“The monster with a million worm-like heads”: Representations of the Crowd and the Politics of...

Matthew Rumbold Modernism and Psychoanalysis

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“The monster with a million worm-like heads”:1

Representations of the Crowd and the Politics of Psychoanalysis in Le Bon, Freud and D. H.

Lawrence’s Kangaroo.

This essay examines the representations of the crowd in two works of crowd psychology by

Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, and ends with an exploration of crowd politics in D. H.

Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo. I examine the key assumptions, characteristics and ideas

emerging from the nineteenth century discourse of the crowd, especially popularised by

Gustave Le Bon, which fed into a particular conception of crowd behaviour adopted by

conservatives and the emerging Fascist politics (as opposed to socialist conceptions of class

collectives in terms such as ‘mass’). In the second section, I discuss the psychoanalytic

reading of groups in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). I show

how Freud developed the ideas of crowd psychology assimilating them into his

psychodynamic architecture and functioning of the mind. In the third section I use these

insights to analyse the politics of the crowd in the novel Kangaroo. I argue that despite an

ambivalent and mostly antagonistic relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis, an

interpretation of Kangaroo which takes into account both Freudian metapsychology of the

group and a broader understanding of the roots of crowd representations unlocks important

insights into Lawrence’s treatment of the crowd.

I

Gustave Le Bon and the Ignominious Rise of the Modern Crowd

... belua multorum es capitum ... (Horace, Epistles I 76)

In some deep and essential sense, crowds are modernity. Modern times are crowded times.

Modern man is the man of the crowd. (Schnapp and Tiews x)

From Horace’s injunction against hoi polloi, mobile vulgus or turba to Shakespeare’s

denunciation of the mob as a beast-like “many-headed multitude” (Coriolanus II.3.) and

which is echoed in Edmund Burke’s harsh critique of the Revolutionary Terror and the

“swinish multitude” (Burke n.pag.) the crowd has been reviled and castigated throughout

history as destructive and a barbaric threat to social order. The human collective with its

profusion of terms from the ennobling assembly to the angry throng each denoting a

different ideological inflection of meaning has also been described through a welter of


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disparaging metaphors: as animals, canaille, and insects; or as savage, mad and unruly

primitive human beasts; or the visual, aural effects of group activity rendered in terms of

natural or supernatural cataclysms, thunder, storms, floods and oceanic imagery of tides.2

These characterisations continue into the twenty-first century: in the media coverage of the

2011 London Riots Justice Minister Ken Clarke railed against the outburst of group

criminality and branded the rioters and looters as a “feral underclass” (qtd. in Reicher and

Stott n.pag.).

Despite the continuity of the denigration of crowds, there is something distinct

about the modern conception of crowds which was arguably inaugurated by the French

Revolution and the people’s demands for liberty, equality and fraternity. Throughout the

nineteenth century and early twentieth century a myriad of responses to the phenomenon

of the crowd as a product of modern democracy, coupled with the attendant anxiety over

the breakdown of the old hierarchical, aristocratic order have been developed in the work

of a variety of European thinkers and writers from Burke to Nietzsche to Ortega y Gasset.

The burgeoning power of collective and its concomitant translation into an academic

discipline of study was in part a “response to the restructuring of modern society, which was

marked by the ‘social question’, urbanization, and the introduction of universal suffrage”

(Stäheli 63). Stefan Jonsson attributes the “invention of the masses as a sociological

category” directly to the “emergence of democracy” and “particularly to the conflicts about

how the new democratic sovereign, the people ought to be represented” in political,

ideological and cultural terms (Schnapp and Tiews 49). Focussing on Jacques-Louis David’s

rendering of the oath sworn by the National Assembly on June 20 1789 in his sketch, The

Tennis Court Oath, Jonsson highlights “two distinct iconographic conventions” which will

persist in a binary logic of idealism and barbarism throughout later crowd writings:

The first convention is that of the idealized political body. The collective is figured as

harmonious, unified, concentrated, gracefully resting in movement. [...]The second

model is that of the many-headed hydra [which] is absorbed and inverted in the

image [and in which] the monster of innumerable heads that shake and rattle in fits

of madness injects a wild and chaotic element into the majestic beauty of the

regenerated political body. (55)

Oscillating between two poles, the crowd theorists of the period 1870s to the 1890s tended

to propagate the notion of crowds as unstable, threatening and violent. Furthermore, rather


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than positively conceiving of a purposive collective in terms of equal, atomised individuals

rationally aggregated into the body politic through a contractual assimilation into the

general will, the mob or foule came to be feared and condemned as a lowering, levelling and

degeneration of values, rationality and civilised conduct. The classic crowd theorists of the

Revolution and modern nineteenth-century society such as Hippolyte Taine, Gabriel Tarde,

and Gustave Le Bon, wrote with a pervading sense of crisis amidst the volatility of French

politics.3 They responded to crowds with a view in part to objectively and authoritatively

describe and account for the ‘new’ phenomenon in the emerging disciplines of sociology

and social psychology. However, their work is often so stridently conservative and laced

with opprobrium towards crowds it seems that “[f]ar from providing remedies, palliatives,

or even placebos” the crowd theorists “write with the sense of the ending of the world,

almost as if they are intentionally trying to create social fear rather than trying to alleviate

it” (McClelland 199).

With qualification, we can agree with Gustave Le Bon that modernity is the “ERA OF

THE CROWD” (Le Bon x). More successful than previous writers, Le Bon heralds the era of

crowds with zealous and prophetically foreboding style in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular

Mind. In a moment of crisis, transition and anarchy, Le Bon diagnoses the symptoms of the

modern age caused first, by the “destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs”

in which “all the elements of our civilisation are rooted”; and, second, “entirely new

conditions of existence and thought as a result of modern scientific and industrial

discoveries” (ix-x). It is, however, the “new power”, the “power of crowds” and the “voice of

the masses” with its “entry of the popular classes into political life” which looms ominously

as the force which will dominate and destroy civilisation – unless understood and

manipulated with the help of a careful reading of his book. Thus, almost revelling in

apocalyptic doom-mongering and anti-egalitarian pessimism, Le Bon preaches a rhetoric of

resignation and fatalism amidst the overwhelming power of the masses:

While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while all the pillars of

society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that

nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. (x)

For Le Bon the crowd is the Damoclean “shadow of the guillotine” (McClelland 199) which

hovered like the death-knell of civilisation beckoning regression to primitivism. A particular

organistic and evolutionary conception of ‘History’ taught him that crowds accompanied


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decadence and moral turpitude, and accelerated civilisation’s decline and dissolution. The

“purely destructive nature” of the crowd means it acts “like those microbes which hasten

the dissolution of enfeebled of dead bodies” (Le Bon xiii). Crowds were always “brutal”,

“unconscious” and only “powerful for destruction”; whereas civilisation is “created and

directed by a small intellectual aristocracy” (xi). Le Bon ingrains a rigid delineation between

the virtues of the individual (civilisation, rationality, morality, culture, creativity) and the

crowd (barbarism, irrationality, immoral depravity and destructiveness).

Given Le Bon’s talent as a populist purveyor of scientific work, he was able to purloin

several decades of ideas and theories, synthesising them into a canonised work of crowd

psychology. Calling him a “scientific freebooter” McClelland wryly comments that “Le Bon’s

career gives the lie to the idea that there is something necessarily furtive about plagiarism ”

(197). As a result Le Bon attempts an objective scientific study and litters his text with

references to the sciences which suited him and with which he justified his version of crowd

behaviour. He claimed to have ‘discovered’ a “law of the mental unity of crowds” (Le Bon 2).

