Vol. 26 No. 13 · 8 July 2004
pages 14-17 | 6120 words
In Our Present-Day White Christian Culture
Jacqueline Rose on Freud and the rise of Zionism
Ever since the fall of Baghdad, when looters went rampaging through the city, a centuries-old assumption about ‘the people’ has lurked, barely spoken, beneath the ghastly aftermath of the war. It is that the people, meaning ‘people en masse’, are incapable of restraining themselves. In the case of Iraq, two further assumptions are in play. First, people freed from the yoke of oppressive dictatorship are most at risk: the excesses of the Iraqi populace are laid at the door of Saddam Hussein at the very moment he loses his power to control them, and not, for example, seen as the responsibility of the occupying armies. Second, the Iraqi people are especially prone to such behaviour because they fall outside the civilising processes of the West. Thus beneath Donald Rumsfeld’s magnificently evasive ‘Stuff happens’ – the formula allows us to think for a second that such things might happen to anyone, including presumably us, or even him – we glimpse a much harsher, discriminatory form of judgment. Between dictatorship and barbarity, Iraq stands condemned: one reason, no doubt, democracy has to be imported and cannot be entrusted to the Iraqis themselves, even while the images from Abu Ghraib suggest that there is no foundation for such self-serving discriminations between them and us.
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[*] Underwood’s translation of this essay will be included in a volume of the Penguin Freud entitled Mass Psychology, which is due in November.
[†] This essay will also be included in the volume of the Penguin Freud entitled Mass Psychology.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 15 · 5 August 2004
From Christopher Wintle
Jacqueline Rose writes of Freud's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) that 'until Jim Underwood translated it for the new Penguin edition as "masses"', 'die Massen' 'had always been rendered as "group"' (LRB, 8 July). She is referring to James Strachey's translation of 1922. However, Hans Keller, in his Freudian writings of the 1940s (published in Music and Psychology, which I edited, in 2003), translates Freud's title as Crowd Psychology and the Individual. This is preferable not only because 'crowd' is less nebulous than 'the masses', but also because 'the individual' avoids the jargon of Strachey's 'ego'.
Christopher Wintle
King’s College London
Vol. 26 No. 16 · 19 August 2004
From Jeremy Whitehurst
Christopher Wintle suggests that 'crowd' is a better translation of Freud's die Massen than 'group' or 'the masses' (Letters, 5 August). In Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, Freud discusses the distinction between crowd and mass psychology with reference to McDougall's The Group Mind (1920) and differentiates between Haufen ('crowd', as discussed by McDougall) and Masse, which he continually uses. It is precisely because of the 'nebulous' stance of Masse that Freud selects the word over Haufen.
Jeremy Whitehurst
Hounslow, Middlesex
Vol. 26 No. 18 · 23 September 2004
From Christopher Wintle
The focus of Freud's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse is not, as Jeremy Whitehurst implies (Letters, 19 August), McDougall's The Group Mind (1920), which deals with stable associations (such as church and army), but Le Bon's Psychologie des foules (1895), which deals with transient ones (crowds). Therefore to render Freud's title as Crowd Psychology and the Individual is both to 'situate' the critique and to signal his overriding concern with what happens to individuals when they are addressed en masse – i.e. in a crowd – by a hypnotic leader.
Christopher Wintle
King’s College London
