mention. Yes, okay, this is a thing. This is another way. But we're just going to say aggressiveness is, is sort of basic at this

32:33 Wes: point, but he does. Yeah, you know, if you read more not to get into the debt tries. So that's all I'm going to say about it. But in more recent psychoanalytic literature, it's getting tied to these concepts of identity and Thomas related stuff, superego and identification. That's really the best way ultimately, I think, to make sense of human aggression. Right. And war and destructiveness, so that our propensity to self destructiveness is inherently related to a libidinal tie to an ideal, this perfect thing that we're going to preserve, even if it means killing ourselves and the rest of humanity.

But that's not Freud's position in beyond the Pleasure Principle where he's thinking out loud and he's giving this very metaphysical speculation about how all animate matter wants to return to a state of the inanimate. And yeah, I guess it's very abstract, but I think for people listening to this podcast, they should be associating in a loose way, thinking about. About Nietzsche's will to power and Freud's death drive in the same. They should be associating those two.

33:37 Mark: Okay, so chapter seven is identification, which we've talked somewhat about, but maybe give a little more organized introduction to this West. You know, I was trying to give the example of homosexuality and we've talked about the example of, you know, ultimately he's going to get around to saying the distinctions between some of these groups. Right. So you don't identify in an army with the general. That's not part of it. But in the church you do identify, you know, in Royce's favorite group you do do identify yourself with or as Jesus, in that I'm going to love everybody just like Jesus did or would.

So just, you know, this is one of the. Identification is going to play a role. I was saying it's like you're identifying with the members of your patrol, with the group members in the army or whatever. Identification is going to play some role, but it's going to play a little different role depending on what kind of group it is.

34:32 Wes: And in this chapter he's giving us the role that identification plays in what he thinks of as normal development, but also in pathology. So identification is very important to his idea of the Oedipus complex where we basically do this thing that I've talked about. We give up the object, in this case the maternal object or a certain kind of relationship to the maternal object, and we identify with the father as compensation. But really the father. Not just the father, but teachers, society, culture, authority figures, leading ideas, that type of thing.

In other words, the name of the father, as Lacan would put it, or the symbolic order. So we get inducted into the symbolic order as we mature. And that's a matter of identification. That's a matter of incorporating cultural and social values from which we get this kind of substitute gratification for what we've lost. So that's the resolution of the Oedipus complex. You know, the impulse, the infantile impulse is to stay with mommy. But we, the father has to become, or the father, broadly speaking, right? Values, culture and social life outside of the family come in between us and the mother.

So the resolution involves identification, which of course can go wrong in so many different ways. Just there's so many different ways that can lead to one path, pathology or another. Because depression for him is the result of an identification with the object. I refuse to give up on the object. There's a sort of identification in which instead of identifying with the father, instead of identifying with the principle that intervenes between me and the object, I identify with the object itself and won't let it go. So the ambivalence that he's talking about our love, hate, relationship with people shows up in this.

In the sense that to identify with someone is to want to take them as a role model on the one hand, but it's wanting to replace them on the other. So I might want to replace my father and my identification with him in order to have mom for myself, for instance. So that's the developmental. That's the kind of normal developmental picture. And then he gets into neurosis.

36:35 Mark: So just to pick out one of the examples is that melancholia, and I know you recorded a whole morning in melancholia, something that I was not involved in. Page 68, another such instance of introjection of the object. So in other words, I'm taking the object into myself. Identifying with it has been provided by the analysis of melancholia, an affection which counts among the most remarkable of its exciting causes, the real or emotional loss of a loved object. Leading characteristics of these cases is a cruel self deprecation of the ego combined with relentless self criticism and bitter self reproaches.

Analyses have shown that this disparagement and these reproaches apply bottom to the object and represent the ego's revenge on it. The shadow of the object has fallen on the ego as I the interjection of the Object here is unmistakably clear. So can we give this a. I tend to think of. Depression is often not associated with a particular object. But you can certainly see I really love this girl and she left my life. And I somehow, instead of just. I could just mourn that, and then it's lost. But if I take it into myself or whatever, the thing that I have lost, the fundamental relationship with the mother, whatever, and then I hate on myself.

The depression is my hating on myself as a way of revenging myself on that thing that has left me. Is that.

37:50 Wes: Yes, exactly. Okay, so. Or disappointed me. Person doesn't have to literally have died, or the relationship doesn't have to literally have ended. They might just disappoint me. So when an analyst is listening to a patient beat themselves up, they're thinking of those self attacks as attacks on the object. Object. Right. The object in general as people. People in general. And that includes the analyst. And that includes. And often you'll find out it was triggered by some conflict with the person. Someone disappointed them, and instead of feeling the aggression fully towards that person, they turn it on themselves.

They protect the other person and they attack themselves. So they're identified with the bad part of the object, and they attack themselves as the part of the disappointing bad part of the object in order to protect a more idealized version of the object that can remain on the outside of them. So this is also the first description of splitting, even though Freud doesn't use that term in this paper, which you guys might be familiar with. I think it's kind of the idea of splitting kind of got into the common culture. I'm not sure, but. So splitting is one of the things.

Predominant features of borderline personality disorder, for instance, where people are all good or all bad or. Yeah.

39:03 Dylan: Isn't there a whole movie in which somebody plays a character who's split like 12 times or whatever?

39:10 Wes: I think they would call that dissociative identity disorder these days.

39:14 Dylan: Multiple. I'm not saying that it's accurate, but I'm just saying that you mentioned it coming into sort of public consciousness.