Far from authoritative, but certainly insisting on the authority of scientific timeless fact and

certitude, however, Le Bon’s conception of the crowd is ideologically tainted and his

‘scientific rigour’ is gravely circumspect. Several of these ideas are important to our

discussion: the medicalisation and diagnosis of crowd behaviour as abnormal or as

‘madness’; the conflation of crowd behaviour with criminal behaviour, which itself carried

deep class prejudice; and, Le Bon’s adherence to evolutionary assumptions which led him to

restricted and suspect racial and biological models of society and culture.

The pervasive influence of the medical sciences in analysis of crowds meant that the

crowd was characterised as a contagious disease and deemed to be pathogenic to an

individual and wider society. Thus, the references to disease and “microbes” are drawn from

Le Bon’s medical career: as a doctor Le Bon “posed as the diagnostician of the crowd -

sickness of his own time” and the appropriation of such terminology “lent a certain

plausibility to Le Bon’s posturing as a healer of social ills” (McClelland 198). The nature of

the crowd was presupposed to be deviant and as such the effect on the individual was

detrimental to his psychological functioning. Descriptions abound of the fever which takes

hold on men in a crowd and which causes a delirium as the crowd begins to act as a whole.

These notions were compounded with the confluence of ideas from the field of medical

psychopathology.4 Le Bon borrowed the ideas of imitation and mental contagion to account


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for the transmission of emotion involuntarily through a crowd and combined them with the

studies conducted on hypnosis (folie à deux) and suggestion. An unhealthy and morbid mix

of influences consigned the crowd to the asylum where it was treated with attitude of

clinical certainty, prejudice and paranoia:

In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious,

which explains the suddenness of panics. Brain disorders, like madness, are

themselves contagious. The frequency of madness among doctors who are

specialists for the mad is notorious. (Le Bon 78)

Such psychologism led Le Bon to determine the fundamental law of crowds:

The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same

direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. (2)

Thus, individual conscious personality described by Le Bon as a “grain of sand amid other

grains of sand” (8), was lost in a larger crowd consciousness which is always “intellectually

inferior” (9). And mostly, although Le Bon concedes that crowds can be heroic, this was for

ill rather than good. Crowd mentality is caused by sheer number, contagion or a catalyst

often described with recourse to hypnosis, and finally suggestibility which is transferred by

images, suggestion or intense displays of emotion, fright, which organises the disparate

individuals account for the dramatic change in the individual’s behaviour as he is relegated

to the group mentality (6-8).5 This heightened the fear of the crowd as the volatility and

mobility of crowds charged with affect was conceived in terms of an epidemic, plague which

equated psychological contagion (mass panic and hysteria) with physical contagion

(McClelland 218).

Subsumed in this concept of infectious irrationalism and a collective mental unity

was the overriding belief in the alteration of the individual and the loss of reason,

perversion of personality traits and corruption of values. This caused the newly aggregated

individual to act in often uncharacteristic and, in these theorist’s views, violent and immoral

ways. For Le Bon, the “normal character of quiet, law-abiding citizens” who are subjected to

an intense excitation of a crowd now manifested “savage” behaviour typical of the Terror of

the French Convention and yet return to be Napoleon’s “most docile servants” (Le Bon 3). It

is the individual’s critical reason and consciousness which is paralysed as he becomes “an

automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will” (8) and is given over to the fickle,

changeable will and whims of the crowd. The individual, “by the mere fact” that he is in a


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crowd, “descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation” and becomes a “creature acting

by instinct” (8). This reference to instinct and the unconscious is a defining feature of the

crowd which exhibits all the features Freud would associate with the Id: the crowd with its

“irritability, incapacity to reason [and] the exaggeration of the sentiments” is guided by

“unconscious motives”; at “the mercy of all external exciting causes” and it is “the slave of

the impulses” (10-11). Importantly at this early stage in psychology, and before Freud would

‘normalise’ the unconscious, the unconscious was viewed with suspicion and mystery: it was

considered “abnormal, or disturbed, or morbid” so that the “medical origins of the

psychology of the unconscious would cause unease” (McClelland 218).

The ‘pathologisation’ of the crowd was combined with the studies of criminologists

in Italy and France (Cesare Lombroso and Scipio Sighele, and Gabriel Tarde) and was used to

bolster the perception of crowds (both organised and unorganised) as unruly, irresponsible

mobs which inevitably descended into acts of criminality.6 Using the same imagery of

microbes the influence of crowds was likened to poison and evil: the “microbes of evil

develop very easily” (Ferri qtd. in Barrows 128). The key conclusion drawn by almost all of

these crowd-theorists-cum-criminologists who used amongst their methodologies cranial

measurement of convicted criminals was that individual morality and values of upstanding,

honest and law-abiding citizens once part of a crowd were transformed and degenerated

into anti-social behaviour. A heated debate over individual responsibility ensued in the

discipline which drew on contentious definitions of crowds, phrenology and biological

models.7 However, the overriding assumption which guided Le Bon in this instance was that

“crime was to the body politic what disease was to the human body” (McClelland 198).

As such “science and psychology of the crowd” were in actual fact merely “banners

for Le Bon” to “peddle a particular kind of elitist ideology” (McClelland 203, 200). This

ideology propped up by scientism ultimately rested on the supposed certainties of a racial

and cultural superiority. It drew heavily on the positivism of Auguste Comte and

evolutionary thought of Herbert Spencer which paralleled the concept of a ‘racial mind’ with

a crowd mind and viewed the development in deterministic biological models.8 This facet of

Le Bon’s and other crowd theorist’s work is essential as it is not only a manifestation of a

particular ideological view predominant in nineteenth century thought but also signifies a

last resort for explanation and justification for the troublesome human phenomenon of the

crowd. References to crowds in terms of race abound in Le Bon’s work. Such rhetoric works


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in several directions. In one respect, race “exerts a paramount influence upon the

dispositions of a crowd [which] is the powerful underlying force that limits its changes of

humour” (Le Bon 102). In a fixed, essentialising conflation of race and nation, differences in

volubility, tendency towards centralisation and propensity towards dictatorship or liberty

and equality are pronounced between Latin, French and English crowds.9 An extenuating

implication of this approach is that it perpetuated a confusion between the levels of

individual, group and social behaviour so that in a reductive and contradictorily inconsistent

manner the individual on one hand was relegated to the functions of the group, but on the

other hand the group functioned as an individualised entity with determining characteristics

and even its own consciousness, intelligence and soul (âme). Furthermore, the racialisation

of the crowd invokes the modes of primitivism, atavism and regression. Beyond reason,

operating unconsciously, racial heredity is a deterministic law, unalterable destiny and a

“resistless impulse” or a “secret force analogous to those which compel the acorn to

transform itself into an oak or a comet to follow its orbit” (Le Bon 71). Last, the adherence

to race as a structural category extended to the classification and stratification of those

most prone to ‘herd mentality’ within society: whilst everyone had the inherent capacity to

devolve, those with the greatest propensity were “observed in beings belonging to inferior

forms of evolution – in women, savages, and children” (Le Bon 10).

We should not underestimate the sinister implications of such thought. As Christian

Borch has argued in a Foucauldian turn, this informs a wider “biopolitical agenda” in Le

Bon’s work which demarcated and policed strict boundaries between the normal and

pathological, and which was then mapped on to other categories of social organisation and

written into Le Bon’s ideological programme (Borch, Politics of Crowds 45-46). The

conclusions that would be enacted in the Fascist appropriation of Le Bon’s work on crowds

are summed up by the following stark statement of intent lurking at the heart of the

discourse:

The crowd should be combated because it posed a biological danger to the organism

of the superior population. Eliminating the devalued crowd microbes was, for Le

Bon, the only way to foster the life of the general population/race. (Borch, Politics of

Crowds 47)

However, Le Bon did not conceive of enlightened man as absolutely helpless in the face of

the crowd. In part due to his disgust and low estimation for the crowd – as well has his


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misguided overgeneralisations and poor attempt to define the difference between types of

crowd – Le Bon saw the antidote to the crowd in their manipulation and organisation by a

capable leader. Since crowds are the embodiment of the unthinking void, swarming in a

vortex of impressionable unbound energy, since they crave the authority and order they

lack, and because, despite their unruly nature, they are easily led, flattered, cajoled and are

at their core conservative, crowds love and are easily entranced by a Caesar or a Napoleon –

they “demand a god before anything else” (Le Bon 40). Le Bon saw the potential for any

savvy and canny statesman to take control of the rising modern crowd. Indeed, his book was

a Machiavellian guide to some of the ways to learn the “art of governing” (37), and

preferably this would be done by the beleaguered aristocratic elites, rather than the

anarchists and revolutionary socialists whom he feared as much as the mob.10 In justifying

and licensing the demagogue and cult of the leader, Le Bon found – and actively sought

them out as a “self-appointed advisor” (Barrows 179) – many admirers, amongst whom

Benito Mussolini wrote flatteringly, praising The Crowd highly. Adolf Hitler and Joseph

Goebbels found “theoretical reinforcement” in Le Bon for their own employment of the

fascist spectacle, mass propaganda and crowd manipulation (Nye 179).11 Given this it should

be noted that in Le Bon’s estimation the leader is not immune to such debased influences as

he is a zealot himself and he has in all likelihood evolved from the crowd: “recruited from

the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on

madness” (Le Bon 73).

Nevertheless, Le Bon’s formula for the leader is relatively simple and he propounds a

rhetoric of persuasion. Le Bon is anticipating the commonplaces and basics of public

relations, advertising, mass communication and even ‘memes’ when he puts forward three

simple tenets: affirmation of concise, uncomplicated, ill-defined, logic-free messages or

slogans; repetition; and spreading ideas by contagion – described in terms of “electrical

current”, “magnetism” and spread of panic like “microbes” (77-81). In addition to these

principles, the sheer will, energy and intensity of the leader is transmitted to the crowd as

the leader must project an aura of prestige and charisma. In a sado-masochistic relationship

of power (the carnality of enthused crowds was a ‘noted’ phenomenon), the leader seduces,

deceives, dominates and harnesses the energy and adoration of the crowd; “contempt and

persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excite them the more” (73).


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Le Bon’s legacy has been dramatic and his influence on subsequent crowd theorists,

including Freud was significant. This is despite clearly being unoriginal, being compromised

by ideological prejudice and to a large extent being simply erroneous about crowd

behaviour. Le Bon managed to perpetuate a version of the crowd which was unhistorical,

which dehumanised most crowd activity whilst naturalising or fixing negative traits to

groups, thereby exonerating and sidestepping the complicity on the part of elites in class

conflict and finally giving licence to repress and control ‘abhorrent’ mobs. 12 Le Bon,

nevertheless, managed to distil and transmit a particular myth of the crowd which was

readily received by the zeitgeist of a turbulent fin de siècle period. Indeed as we shall see, D.

H. Lawrence, despite his misgivings about crowd psychology in general, would no doubt

have shared a good deal of Le Bon’s political and ideological beliefs and his response to

crowds in his work, although somewhat more nuanced, is unavoidably conditioned by Le

Bon’s and other similar studies.

II

Freud’s Horde

In turning to Freud, I am not trying to draw explicit connections of influence on D. H.

Lawrence in the same way that I think Le Bon’s The Crowd lurks behind Lawrence’s

representation of the crowd in Kangaroo. Indeed, as has been suggested by Fiona Becket,

Lawrence in his own eccentric manner rejected Freudianism and it is highly unlikely he

would have read Freud’s central contribution to the field, Group Psychology and the Analysis

of the Ego.13 Nevertheless, Freud’s account of groups and especially the role of the leader,

including the complex psychological relationship between leaders and led, form a

compelling analytical tool with which to interpret Lawrence’s own reaction to crowd politics

of the early 1920s. Furthermore, Freud’s prescient portrayal of group behaviour also

accounts for the dynamics of Totalitarian mass movements which were to grip Europe and

with which Lawrence was engaging in their nascent stages of development.

Freud’s Group Psychology was not his first foray into cultural anthropology. Indeed

Robert A. Paul, stressing their unity, argues that Freud’s studies of the cultural and collective

life which began with Totem and Taboo (1913) continuing in Civilisation and Its Discontents

(1930) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) represent an ongoing concern and engagement

outside the realm of clinical psychoanalytic theory (Neu 267). In any case the strict


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separation between the individual and the group is a tenuous one for Freud. He consistently

disrupts it with his work’s immersion in cultural and literary allusions, aspects of everyday

life including jokes, and, of course, the ‘royal road to the unconscious’: dreams.14

Furthermore, an abiding feature of his studies on hysteria, trauma, and neurosis is the

methodological shift from abnormality and supposed deviancy towards universality and

normalcy in common psychological structures and functioning. Freud’s enduring discovery is

that “psychopathology holds the key to the understanding of normal psychology” (Laclau

40).

Ernesto Laclau argues that it is this which marks a “radical breakthrough” and

intervention into crowd psychology. Freud seeks to interrogate the “stark and sterile

dichotomies – the individual/the crowd; the rational/the irrational; the normal/ the

pathological” set up by previous crowd theorists (40). Thus, at the beginning of the book

Freud argues that despite individual psychology being “concerned with individual man” it is

only “rarely and under certain exceptional conditions” that one can “disregard the relations

of this individual to others” (Group Psychology 69). Enmeshing his subject in what will

become an intricate and complex set of relations Freud establishes the role of the Andere or

the Other in the psychic life of the individual:

In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an

object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology,

in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social

psychology as well. (69) 15

In establishing a new set of relations for social psychology which are primarily grounded in

our formative bonds with others, especially the familial Freud audaciously subsumes the

social and individual into the domain of psychoanalysis proper. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in

The Freudian Subject argues that Freud is attempting “to do away with the specificity of the

discipline called ‘social psychology’ by unveiling it as a false derived specificity” (129). Freud

attempts to dissolve the distinction between individual and group psychology into a

multifaceted inter-subjective relationship which is mediated in terms of the complex

psychodynamic drives and psychic structures.

Given this task, Group Psychology is in many ways a problematic and an intermediary

text in Freud’s oeuvre.16 In it Freud explores and works through fundamental psychoanalytic

concepts from earlier findings and discoveries and also incorporates more recent tentative


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theoretical speculation. The text exhibits an intersection of some quite unstable, complex

and slippery concepts in psychoanalytic history. First, Freud returns to the phenomenon of

hypnotism which had been highly influential in his early career studying under the

“Napoleon of neuroses” Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris in the late 1880s.

Freud’s eventual rejection of the physiological aetiology of hysteria in favour of a

psychological explanation, laid the foundations for the early breakthroughs of

psychoanalysis. Second, the ‘scientific myth’ of the Primal Horde evinced in Totem and

Taboo which propounded the origins of society in the parricide of the alpha male leader by

the horde of brothers. Third, is the extremely important work accomplished in On

Narcissism which would lead to the major reformulations which Freud was working through

contemporaneous to Group Psychology: the reconfiguration of the drive theory to

accommodate the death-drive, and the subsequent emergence of the second topography in

The Ego and the Id (1923).

In this regard, the key concepts integral to our understanding of groups and their

leaders which emerge in Freud’s text are: hypnosis as an effect of an underlying libidinal

dynamic, related to the love-bond between the leader and members of the group; the

proliferation of a set of identifications and substitutions which come to constitute the

internalisation of the social bond; and, finally the emergence of a proto-structure or ego-

ideal used to explain the fascination and allure of leadership and which will evolve in further

theoretical development into the Super-ego.

