Another Freud for the left: Our group psychology and the analysis of ourselves

Abstract

Freudian social theory is criticised for misconceiving groups and crowds by psychologising, depoliticising, dehistoricising, familiarising, and naturalising them. Other authors are questioned about a misconception of the masses through their psychopathologisation in Mackay and Taine, their criminalisation in Sighele, and their infantilisation or primitivisation in Le Bon, Flores Magón, and Ortega y Gasset. These authors, and Freud himself, are rehabilitated by considering, with Reich, that their ideas are suitable for certain fascist and neo-fascist groups with authoritarian, patriarchal, familiarist, and anti-political tendencies. Such tendencies are contrasted with the distinctive ones of the leftist masses, which are reconstituted from what was taught by Hobbes and Spinoza, Marx and Engels, María Talavera, Federn, Canetti, and Freud himself. When ‘our’ socialist and communist masses resist their slide to the right, they appear intrinsically fraternal, horizontal or egalitarian, feminine and matriarchal, and centred on the ‘us’ and not on the ‘ego’.