The Denial of Death (20 page)

Thus Freud’s great work on group psychology, on the dynam
ics of blind obedience, illusion, communal sadism. In recent writings Erich Fromm especially has seen the durable value of Freud’s insights, as part of a developing and continuing critique of human viciousness and blindness. From his early work
Escape from Freedom
to his recent
The Heart of Man
, Fromm has developed Freud’s views on the need for a magic helper. He has kept alive Freud’s basic insight into narcissism as the primary characteristic of man: how it inflates one with the importance of his own life and makes for the devaluation of others’ lives; how it helps to draw sharp lines b
etween “those who are like me or belong to me” and those who are “outsiders and aliens.” Fromm has insisted, too, on the importance of what he calls “incestuous symbiosis”: the fear of emerging out of the family and into the world on one’s own responsibility and powers; the desire to keep oneself tucked into a larger source of power. It is these things that make for the mystique of “group,” “nation,” “blood,” “mother- or fatherland,” and the like. These feelings are embedded in one’s earliest experiences of comfortable merger with the mother. As Fromm put it, they keep one “in the prison of the
motherly racial-national-religious fixation.”
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Fromm is exciting reading, and there is no point in my repeating or developing what he has already so well said. One has to go directly to him and study how compelling are these insights, how well they continue what is essential in Freud and apply it to present-day problems of slavishness, viciousness, and continuing political madness. This, it seems to me, is the authentic line of cumulative critical thought on the human condition. The astonishing thing is that this central line of work on the problem of freedom since the Enlightenment oc
cupies so little of the concern and ongoing activity of scientists. It should form the largest body of theoretical and empirical work in the human sciences, if these sciences are to have any human meaning.

Developments Beyond Freud

Today we do not accept uncritically all of Freud’s arguments on group dynamics or consider them necessarily complete. One of the weaknesses of Freud’s theory was that he was too
fond of his own phylogenetic myth of the “primal horde,” Freud’s attempt to reconstruct the earliest beginnings of society, when proto-men—like baboons—lived under the tyrannical rule of a dominant male. For Freud this craving of people for the strong personality, their awe and fear of him, remained the model for the basic functioning of all groups. It was Redl, in his important essay, who showed that Freud’s attempt to explain everything by the “strong personality” was not true to fact. Redl, who studied many different kinds of groups, found that domination by a strong personality occurred in some of them, bu
t not all.
²⁰
But he did find that in all groups there was what he called a “central person” who held the group together due to certain of his qualities. This shift of emphasis is slight and leaves Freud basically intact, but it allows us to make more subtle analyses of the real dynamics of groups.

For example, Freud found that the leader allows us to express forbidden impulses and secret wishes. Redl saw that in some groups there is indeed what he perfectly calls the “infectiousness of the unconflicted person.” There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation. Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent. Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the “initiatory act”
when no one else had the daring to do it. Redl calls this beautifully the “magic of the initiatory act.” This initiatory act can be anything from swearing to sex or murder. As Redl points out, according to its logic only the one who first commits murder is the murderer; all others are followers. Freud has said in
Totem and Taboo
that acts that are illegal for the individual can be justified if the whole group shares responsibility for them. But they can be justified in another way: the one who initiates the act takes upon himself both the risk and the guilt. The result is truly magic: each member
of the group can repeat the act without guilt. They are not responsible, only the leader is. Redl calls this, aptly, “priority magic.” But it does something even more than relieve guilt: it actually
transforms the fact
of murder. This crucial point initiates us directly into the phenomenology of group transformation of the everyday world. If one murders without guilt, and in imitation of the hero who run
s the risk, why then it is no longer murder: it is “holy aggression. For the first one it was not.”
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In other words, participation in the group redistills everyday reality and gives it the aura of the sacred—just as, in childhood, play created a heightened reality.

This penetrating vocabulary of “initiatory acts,” “the infectiousness of the unconflicted person,” “priority magic,” and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that “father permits it” or “orders it.” It is more:
the magical heroic transformation
of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion.

I am not going to try to repeat or sum up the subtleties of Redl’s essay here. Let us just underline the brunt of his argument which is that the “spell cast by persons”—as we have called it—is a very complex one, which includes many more things than meet the eye. In fact, it may include everything but a spell. Redl showed that groups use leaders for several types of exculpation or relief of conflict, for love, or for even just the opposite—targets of aggressions and hate that pulls the group together in a common bond. (As one recent popular film advertisement put it: “They follow him bravely
into hell only for the pleasure of killing him and revenging themselves.”) Redl was not out to replace Freud’s basic insights but only to extend and add nuances to them. The instructive thing about his examples is that most of the “central person’s” functions do have to do with guilt, expiation, and unambiguous heroics. The important conclusion for us is that the groups “use” the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges. W. R. Bion, in an important recent paper
²²
extended this line of thought even furthe
r from Freud, arguing that the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him and that he loses his “individual distinctiveness” by being a leader, as they do by being followers. He has no more freedom to be himself than any other member of the group, precisely because he has to be a reflex of their assumptions in order to qualify for leadership in the first place.
²³

