Instincts of the Herd in Peace and WarTrotter, W. (Wilfred)
Science
Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War
Trotter, W. (Wilfred)
Collective behavior; Crowds; Social psychology; World War, 1914-1918 -- Psychological aspects
To the biologist perhaps the most striking characteristic of the
work of this school is its complete acceptance of what one may call
the human point of view. It seems to be satisfied that no useful
contribution to psychology is to be obtained outside the limits of
human feeling and behaviour, and to feel no impatience to expand its
inquiries into a still larger field. It is not that the school has
failed to show an extremely vigorous movement of expansion. Beginning
as a mere province of medicine, and while its foothold there was
still far from general recognition, it invaded the regions of general
psychology, of æsthetics, ethnology, the study of folklore and myth,
and indeed of all matters in which it could find its essential
material—the records of human feeling and conduct. Beyond the human
species it has shown remarkably little of this aggressive spirit, and
it seems to feel no need of bringing its principles into relation with
what little is known of the mental activities of the non-human animals.
The absence of any strong pressure in the direction of establishing a
correlation of all mental phenomena, whether human or not, is not a
matter of merely theoretical interest. The actual practical success to
be obtained to-day in such an attempt might possibly be insignificant
and yet of great value in moulding the whole attitude of mind of the
investigator towards matters lying wholly within the sphere of human
psychology. However much one may be impressed by the greatness of
the edifice which Freud has built up and by the soundness of {78}
his architecture, one can scarcely fail, on coming into it from the
bracing atmosphere of the biological sciences, to be oppressed by the
odour of humanity with which it is pervaded. One finds everywhere a
tendency to the acceptance of human standards and even sometimes of
human pretensions which cannot fail to produce a certain uneasiness
as to the validity, if not of his doctrines, at any rate of the forms
in which they are expounded. The quality I am trying to describe is
extremely difficult to express in concrete terms without exaggeration
or distortion. To those who have approached Freud’s work solely by
the path of medicine the idea that it can give any one the feeling of
a certain conventionality of standard and outlook and of a certain
over-estimation of the objectivity of man’s moral values will seem
perhaps merely absurd. That this is an impression which I have not been
able altogether to escape I record with a good deal of hesitation and
diffidence and without any wish to lay stress upon it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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