The core project of Group Psychology involves a translation of the findings of crowd

theorists such as Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter and William McDougall into Freud’s emerging

metapsychological system. Ultimately, Freud seeks to probe beyond what he regarded as

necessary and laudable yet insufficient descriptive accounts of crowd behaviour and to

explain them more fully. Despite these developments it must be stated at the outset that on

a fundamental level Freud did not challenge the conventional portrayal of crowds which he

inherited from Le Bon. Although his focus shifted from Le Bon’s bellicose mêlée of crowd

behaviour to organised crowds and he drew from subsequent writings especially from an

evolutionary basis describing a more ‘neutral’ or ‘normative’ biological view of crowds as

gregarious herd behaviour, Freud to a large extent simply modified and perhaps tempered

the ideological antagonism towards crowds. Theodor Adorno, in his masterful exposition of

the psychoanalytic implications for understanding Nazi Fascism, comments that “Freud does


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not challenge the accuracy of Le Bon’s well-known characterizations” but his work does

mark the “absence of the traditional contempt for the masses which is the thema

probandum” of previous studies (Arato and Gebhardt 121). Like Le Bon’s The Crowd, Freud’s

text is similarly historically and ideologically conditioned. Although written over twenty-five

years later, Group Psychology is informed and influenced, albeit perhaps registered

obliquely by the political and historical context of brutal mass slaughter during the Great

War, the turmoil of the violent fall of monarchy in Russia and the disintegration of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire.17 Given this, Borch-Jacobson goes as far as to argue that, as a tool

for our understanding of totalitarian regimes, Group Psychology is “exceptional”, however,

given its ambiguities and ambivalences,

we must also recognize that Freud did not so much analyze this totalitarian fantasy

as subscribe to it [...] Freud never criticized ‘group psychology,’ convinced as he was,

on the contrary, that it represented the very essence of society. (“The Freudian

Subject.” 118-119.)

It is in homage to Le Bon that Freud in first sections of the book quotes at length from his

“deservedly famous” book in order to corroborate and underscore a “correctly observed”

view of the crowd as violent, a lowered intellectual ability, easily manipulated by a leader,

exhibiting an alteration and loss of individuality, discarding inhibitions combined with a

contagious sense of omnipotence and an altogether regressive manifestation akin to

primitives and children (Freud, Group Psychology 72-81, 117). Despite nuances in notions of

the unconscious,18 Freud and Le Bon firmly agree on the regressive psychology of the crowd

as it is determined by the archaic influence of the unconscious. Furthermore, the two share

the “common conviction” that the “pathological return to a previous state bears witness to

the existence of a stage of ontogenetic and phylogenetic development that has been

surpassed” (Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject 135).

However, as much as Freud praises Le Bon for his characterisation Freud sees some

shortcomings in the explanation of these characteristics. This is further compounded when

he explores the notion of suggestibility, imitation and hypnotic effect which has been used

as determining factors in crowd psychology. Here Freud alludes directly to William

McDougall’s ‘principle of direct induction of emotion’ which through a primitive mechanism

of suggestibility and sympathy can quickly spread emotion by ‘exaltation and intensification’

and thereby can galvanise and unify a crowd (Group Psychology 82-87).19


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Freud’s central intervention is to show that suggestion cannot be the only

explanation for this phenomenon. There must be a more rational explanation which goes

beyond the mysterious and magical assumptions of suggestion and hypnosis. Indeed he

argues suggestibility is merely an effect of a more fundamental explanation which he locates

in the mechanics of libido and the psychic economy of exchange. Thus, unwilling to attribute

to suggestibility an “irreducible, primitive phenomenon, a fundamental fact in the mental

life of man” (89) or reluctant to posit a new drive or instinct as would seem necessary if one

followed Trotter’s concept of a herd instinct, Freud seeks to uncover the nature of the

emotional tie or bond through investment of libidinal energy and attachments. This will

manifest itself in a double tie which will explain several perplexing characteristics of the

crowd including the power, fascination and prestige of the leader, the self-sacrificial bond

between members of a group to the extent that ambivalences and conflicting emotions are

inhibited and repressed, as well as the panic and dispersal of a crowd.

The fundamental underlying force of cohesion in uniting an organised group, such as

the Church or the Army is a love-bond. We must be careful to delineate clearly Freud’s

concept of sexual instinct from the libidinous drive (trieb) in order to understand that the

emotional affect involved in this bond is redirected sexual energy, which is sublimated,

channelled or diverted whilst still retaining its charge and influence onto different objects,

even abstract ideal. As such it is what Freud terms “aim-inhibited” libido or “Eros”.20 For

Freud the love-bond is the glue which unifies groups and by implication constitutes an

orderly, structured group preventing organisations like the Church and the Army from

disintegrating. It ensures that the members of society give up narcissistic libidinal energy

directed at fulfilment of pleasure and devote this to the demands of society and the

collective political body. Here the necessity of a containing, repressive characterisation of

society is clear: the ties, especially to a leader, are needed to re-structure and orient

potentially insular love-bonds as well as to prevent other chaotic desires from being

unleashed. The ideological import of this is profoundly totalitarian and authoritarian.21

Society is integrated into a totality through the organisation of the erotic political economy:

first, by devoting (binding) love to the leader; and second, through the displacement of

competitive envy and antagonism between the individual members by adhering to the

illusion that the leader-Chief loves all members equally, justly and absolutely. “The group,

like a fine-tuned, organic, harmonious whole, would not survive an instant without that


14

founding bond, without that political Love or that Politics of Love” (Borch-Jacobsen, The

Freudian Subject 157).

The leader who emerges as an absolute figure of omnipotence and mastery, not

constrained by any of the libidinous bonds is a socially necessary myth of totality. The leader

also comes to assume a formative role in the psychic constitution of the political Subject.

Freud delves further into the depth of our psychic construction in order to show the intra-

psychical or internalised dynamics of the mind as carrying the imprint of prototypical

structures – these are developmental as determined by the Oedipal complex and archaic

structures through his reference to the myth of the Primal Horde.22 Here Freud relies on the

notion of identification, which informs a great deal of Group Psychology. Although it has a

complex and intricate psychoanalytic conceptual history, on a basic level identification

involving the desire ‘to be’ or ‘to have’, is elucidated in three ways: first, the primary

manifestation in an emotional tie with an object; second, identification involves the cathexis

or investment of libido onto an external figure which is then introjected becoming a

regressive substitute for an object tie; and, third, the new identification with a common

quality not necessarily related to the libidinal drive (Freud, Group Psychology 107-108).

Without exploring the intricacies of the entanglements of identifications the significant

conclusions pertaining to the identification of the leader is that it becomes part of a

substitutive relationship. Through the process of idealization, common to those in love,

narcissistic libido is re-directed onto the internalised image of the leader who comes to

embody perfection. He is an object onto which the subject transfers unattainable desires,

wishes and fantasy (his Ego-ideal). As for the members of the group, they are bound

together in a “Gemeingeist, esprit de corps, ‘group spirit’” (120). Although derived from

envy, this has social and ethical significance: it facilitates necessary compromise and

relinquishment of the unattainable possession of the love-object (the leader’s position as

Primal Father). In a gesture of self-abnegation and sacrifice, everyone accepts that no-one

shall succeed in their desires: “Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so

that others may have to do without them as well” (121). Thus, a horde, the proper name for

a group is defined as a:

number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego

ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego .

(116)


15

Apart from finding immediate answers to some of the problematic features of crowd

behaviour (panic, hypnosis and the nature of the group relations), Freud’s analysis of the

imbrications of individual and group identity in the process of identification and constitution

of the Subject in a political economy is profoundly ambivalent and bound by conflict,

feelings of hostility and aversion. Ridden by guilt, envy and with dangerous libidinal energy

caught in a convoluted series of identifications, Freud’s characterisation of the

entanglement of psychic and political organisation is in many ways bleak and oppressive : it

suggests, like Le Bon that humans need and crave mastery and authority, crowds are

regressive and revolutions will ultimately return to a reinstatement of old authority and

oppressors. It is no surprise that psychoanalysis provides an understanding of Fascist

totalitarian power and control through the myth of the strong leader and a mobilised mass .

