Abstract
In proposing the concept of mass in Freud as an object of study, one runs the risk of confusing one’s reader: — ‘Mass? Is that a Freudian concept? Should “mass” be understood in a physical or socio-political sense, or is it a quantitative noun?’ Speaking about the ‘mass’ in relation to Freud’s thought can be so perplexing in the sense that it may prompt the dismissive question as to whether Freud has ever written on the mass in any of these senses. Indeed ‘mass’ is not as such a Freudian concept. In only one essay does Freud focus on the mass but here it pertains less to the phenomenon or concept of the mass, than to the concept of identification.1 In fact, the term ‘mass’ and its cognates appear sporadically in Freud’s early writings onwards up to Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939 [1937–39]). It sometimes serves as a term of classification, such as in the opposition en masse and en détail that distinguishes two kinds of paralyses and the two popular methods of interpretation.2 It can be part of a description of the external world or of the ego as in ‘The Project of a Scientific Psychology’ (1895).3 It points to human groupings whose dimensions remain unspecified, as throughout Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Or else, it functions as a term of comparison such as in ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper Lynkeus’ (1932).4
‘… rien n’empêchera Dieu, s’il le veut, de faire tenir en un petit espace un nombre infini de personnes.’
—Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée
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Notes
Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) is translated into Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII. In the pages that follow, we will refer to that book as Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (abbreviated as Mass psychology, to remain closer to the German title). The history of the French translation of this essay is worth recalling as an illustration of the semantic confusion that surrounds the term mass. S. Jankélévitch, the first French translator of the essay rendered Massenpsychologie into psychologie collective (Psychologie collective et analyse du moi, Payot [1924], 1950). In the two subsequent French versions of the essay, Massenpsychologie is turned into psychologie des foules (in S. Freud, Essais de psychanalyse, trans. by J. Altounian, A. Bourguignon, O. Bourguignon, P. Cotet and A. Rauzy Payot, 1981) and into psychologie des masses (Oeuvres complètes, Vol. XVI, 1921–3, ed. by A. Bourguignon, P. Cotet and J. Laplanche, Presses universitaires de France, 1991). The translator’s note of the 1981 publication expounds on the problems that the translation of the words Masse and Massenpsychologie pose in relation to the other terms used by Freud, such as, for example, Gruppe, Menge and kollectiv in the 1921 essay, but also throughout his work. They refer their choice of the word foule to G. Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules (Alcan, 1895), which Freud discusses at the beginning of his book. It is interesting to note that they rule out the rendering of Massenpsychologie into psychologie des masses, because they associate the latter with the French translation of W. Reich’s Massenpsychologie des Faschismus and consequently argue that the ‘word masse [in French] has socio-political connotations which are absent in Freud’ (p. 122). The problem is taken up again in Traduire Freud, the first volume of the Oeuvres complètes, this time, in order to justify the translation of Massenpsychologie into psychologie des masses (pp. 112–13). There, in addition to recalling the socio-political connotations to the term mass, the question arises as one of retranslation or ‘trilinguisme’. Indeed, in Massenpsychologie, Freud refers to the 2nd edition of R. Eisler’s translation of Le Bon’s book, Psychologie der Massen ([1908], 1912), but also to William McDougall, The Group Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1920). The term Masse is thus, according to the editors, ‘from the outset, an hybrid of two erroneous translations’ of foule and ‘group’. The editor of The Standard Edition justifies the use of the term ‘group’ in the title and throughout Freud’s essay, in terms of uniformity.
It is also the best English equivalent to the ‘more comprehensive German Masse’, even if, according to the editor, the English equivalent of foule is crowd (see the English translation of Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, London, 1920).
See, for example, T. Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and in Context (Stanford University Press, 2000).
See among others, M. Henry, Généalogie de la psychanalyse (Presses universitaires de France, 1985).
Consider this statement by Freud to Lou Salomé: ‘I so rarely feel the need for synthesis… what interests me is the separation and breaking up into its component parts of what would otherwise revert to an inchoate mass’ in Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salomé — Letters, ed. E. Pfeiffer, trans. W. and E. Robson-Scott (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1963). Or else, the way in which ‘The ego is an organization characterized by the urge towards synthesis. This characteristic is lacking in the id; it is, as we might say, “all to pieces”, its different urges pursue their own purposes independently and regardless of another’ (SE XX, p. 196).
See W. Granoff, J.-M. Rey, L’Occulte, objet de la pensée freudienne (Press universitaires de France, 1983), p. 149, n. 9.
See the Introduction to Max Jammer, Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (Harvard University Press, 1961).
Works on that topic are numerous, see P. Mahony who, in Freud as a Writer (New York: International Universities Press Inc., 1982),
discusses W. Schönau, Sigmund Freuds Prosa: Literarische Elemente Seine Stils (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlag, 1968);
W. Muschg, ‘Freud als Schriftsteller’, Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung 2 (1977), pp. 467–509;
F. Roustang, ‘Du chapitre VII’, Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse, 16 (1977), pp. 65–95.
More recently, see the influential works by S. Weber, The Legend of Freud (Stanford University Press, [1982] 2000)
and Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
See, among others, D. Ornston (ed.), Translating Freud (Yale University Press, 1992),
and A. Bourguignon (et al.), Oeuvres complètes de Freud/Psychanalyse (OCF.P). Traduire Freud (Presses universitaires de France, 1989).
On the necessity of reflecting upon that discipline, see Étienne Balibar’s preface to La Psychologie des peuples et ses dérives, ed. M. Kail and G. Vermès (Centre national de documentation, 1999), pp. 9–10. Balibar draws attention to what he calls the ‘voisinages ou les filiations les plus étranges’ between elements of late nineteenth-century ‘psychologie des peuples’ and other fields, such as Freud’s discussion of Gustave Le Bon La psychologie des foules. It is these filiations which, according to him, need to be studied with respect to the evolutionism that dominates psychologie des peuples and its related sciences, such as crowd psychology.
See the comprehensive analyses of Jean Starobinski in his preface to the French translation of E. Jones, Hamlet et Oedipe (Gallimard, 1967).
See D. Baguley Fécondité d’Émile Zola, Roman à thèse, évangile, mythe (University of Toronto Press, 1973).
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© 2003 Céline Surprenant
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Surprenant, C. (2003). Introduction. In: Freud’s Mass Psychology. Renewing Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913746_1
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