All of which leads us to muse wistfully on how unheroic is the average man, even when he follows heroes. He simply loads them
up with his own baggage; he follows them with reservations, with a dishonest heart. The noted psychoanalyst Paul Schilder had already observed that man goes into the hypnotic trance itself with reservations. He said penetratingly that it was this fact that deprived hypnosis of the “profound seriousness which distinguishes every truly great passion.” And so he called it “timid” because it lacked “the great, free, unconditional surrender.”
²⁴
I think this characterization is beautifully apt to describe the timid “heroisms” of group behavior. There is nothing free or manly about them. Even when o
ne merges his ego with the authoritarian father, the “spell” is in his own narrow interests. People use their leaders almost as an excuse. When they give in to the leader’s commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are alien to them, that they are the leader’s responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing are in his name and not theirs. This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as Canetti points out: they can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader.
²⁵
The more they give in to his spell, and the more terrible the
crimes they commit, the more they can feel that the wrongs are not natural to them. It is all so neat, this usage of the leader; it reminds us of James Frazer’s discovery that in the remote past tribes often used their kings as scapegoats who, when they no longer served the people’s needs, were put to death. These are the many ways in which men can play the hero, all the while that they are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way.

Very few people, for example, have been impressed with the recent “heroics” of the Manson “family.” When we look at them in the light of the group dynamics we have been discussing, we can understand better why we are shocked—not only by the gratuitous murders they committed, but by something more. When people try for heroics from the position of willing slavishness there is nothing to admire; it is all so automatic, predictable, pathetic. Here was a group of young men and women who had identified with Charles Manson and who lived in masochistic submission to him. They gave him
their total devotion and looked upon him as a human god of some kind. In fact he filled the description of Freud’s “primal father”: he was authoritarian, very demanding of his followers, and a great believer in discipline. His eyes were intense, and for tho
se who came under his spell there is no doubt that he projected a hypnotic aura. He was a very self-assured figure. He even had his own “truth,” his megalomanic vision for taking over the world. To his followers his vision seemed like a heroic mission in which they were privileged to participate. He had convinced them that only by following out his plan could they be saved. The “family” was very close, sexual inhibitions were nonexistent, and members had free access to each other. They even used sex freely for the purpose of attracting outsiders into the family. It seems obvious
from all this that Manson combined the “fascinating effect of the narcissistic personality” with the “infectiousness of the unconflicted personality.” Everyone could freely drop his repressions under Manson’s example and command, not only in sex but in murder. The members of the “family” didn’t seem to show any remorse, guilt, or shame for their crimes.

People were astonished by this ostensible “lack of human feeling.” But from the dynamics that we have been surveying, we are faced with the even more astonishing conclusion that homicidal communities like the Manson “family” are not really devoid of basic humanness. What makes them so terrible is that they exaggerate the dispositions present in us all. Why should they feel guilt or remorse? The leader takes responsibility for the destructive act, and those who destroy on his command are no longer murderers, but “holy heroes.” They crave to serve in the powerful aura that he projects and to c
arry out the illusion that he provides them, an illusion that allows them to heroically transform the world. Under his hypnotic spell and with the full force of their own urges for heroic self-expansion, they need have no fear; they can kill with equanimity. In fact they seemed to feel that they were doing their victims “a favor,” which seems to mean that they sanctified them by including them in their own “holy mission.” As we have learned from the anthropological literature, the victim who is sacrificed becomes a holy offering to the gods, to nature, or to fate. The community
gets more life by means of the victim’s death, and so the victim has the privilege of serving the world in the highest possible way by means of his own sacrificial death.

One direct way, then, of understanding homicidal communities like the Manson family is to view them as magical transformations
, wherein passive and empty people, torn with conflicts and guilt, earn their cheap heroism, really feeling that they can control fate and influence life and death. “Cheap” because not in their command, not with their own daring, and not in the grip of their own fears: everything is done with the leader’s image stamped on their psyche.

The Larger View of Transference

From this discussion of transference we can see one great cause of the large-scale ravages that man makes on the world. He is not just a naturally and lustily destructive animal who lays waste around him because he feels omnipotent and impregnable. Rather, he is a trembling animal who pulls th
e world down around his shoulders as he clutches for protection and support and tries to affirm in a cowardly way his feeble powers. The qualities of the leader, then, and the problems of people fit together in a natural symbiosis. I have lingered on a few refinements of group psychology to show that the powers of the leader stem from what he can do for people, beyond the magic that he himself possesses. People project their problems onto him, which gives him his role and stature. Leaders need followers as much as they are needed by them: the leader projects onto his followers his own inability to stan
d alone, his own fear of isolation. We must say that if there w
ere no natural leaders possessing the magic of charisma, men would have to invent them, just as leaders must create followers if there are none available. If we accent this natural symbiotic side of the problem of transference we come into the broadest understanding of it, which forms the main part of the discussion I now want to dwell on.
^†

Freud had already revealed as much about the problems of followers as about the magnetism of the leader, when he taught us about the longing for transference and what it accomplished. But just here, trouble lies. As always, he showed us where to look but focussed down too narrowly. He had a conception, as Wolstein succinctly put it, “of why man got into trouble,”
²⁶
and his explanations of trouble almost always came to rest on the sexual motive. The fact that people were so prone to suggestibility in hypnosis was for him proof that it depended on sexuality. The transference attraction that we
feel for people is merely a manifestation of the earliest attractions that the child felt for those around him, but now this purely sexual attraction is so buried in the unconscious that we don’t realize what really motivates our fascinations. In Freud’s unmistakable words: