Freud explains crowd phenomena as individual regressions, not a group mind

Evidence

The German title, under which the book was published in 1921, is Massen-psychologie und Ichanalyse. The translator, James Strachey, rightly stresses that the term group here means the equivalent of Le Bon’s foule and the German Masse. It may be added that in this book the term ego does not denote the specific psychological agency as described in Freud’s later writing in contrast to the id and the super-ego; it simply means the individual. It is one of the most important implications of Freud’s Croup Psychology that he does not recognize an independent, hypostastized ‘mentality of the crowd,’ but reduces the phenomena observed and described by writers such as Le Bon and McDougall to regressions which take place in each one of the individuals who form a crowd and fall under its spell. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 320

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that Freud’s ‘ego’ in Group Psychology means simply the individual, not the later structural agency, and that crowds are reduced to individual regressions rather than a hypostatized group mind.
• XREF: connects to: Crowd psychology lowers individual responsibility and boosts influence susceptibility — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 399; Freud defined groups by shared object replacing the ego ideal — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 147

Related

• Crowd phenomena reduce to regressions in individual psyches, not group minds (similarity 0.94)
• Freud defined groups by shared object replacing the ego ideal (similarity 0.84)
• Crowd psychology lowers individual responsibility and boosts influence susceptibility (similarity 0.84)
• Crowds arouse sub-individual instincts while organized groups transcend individuals (similarity 0.82)
• Freud explains mass formation by mechanism rather than by contemptuous essence (similarity 0.79)
• Freud reproduced the bourgeois contempt of instinct he set out to dismantle (similarity 0.79)
• Freud allowed groups to gain the individual’s traits through organization (similarity 0.78)