Adorno has drawn parallels between the psychoanalytic conception of the love-bond with

the narcissistic leader and the propaganda of the Führer ideology, and used the concept of

group tie to illustrate the Fascist manipulation and propagation of abstract patriotic and

nationalistic ideals which is the basis for the persecution of ‘inferior races’ (Arato and

Gebhardt 123). Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen sums up the disturbing legacy of the politics of

psychoanalysis which poses the “formidable problem” of the Freudian “totalitarian Chief -

Subject Myth” in a statement made by Freud in a letter to Einstein:23

One instance of the innate and ineradicable inequality of men is their tendency to

fall into the two classes of leaders (Führer) and followers. The latter constitute the

vast majority; they stand in need of an authority which will make decisions for them

and to which they for the most part offer unqualified submission” (Freud qtd. in “The

Freudian Subject.” 119)

III

D. H. Lawrence: Antipathy towards the Antipodean Mob


16

Almost allowed to write itself in a flurry of a month’s literary activity in mid 1922,24

Kangaroo, D. H. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel based loosely on his short stay in

Sydney explores questions of individual consciousness (what Lawrence calls the demands of

his “dark self” (Kangaroo 135, 199), various ideals of political engagement, the necessity and

ambivalence of leadership and the trials and conflicts of marriage and gender relationships.

The novel was written as both a personal and a wider response to the volatile and uncertain

post-war years which were beset by international political, economic and social turmoil

from German financial debt crisis, Bolshevik and Communist revolutionary upheavals to

what Lawrence felt was a world shattering change which had come about during the Great

War (1915). Worldly-weary, disillusioned and carrying the trauma of his experiences in

England during the war, Lawrence was on a Grand Tour towards Mexico and America as he

could not bring himself to travel the archetypal passage West.25 Lawrence, who had found

himself fleeing the crumbling and decay of the “horrible staleness of Europe” which he had

caustically rejected as “done for, played out, finished” was ultimately hoping to find a “new

life-form” on his travels (Kangaroo 153, 13, 98). Lawrence was not wholly successful in his

quest or pilgrimage to “somehow bring together the two ends of humanity, our own thin

end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era” (qtd. in North 119).

Lawrence abhorred Ceylon, the forbidding heat and landscape and the “dark tangled jungle”

and the Buddha and his “rat-hole religion” (Letters 227, 234). Writing in letters with a sense

of post-Imperial malaise, deep racial antagonism and, as we shall see in a characteristic

figuration of misanthropic disdain for humanity or “teeming millions” figured through

inherited descriptions of the crowd, Lawrence states that the “natives are back of us – in the

living sense lower than we are. But they are going to swarm over us and suffocate us”

(Letters, 227, 234). Initially Australia did not seem to fare any better, and as an introduction

to Lawrence’s anti-democratic sentiments we need look no further than his first impressions

of the country:

I doubt I shall ever like Australia. [...] Australia is liberty gone senile [...] The human

life seems to me very barren: one could no more make a novel out of these people,

they haven’t got any insides to them, to write about. (Letters 246)

Nonetheless, Lawrence did write a novel which has been described as “thinly disguised

autobiography” and has set critics following clues to the relation of characters and events to

real life (Steele, Kangaroo xxiii).26 Others, perhaps more fruitfully, have shown that in the


17

meandering form of the novel, which can be exasperating and has been described as a

“smashed up novel” and an “artistic debacle” (qtd. in Radford 52), marks an experimental

mode which exemplifies a novel of ideas, in which Lawrence is intent on debating and

carrying out self-conscious conversations between characters who represent various

positions Lawrence himself was considering. Thus, while on one level we can safely assert

that Lawrence is represented by Somers, we must also take into full cognisance the

ambiguities of unstable speculative narrative perspective27 and internal critique between

characters who frequently voice Lawrence’s own opinions against him. Indeed Somers is

often portrayed humorously and ironically criticised – his wife Harriet’s jibes are especially

revealing. As the novel modulates its narrative voice and remains disjointed, fragmented

and in Michael Bell’s assessment, self-consciously relative,28 so too is Lawrence’s political

vision which is put under extreme strain in the novel.

In this vein, I would like to suggest that as a “political fable that never attains organic

wholeness” (Radford 53), Kangaroo grapples with political ideologies under the increasing

conflict between an anti-humanistic aristocratic and individualist philosophy inherited from

Nietzsche29 and a realisation that amongst modernity’s shattered traditions and its ennui,

mechanistic and materialistic alienation and loss of faith some form of new social contract

had to be constructed. Kangaroo explores this dilemma between the two poles of

democratic equality as embodied in socialism and conservative capitalism, with a vestige of

authority, but in reality compromised by shabby materialistic values. Between the rock,

Scylla, and the hard place, Charybdis, falls the mass of humanity:

So the monster of humanity, with a Scylla of an ideal of equality for the head, and a

Charybdis of industrialism and possessive conservatism for the tail howls with frenzy,

and lashes the straits till every boat goes down, that tries to make a passage.

(Kangaroo 297-298)

Whilst Richard Somers is also clearly caught in this dilemma (literally as we shall see in ‘A

Row in Town’) which forces him to choose between Kangaroo and Willie Struthers, I argue

that it is the crowd and mass politics which holds the most sway in deciding Lawrence’s

debate between right-wing proto-Fascist authoritarianism and left-wing revolutionary

Socialism. Indeed Urs Stäheli’s generalised comments on crowds are poignantly appropriate

for our understanding of Kangaroo’s political constraints:


18

The crowd, however, was not only a surrogate for a new, not yet fully fledged

democratic subject, and the concept of the crowd was not only a reactionary right-

wing polemic against the working class; crowd psychology also became a conceptual

laboratory for deliberating social processes no longer rooted in traditional relations

of power. (Stäheli 63)

It is the myth of the crowd and the Freudian leader-group bond which shed the most light

on the various ways Lawrence consistently uses the crowd, mob or group as a trope or

figure to form the basis of his rejection first of Willie Struthers and his offer of Comradeship

in the form of socialistic equality and, second, Kangaroo’s offer of a “benevolent tyranny”

based on a militaristic social order also embodying comradeship and strict value of

discipline, obedience and faith in paternalistic authority(Kangaroo 112). Yet still left with the

belief in authority, the desire for his new life form, Lawrence is left betwixt and between.

With a “restless” and increasingly “acerbic alienation” (Rylance 166), Lawrence seemed to

have no choice but to consign himself to exile, and continue to pursuing his own quasi-

religious “dark self” and “blood-consciousness” which he felt most political ideologies

ignored or perverted.

Mates, the mob-military and the masses

Portrayed with an air of aloof superiority, Richard Lovatt Somers is an embodiment of

Lawrence’s ideal of a natural aristocrat.30 Regardless of background31 (whether it is working

class in Lawrence’s own case) the singularly individual and superior figure of the natural

aristocrat stands in opposition to the machine-like morass of unthinking, unfeeling and

unresponsive humanity which is “soulless [they are] dead, and scurrying and talking in the

sleep of death” (Kangaroo 294). This opposition to the collective takes three forms in

Kangaroo. One alluring: personal friendship or ‘mateship’; another, abhorrent, the mob-

military; and, the last, an ideological extension of the second, the ‘mob-spirit’ of modern

mass democracy. All are ultimately rejected in favour of a resolute and unshakeable belief in

the individual.

