ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with something more substantial and significant than the instances of spectatorship and national feeling. Such feelings and their related activities are, after all, relatively transient; they seem insubstantial, even cosmetic, relative to the depths of affective belonging outlined in Freud's model. The chapter makes a psychoanalytic contribution to the growing literature on collective emotion, and does so via a series of Freudian and Lacanian concepts. Freud begins his analysis of mass psychology with a discussion of Gustav Le Bon's study of crowd behaviour. It involves a series of questions on the nature of identification, and, indeed, posits two interlinked modalities of identification, both of which will be crucial in maintaining the 'libidinal economy of the mass'. In grasping the libidinal aura of the leader, people should avoid falling prey to a type of psychological reasoning that Lacan constantly rails against. A Lacanian stance emphasizes instead the extra-subjective dimension, the irreducible intersubjectivity of affect.