39:21 Wes: I'm thinking of splitting, as in splitting good and bad. And instead of having complex objects towards which I have an ambivalent relationship, they're good and bad. Sometimes they're frustrating, sometimes they're not. Not. You know, those people. Can't live with them, can't live without them. I alternate between these very extreme. I could do it with a. So borderline personality disorder. It often happens within a context of a relationship. Someone is idealized at first, and then they're the devil. And then they're idealized again and then they're the devil. But the dynamic can play out in. In many different ways. So, yeah, this is. I. I don't think we need to go into all these, like, different examples of pathology, but that's just. That's one really good example that Mark picked up.

39:59 Mark: Well, if this is too complex and profound, I will point you at a child who is unhappy, loss of a kitten, declared straight out that now he himself was the kitten and accordingly crawled about on all fours, would not eat at the table, etc.

40:12 Wes: Yeah, that's a great example. You preserve it in yourself.

40:15 Seth: Yeah, but the important. So identification is like taking the object into oneself in a certain manner. And in this case, identification, the object is lost in the broad sense of the term, but it's also partial. Right. You're not taking the whole object into oneself. It's like a characteristic or some aspect of the object. Is that correct?

40:39 Mark: The bad side, as Wes was just saying.

40:41 Wes: Yeah, yeah, in this case. But yeah, Seth. I mean, the larger point that Seth is getting at is that we might just identify with some particular quality in a person, so we might model ourselves on some particular quality of another, but not others. Him.

40:57 Seth: Right. Because for Freud, he's trying to establish that identification is a fundamental form of libidinal tie. It's not derivative. It's present in the development process from the very beginning. And to just differentiate that from the more formal or more mature forms of libidinal ties that come in, talking about the relationship with the mother and the father and so forth. He says that the child can have an early form of identification before it gets to these advanced stages.

41:31 Wes: This is one of the complications in this theory. Identification is the most primitive and it's the most advanced. You have a weird form of identification that precedes libidinal ties to the object. And then you have the kind of identification that we're talking about more typically where we're modeling ourselves. But yeah, maybe we should, I guess, since we're getting towards the end here, we could just say, I don't know. Have we said everything about how it applies to groups?

41:56 Mark: But yeah, yeah, connect this explicitly back to the group in a summary fashion here.

42:01 Seth: So I'm looking here somewhere in the range of the late 70s, early 80s, so I'm kind of skipping ahead. So we've established what it means to have the object, the identification with the object, what it means here. And he wants to then connect that to how that could lead to this suggestibility. And so he brings up on page 77 the analogy between being in love and hypnosis. So this identification with the love object he sort of mentions very briefly, but doesn't expound. I assume elsewhere he has that when we have a love object, we tend to be less critical of it. Right. Like the ideal love object can do no wrong and everything they say is funny and. And they're always cute and yada di ya.

42:47 Wes: All the things that will later on completely annoy us.

42:50 Seth: Yes, exactly. All the things that become problematic later. But he says, so when you're in that state of being, in that sort of new relationship, energy, I think is they call it. So when you're in that state, then if they're like, hey, we should go to the park and have a picnic and you hate doing that, you're like, great, what a great idea. Let's do that. Right?

43:13 Wes: Anything with you is the greatest.

43:14 Seth: Anything with you is wonderful. So he makes a comparison. He says this is kind of like a form of hypnosis. And he says hypnosis is actually a really great analogy and a really great explanation of the group thing, except it has these problems, we don't need to go into them right now. But essentially there is a kind of hypnotic thing going on, something similar to what happens with hypnosis, which is a one on one relationship in this group dynamic. And he says on page 80, a primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.

So this is really interesting. We haven't talked about the role of the leader in kind of cementing all that, but if I'm allowed to invoke Royce again and the previous conversation that Dylan and Wes had about identity, Royce says something very similar about the way that individuals in the group identify with each other, mediated by the relation of love, but also sacrificing some aspect of their individuality in order to identify with others. In Royce's case, he's talking about a couple things. One can be shared experience, another can be like a shared belief in an ideal, I think was one of the other ones.

Right. And in Freud's case, he doesn't talk so much about shared experience or history as much as Royce does, but the mechanism of having sharing a single object. And as Wes mentioned, could be a person, could be an ideal. Right. But it's not just that they share some kind of abstract religious belief in that object. They have to go through this psychological process of taking that object in and doing some form of identification with it through this idealization or whatever.

45:18 Wes: Yeah, so retrace your steps a little bit. I think this is an important connection you're making because in the section on falling in love, he says the object has taken the place of the ego ideal in the case of love. And what does that mean? Well, just that the, you know, the case of the picnic, just that our normal values have been supplanted by the person and that could be include or, you know, everything in our own conscience. So being in love might be an impetus to crime. So the normal, like my attachment to my own identity and my own values and being a certain type of person with certain type of interests, that could all go out the window in relation to.

To a particular person that I've fallen in love with. And then likewise later on in page 80, in organized groups, you could similarly substitute a leader or leading ideal for your ego ideal so that it's no longer being a decent person. That's my moral imperative. It's obedience to the Fuhrer. They are the highest value. Or it could be nation, you know, but America is the highest value. And if I have to be cruel to a bunch of people to purify America, then so be it. That's all that matters.

46:28 Mark: Well, that's a good summary. Obviously we need to talk a little more about this text. So we're going to have a part three or a second full discussion on this. We'll figure that out soon. You can just look in your feed for that. I know we're going to have some year end discussion. I hope everybody's having a great holiday, a great time with your groups of friends and relatives. And we're just happy you could be part of.

46:53 Wes: Towards whom you have ambivalent, highly ambivalent relations.

46:56 Mark: We're happy you could be part of our community. Why don't you do that in a more literal sense by joining our Facebook group, You know, following us on X, reaching out to us. You can email us pel.

47:06 Wes: Partiallyexaminedlife.com giving us money. That's the most. Yes, yes, you could establish.

47:14 Mark: All right, thanks everybody.

47:15 Dylan: Good night. Good night.