Attracted by Somers’s ineffable quality of nobility and assumed gentlemanliness,32

Jack Callcott, Kangaroo and Willie Struthers court Somers’s favour and attempt to befriend

him and co-opt him into their political enterprises. On a personal level, Jack Callcott is

particularly earnest in his desire for a mate, a blood-brother with whom to trust a self-

sacrificial bond in an exclusively male domain. This relationship, modelled on his experience


19

in the army is the basis for the hierarchical structure of The Diggers a proto-Fascist club of

demobilised soldiers valorising physicality, militaristic activities and debates about current

political issues stressing Australian nationalism and identity. Clearly, Somers is being asked

to renounce his narcissistic ties to a self-sufficient individuality and also to break with an

insular love-bond – his relationship with his wife is soon ‘at sea’ as Somers wrestles with the

fellowship of men in his attempt to “send out a new shoot in the life of mankind” (69). The

strain and conflict between the homosocial world of men set against the domestic sphere of

marriage and the feminine is a major theme of the novel: Jack is a “consciously manly man”

(38) and Harriett expresses her disdain for the world of men, in particular the Australian

“[c]ommon little street-people” (68) and Callcott’s Digger’s Club as petty male power

games, a “bit of little boy’s silly showing off” (95). Thus, Callcott is the epitome of Australian

colonial physical, ‘outward’ “final manliness” (64). As such he berates Somers’s indecision as

“slow and backward like a woman” (106). Following Freud’s definition of a group, the

demand on Somers is a matter of aligning his ego in terms of an in-group all male

identification based on strength, loyalty and obedience. This aspect of Lawrence’s writing

has rightly been critiqued by feminist critics and the “phallocentric authority in both state

and home” is a pervading a “restless” and “consistently rather thoughtless [...] flirtation”

(Rylance 165-166). Apart from women, there are many other out-groups which inspire fear

and hatred for the new, embattled colonial country alone at risk in a volatile globalising

world: the immoral international financiers, or Communists or the “Japs” who would

“squash us like a soft pear” (Kangaroo 89). Here Adorno’s Freudian discussion is apt: the

unity of the group is maintained by erasure of differences within the group and

intensification of perceived differences of others outside.

In the identification between the group members, a measure of conformity and

sacrifice of individuality is necessary. Richard Lovatt Somers cannot abide this. It is the crux

of his misgivings over a tryst with Callcott and Kangaroo or a pledge of solidarity with

Struthers’s Australian Labour Movement. 33 It places Somers in a tricky position as he tries to

negotiate his desire, on one hand for fellowship, a recognition of the value in a

Whitmanesque Love of Comrades – he has yearned for a “beloved ideal of friendship [...] a

David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood-brother” (Kangaroo 106-107) – and on

the other hand, Somers’s residual and strong belief in the irreducible absolute individual

soul. His decision against the mateship is based not on class or prejudice but a deeper


20

refusal “to commit himself” and invest affection in “this mingling, this intimacy, this truly

beautiful love” (107). Rather than group with the “men in the street – ugh, horrid millions,

crawl the face of the earth like lice or ants or some other ignominy” Somers retreats into a

narcissistic cocoon: “the man by himself” or the “the central self, the isolate, absolute self”

which is man “alone in the darkness of the cavern of himself, listening to soundlessness of

inflowing fate” (280-281).

This truth is revealed to Somers by way of therapeutic digression. 34 At the centre of

the narrative, yet in a sense displaced outside the Australian narration in the form of a

closely autobiographical flashback, contaminated by affect is the bitterness and trauma

Lawrence suffered during the Great War. Lawrence uses Somers as a fictional foil and

employs in the safe space of fantasy the image of a volcano to express not only the

upwelling of political violence stoked by Kangaroo and Struthers but also the latent personal

psychic violence internalised and repressed only to erupt in Coo-ee, Australia:

[...] deep in his unconscious had lain this accumulation of black fury and fear, like a

frenzied lava quiescent in his soul. And now it had burst up: the fear, then the acute

remembrance. (261)

Closer to a psychoanalytic diagnosis of symptoms than perhaps Lawrence would admit, ‘The

Nightmare’ is Lawrence’s working through and cathartic coming to terms of his war-time

experience during which he was attacked by the press as unpatriotic, under close

surveillance and thought to be a spy, failed several humiliating conscription examinations

and constantly afraid and threatened, especially for his German wife Frieda. In a recurrence

or return of repressed, like the hysteric or neurotic suffering from reminiscence, Lawrence-

Somers recalls with acute bitterness and despair the humiliation, persecution and treatment

at the hands of the military conscription officers. Somers’s visceral and degrading

examination which for him amounts to sodomy is the very core of the trauma. As a classic

example of ‘Nachträglichkeit’, the nightmare is triggered by the intense conversation with

Kangaroo and especially his gesture to touch Somers, which is described in the language of

gothic horror to convey an overload of transferred affect and repressed excitation:

Kangaroo is “hideous”, a “great ugly idol that might strike” and he induces waves of terror

and fright as he is transmogrified into a spider-like creature (210-211).

Much can be made of this in a psychoanalytic analysis of the ambivalent feelings

towards a paternal figure; the repressed desires towards a homosocial bond; and, the fear


21

of the feminine portrayed as the ‘devouring mother’. Indeed, Charles Ferrall’s reading of the

novel as an expression of Lawrence’s troubled, wounded and fractured narcissistic

personality is insightful and complements an understanding of the tensions between group

affiliation and Lawrence’s conflicted responses to groups.35 It is important to note, however,

that Lawrence consistently employs the trope of the crowd using the accumulated

associative connotations of nineteenth century crowd psychology to express his intense

aversion and bitterness at the violation and loss of individual dignity, integrity and manhood

that the war-machine inflicted on him and especially those conscripted to fight. Thus,

Lawrence invokes all the motifs of criminality, contagious animalistic and apocalyptic natural

metaphor as well as a threatening barbarity which consumes individual values in his

description of England during 1916-1919. The country was governed by “stay-at-home

bullies” and was “possessed” by “a wave of criminal lust” during which a

man must identify himself with the criminal mob, sink his sense of truth, of justice,

and of human honour, and bay like some horrible unclean hound, bay with a loud

sound, from slavering, unclean jaws. (212)

Somers’s reaction against the war is not in line with conscientious objectors36 but against

“the whole spirit of the war, the vast mob-spirit” (213). The military and government are

consistently described using the opprobrium reserved for crowds: “Canaille! Canaglia!

Scheinerei!” (233) or as the “foul, dense, carrion-eating mob” (249). The root of the trauma

is the savage entrenchment of the group tie in Somers’s examination. Again Lawrence

describes the degrading process with references to pack mentality: the officers and medical

staff are leering and jeering animals who joke and jibe amongst themselves in an

“atmosphere of corrosive derision” which instils “the fear of the base and malignant power

of the mob-like authorities” (253, 259). Somers describes the experience as a desecration,

as being sold and it erupts in a violent outburst of rage and anger. Ultimately, for Lawrence

this becomes the catalyst for a wider pessimistic, nihilistic and misanthropic rejection of any

collective bond or Ideal:

For the idea, or ideal of Love, Self-Sacrifice, Humanity united in Love, in brotherhood,

in peace – all this is dead. (264)

Thus, Lawrence’s wilful adherence to the individual must be seen as a reaction against the

crowd. In this respect it must temper any uncompromising criticism of him as an outright

fascist, for his description and denial of the military-mob necessitates against a libidinal


22

investment in a group. Perversely, Lawrence’s insight grounded in anti-democratic antipathy

towards the mass accords with Adorno’s indictment of fascism: “Repressive egalitarianism”

or “the brotherhood of all-compromising humiliation” is the basis of fascism (Arato and

Gebhardt 131). That the “central self, the isolate, absolute self” wins out against any form of

conformist collective bond is a matter of complex related factors. I would argue that

Lawrence’s aversion to the crowd is central in its formulation; the “bulk of humankind

haven’t got any central selves. They’re all bits” (Kangaroo 280). This becomes a wider

rejection of a democratic industrial machine age which atomises and fragments the

individual into a levelled out conglomeration of mass men. Lawrence invoking almost a

century of inherited anti-democratic and anti-crowd discourse joins the invective against the

generalised notion of the mass which is variously denigrated as mindless, soulless money

worshipping automatons or lower forms of life as such as ants, bees or machines,

automatons.

