ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ethnographic and clinical material from rural Indonesia and the urban United States, respectively, to critically examine some of Randall Collins’s claims about the role of emotional entrainment in crowds and other social formations. It argues that while Collins is certainly correct in drawing our attention back to the ways in which social formations are embodied in deeply emotional and intersubjective ways, he errs in suggesting that people entrain to other bodies in fairly uniform ways, under the influence of a mutual focus of attention. From a Loewaldian perspective, emotional hauntings reflect the ambivalence and ambiguity that are a part of almost all social interactions. Hans Loewald notes that psychoanalysts inevitably and deliberately evoke the transference of the unattended and repressed thoughts and feelings during the course of analytic treatment, but of course they are inevitably stirred and evoked by other types of interactions as well, including crowd formation.
