ABSTRACT
Drawing on Freud's account of group psychology and prompted by the growing literature on collective emotion, this chapter considers the phenomenon of mass identification from two interlinked perspectives. In the language of psychoanalysis people speak of love in terms of an attachment, as a libidinal tie. Freud begins his analysis of mass psychology with a lengthy discussion of Gustav Le Bon's study of crowd behaviour. There is much there which appeals to him, notably the postulate that crowd membership leads to a lowering of intellect, an inflated sense of invulnerability and to the contagious spread of irrational ideas. Without wasting further ink on a feature of Freud's account that has been much criticized, namely the ostensibly reductive and patriarchal emphasis on the paternal, one might simply add a basic Lacanian qualification. Ideal-ego identifications would be of a horizontal sort, between 'like others', who represent the author's own possible mirror image.