In the midst of the mob

Lawrence’s most direct engagement with the politics of the crowd comes with his

‘reckoning’ with the “mass-spirit” in the chapter ‘A Row in Town’. In a novel of ‘bits’ and

mostly of conversation, the central action or event is a political meeting of Struther’s Labour

Party which devolves into a violent riot when the Diggers burst in and count the speaker out

after which chaos ensues. Lawrence precedes this scene with an extended discussion and

intervention in crowd psychology in which he makes the very same move Freud makes in his

Group Psychology: “the only way to make any study of collective psychology is to study the

isolated individual” (294). Lawrence in a typical iconoclastic fashion rejects the

contemporary study of collective psychology as “absurd”: it is merely a mechanistic,

scientific reduction of the individual soul to an “automaton working in certain automatic

ways when you touch certain springs” which are “all labelled” to form a “keyboard to the

human psyche” (294). Despite this attack on the scientific claims of crowd psychology

(psychoanalysis suffers a similar charge) and all the obscurantism and mystification endemic

to his conception of a “God-urge”, a bodily-consciousness and other idiosyncratic ideas,

Lawrence will fall into the same narrowly ideologically constricted crowd characterisations

familiar to us from a study of Le Bon.

Thus, the mob is made a mob by virtue of its “mad” refusal to understand itself or its

“God-urge”: in another animal analogy it is “like a mass of bullocks driven to frenzy by some


23

bott-fly, and charging frantically against the tents of some herdsmen, imagining that all the

evil comes out of those tents” (298). The mob is once again characterised as blind,

purposeless and lacking rationality, intelligence and higher values. The individual is also

subsumed in its force: “The mass does not act by reason. [...] the more intense or extended

the collective consciousness, the more does the truly reasonable individual consciousness

sink into abeyance” (298). Drawing on Trotter’s use of herd instinct,37 Lawrence places

heavy emphasis on communication in a crowd through a thinly disguised conflation of

animal biology (flocks of birds, whales and herds of elephants) and human anthropology.

Predictably enough mob mentality is accounted for with recourse to hypnosis or a

“collective trance”, telepathy and unconscious instinctual modes of transmission.38 The

crowd once again uses regressive faculties which are non-rational, “pre-mental” and the

“very reverse of brain power” (299) as their “consciousness is preponderantly vertebral”

(301). In a reformulation of the prestige and power of the leader who commands a hypnotic

influence, Lawrence ascribes the “magic of a leader like Napoleon” to “his power of sending

out intense vibrations, messages to his men, without the exact intermediation of mental

correspondence” (299). Like Freud, Lawrence envisages a deeper force connecting masses

beyond vibrations of a “great, non-mental oneness”(300). Lawrence formulates two: power

and love. An imbalance of either drives a mass towards the “terrible automatism” of the

“mob-state” (300-301).

Lawrence’s description of the actual violence also betrays similar tropes. After

Struthers’s long rousing speech railing against Capital, wage inequality, corruption and

extolling the virtues of work, male ‘mateship’, interspersed with xenophobic

pronouncements, the meeting is interrupted by the Diggers. Interestingly, the account

includes Somers’s reaction in the midst of the mob. Their counting out is described in

striking and forceful repetition of the phrase “like hammer-strokes on the back of the brain”

which drives Somers “clean mad” and he jumps into the “air like a lunatic” with the primal

urge to kill (314). The language of evil, possession and primitivism is used to describe the

scene and the violence erupts from the unconscious. Struthers is “like an aboriginal’s” his

face goes “demoniac” (313). The sound of the Diggers is “unbearable, a madness, tolling out

of a certain devilish cavern in the back of the men’s unconscious mind, in terrible

malignancy” (313). Somers is pulled into the frenzy yet is conflicted – driven to be part of

the violence but also “not quite carried away” (314). He is saved by a blow to the head and


24

dragged out by William James. The graphic representation of the fight scene is rendered in

one jumbled chaotic sentence which heaps together short, violent descriptive phrases and

clauses focussing on dehumanised, deindividualised and dismembered body parts tearing

one another apart: “long, naked faces gashed with blood”, “eyes demented”, “the dense

bunch of horrific life” and wrists and hands bleeding (314). In a perverse inscription of the

feminine in terms of abject dissolution,39 Somers identifies the horrific violence with a

forced and brutal childbirth (316). Jack Callcott, however, is transformed by the orgy of

violence and with “indescribably gloating joy” describes killing three men to which even

sexual pleasure cannot compare (319). With a final touch of sardonic irony the chapter

closes off with a passing journalistic allusion to an inverted primitivism: the civilised

“atavistic” white man of the crowd betrays himself to be just as violent in his

“uncontrollable desire to kill” as Brother Brown who at least attempts to control his instincts

(321).

The point here is not to contest the reality or veracity of such a description. Although

there is speculation about the precedent for an Australian event, Lawrence definitely used

his experience of similar unrest during Fascist uprisings in Italy and Europe. Nevertheless, it

is the manner of inscription and the assimilation of such a stereotypically negative

conception of the crowd which compounded and intensified Lawrence’s vilification of group

activities. The crowd or mob becomes in Lawrence’s imagination the locus for antipathy

towards the collective in general. Without any conception of a positive notion of the public

sphere, the crowd becomes a syncretic trope which is malleable to fit any ideology regarded

as a threat to sacred individuality, whether it was Fascism, Socialism, democratic

parliamentarianism, or trade unionism.

Rejection and Flight

Kangaroo and his brand of autocratic ideology is alluring and attractive to Somers. Invoking

Le Bon and Freud’s ideas on leaders, Cooley’s charm is described with notes of hypnotic,

radiating charisma which leads Somers into a tempting love for the man as a God (114).

However, Kangaroo, who is portrayed as a totemic narcissistic leader, and who, like the

primal Father or alpha male is self-sufficient, without libidinal ties – he does not need a

female mate, dominates others and exists in splendid isolation, “lone as a nail on a post”

(104) – ultimately is abhorrent to Somers as something “fatal and fixed” (104). Craving

mastery of his own individual destiny, Somers’s rejection of the Kangaroo-as-Leviathan (he


25

refuses the pitiful pleas for love from a dying Kangaroo) and his refusal to wallow in the

marsupial’s pouch/belly of group identification sees Somers’s bidding Australia Adieu and

continuing on his travels.

Somers’s flight represents Lawrence’s wider rejection of all mass politics in favour of

a passionate individualism. Such individualism was in the final analysis a double edged

sword. On one hand, it meant that Lawrence was unable to imagine “collectivist forms” and

he could not “commit himself to any political programme which is not mythically distanced,

and his ideological imagination is characteristically restless” (Rylance 172). On the other, it

was this “very individualism which divides him from the most ghastly collectivist errors and

the tyrannies embraced by too many of his contemporaries” (172).


26

1

See D H. Lawrence, Letters Vol. IV. p 277. ENDNOTES

2 See Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, Crowds p 5.

3 See Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors, 1981.

4 See Robert Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology p 67-72.

5 See Gabriel Tarde’s description in Barrows p 141.

6 See Barrows p 125-136.

7 See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason p 37-39.

8 See Nye p 61-63.

9 See Le Bon p 102.

10 This allusion to Machiavelli is commented on by many critics of Le Bon. See McClelland p 210; Barrows p

175; and Stäheli p 65. As for Le Bon’s anti-socialist politics, see Nye p 172-177. 11

See Nye p 178-179. 12

For a trenchant critique of Le Bon see Stephen Reicher’s article, “Crowds, Agency and Passion: Reconsidering the Roots of the Social Bond.” in Parkin-Gounelas, ed., The Psychology and Politics of the Collective p 67-85. 13

See Fiona Becket, “Lawrence and Psychoanalysis.” in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence p 217- 233. 14

See Robert A. Paul’s, “Freud’s Anthropology.” in The Cambridge Companion to Freud p 267-269. 15

In terms of Freudian metapsychology and the vicissitudes of the Ego and constitution of the Subject there is much to be said about the inclusion of the Other in psychic functioning and mental structure of the subject. This area informs a significant part of the ‘return to Freud’ initiated by Jean Laplanche. For Laplanche, Freudian theory exhibits a complex and contradictory oscillation between two poles which Laplanche terms the ‘Copernican’ and the ‘Ptolemaic’. See Laplanche p 52-83.

