ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud began with the special problem of the mechanisms which bound the led to their leaders, but he eventually came up with a set of answers to problems of crowd theory which turned that theory upside down. Freud’s intellectual procedure was eccentric. He began at the end of crowd theory and worked his way back to its explanatory beginnings. Crowd theory thought it was founded on the solid base of hypnotic theory. Freud began from the bond which everybody agreed existed between leaders and led and began to ask questions about what that bond actually consisted of. When Freud began to write Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he was able to treat crowd theory as an established body of knowledge with half a century’s intellectual pedigree. Freud’s account of the crowd in the terms of the psychology of individuals could stand on its own, without the confirmation it receives from the Freudian version of evolutionary anthropology.