The crowd, it would seem, would be a fine example of a highly unstable concept in terms of Freudian metapsychology, exhibiting the vacillations between individual autonomy and disintegration. In one respect, the characteristic representation of crowd experiences, such as the loss of individual rationality, self -sacrificial behaviour, the seduction by a leader and unconscious automatism akin to hypnosis, make it a classic case of the eruption and disruption of the Other-alien-strangeness into the psychic economy. Indeed, much of Freud’s essay develops this with the acceptance of Le bon’s descriptions of crowds and the acceptance of hypnosis and the unconscious as effects of crowd mentality. However, much of the destabilising force of this is redirected and even suppressed in Freud’s very attempt to explain these phenomena and to translate them into psychoanalytic terms. For example, his own psychoanalytic extension discussing internalised identifications, idealisations and implicit in group dynamics which ultimately will come to rest for Freud in the internal libidinal operations of the individual, marks a recentering of the other into an intrapsychical realm. Furthermore, the opposition between socialisation of the psyche (an acceptance of the role of other) and the emergence of a new polarity in the a-social figure of narcissism which replaces the discarded binary between individual and social further recalibrates the Copernican-Ptolemaic dynamic.

So, as implicit in Mikkel Borsch-Jacobsen’s deconstruction of Group Psychology in The Freudian Subject, the phantom of narcissism returns in the figure of the Father-Chief who in his manifestation of an all- powerful, aggressive sexual domination and satisfaction of desire represents a radical expression of narcissism upon which the introjections and identifications, and as such the coherence of the self is constituted. Thus, the otherness of crowd politics is acknowledged; however, as soon as it is, it is subsumed into the internalised psychic dynamics as the autonomous and narcissistic figure of the Primal father is squeezed elsewhere into the shape of the leader whom embodies the Subject in a totalitarian relation. What is more, the establishment of this dynamic happens with recourse, again to evolutionary developmental models: first, with the reference to the ‘scientific myth of the horde’ which established for Freud a phylogenetic and racial origin for what becomes replicated in the Oedipal conflict i.e. an ontogenetic individualising formation; second, as Freud shifts the alterity of the structure and re-posits the origin of the group dynamic not from the other but in the internal libidinal urge for fulfilment of the drives which set up such identifications; and, third, as Freud returns to biological metaphors of cellular development in a ‘Ptolemaic’ attempt to recenter the subject on organic models which no doubt extend to the entire body politic. See Borch-Jacobsen The Freudian Subject p 156-160. The case, however, is made clearer in a later lecture, “The Freudian Subject: From Politics to Ethics.” when Borch-Jacobsen spells out what is described as the “totalitarian myth of the subject” more clearly:

For just as Freud, on behalf of social identifications, emphasizes the radical alteration of so-called ‘subjects’ assembled in crowds, just as he emphasizes the original character of such group psychology,


27

so does he restore, reinstitute, despite everything, the full primacy and principality of an absolute subject. (120)

16 Peter Gay has commented that it is an untidy, improvised publication (qtd. in Daniel Pick, “Freud’s ‘Group

Psychology’.” 41). 17

Jaap van Ginneken explains the political background to Group Psychology beginning with the spate of political assassinations prior to World War One and including the Archduke Franz Ferdinand as possible contexts for the themes of parricide in Totem and Taboo. See “Killing of the Father.” p 399-404. 18

Freud notes the differences and emphasises his notion of repression. See Group Psychology p 75, note 1. 19

McClelland refers to Alfred Espinas, who in a “Benthamite” and positivistic mode invented an “emotional calculus to explain the often observed mutual heating up which happens when an actor or an orator ‘electrifies’ an audience” (239). The modern corroboration of such an effect will perhaps be found in the modern discipline of neuroscience and the recent work on mirror neurones. It should not be forgotten that Freud also ultimately sought proof for his psychoanalytic model in neurology, but had to consign this hope for the future when scientific technical means had improved. 20

See Freud, Group Psychology p 90-92. 21

The following observations were made with close reference to Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s critique. See “The Freudian Subject.” p 118-122 and The Freudian Subject p 153-163. 22

McClelland shows that the account of the “psychology of the individuals could stand on its own without the phylogenetic confirmation” but Freud still inserted his “version of evolutionary anthropology”: Freud introduced “the required beat of distant tom-toms into psychoanalysis in Totem and Taboo (1913)” (257). 23

For an alternative and more tempered view see Laclau p 57-60. 24

See Dan Jacobson, “D. H. Lawrence and Modern Society.” p 87. 25

See Bruce Steele, Introduction in Kangaroo p xix. 26

Especially, see Robert Darroch, D. H. Lawrence in Australia, 1981. 27

Beatrice Monaco’s comments on Lawrence’s use of free indirect speech which amounts to “part political criticism, part aesthetic technique” and allows for “multiple points of view (difference) in a relative modern world” (144). Notably if we consider Lawrence’s texts as a ‘heteroglossia’, we can partially exonerate him from the charge of his being fascistic, and point to complexity and instability at a textual level which enacts the vacillation between rival points of view. 28

In D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Michael Bell states: “For Lawrence’s novelistic genre in this period is characterised by its consciously privileging, and problematising, the pole of relativity of thinking” (149). 29

See Eleanor H. Green “Blueprints for Utopia: The Political Ideas of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence.” 30

See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses p 71-80. 31

See D. H. Lawrence’s essay “Aristocracy.” Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine p 376. 32

See Kangaroo p 37. 33

Interestingly, one of the reasons for Somers’s rejection of Socialism is on the account that it is itself mired in a possessive, materialistic obsession with the means of production and is without a “religion”. Thus, “All this political socialism – all politics, in fact – have conspired to make money the only god” (Kangaroo 201). 34

In my interpretation I have followed closely Carl Krockel’s analysis of Kangaroo. See War Trauma and English Modernism p 140145. 35

See Charles Ferrall’s chapter ‘The Homosocial and Fascism in D.H. Lawrence.’ in Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics p 115-134. 36

Lawrence initially supported the war, then veered towards Bertrand Russell and other liberal objectors, only to fall out with Russell and the Cambridge group to follow his own idiosyncratic ideological path – what Russell would condemn as fascist authoritarianism which “came from a megalomaniac’s baulked will, a small-minded egotism and a neglect of real political problems” (Rylance 164). 37

Editor Bruce Steele notes that we are certain that Lawrence read Trotter’s Instinct of the Herd in Peace and War as he refers to the work in his letters and despite disliking it he was influenced by the book. See Steele Kangaroo p 403 note 294:20. 38

A fascinating series of references is made to the new technology of radio-telegraphy Kangaroo p 299. This connects with an emerging discourse within Modernism and technology spurred on by the Futurists and Marconi’s inventions. Lawrence is seeking a means to figure an unconscious pre-verbal mode of communication by appropriating new technology especially from the the realm of telecommunications. 39

See Scott Brewster, “Jumping Continents” where he argues that the riot “unleashes [a] feminine alterity” and the crowd becomes an “amorphous, undifferentiated, fluidly mobile body a figure of the abject” (226).

Matthew Rumbold (1152121) Modernism and Psychoanalysis Dr. Dan Katz

Bibliography

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http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/

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