The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
"Yes, but by the proper moral instruction I do not mean quite the same
thing that most people mean by that. It all depends on the way in which
the instruction is given. Many of these patients are the mental slaves
of convention. They have been terrified by it; its weight crushes them;
when they discover that their own impulses or behavior are in conflict
with what they regard as absolute standards, they cannot bear the shock.
They do not know how to use morality; they simply condemn themselves;
they seek reconciliation by all sorts of crazy ideas which develop into
the psychoneurosis. And the only hope there is of cure for them is
re-education. The physician, when it is not too late, often to do any
good has to become an educator."
The practice of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method is really hardly
anything more than re-education. The patient must first be led to face
the fact of himself as he really is; then he must be taught to revalue
conventional ideas in such a way that he can use these ideas as
instruments with which he may adjust himself in the various relations of
life. This process of education, in a word, is humanistic. It is
pragmatic; the patient is taught that his thinking is a way of
functioning; that ideas are instruments, ways of acting. He learns to
value these tendencies to act and to find himself through the mastery of
his own thinking.
Now we have seen that the neurosis is but one path of escape from this
conflict of self with the imperatives and abstract ideas through which
social control is exercised. The second way is to deny, unconsciously,
the true meaning of these ideas, and this, as we have seen, is
crowd-thinking. Here, as in the other case, the education which is
needed is that which acquaints the subject with the functional nature of
his own thinking, which directs his attention to results, which
dissolves the fictions into which the unconscious takes refuge, by
showing that systems of ideas have no other reality than what they do
and no other meaning than the difference which their being true makes in
actual experience somewhere.
We have previously noted the connection between the intellectualist
philosophies with their closed systems of ideas, their absolutists, and
the conscious thinking of crowds. The crowd finds these systems
ready-made and merely backs into them and hides itself like a hermit
crab in a deserted seashell. It follows that the humanist, however
social he may be, cannot be a crowd-man. He, too, will have his ideals,
but they are not made-in-advance goods which all must accept; they are
good only as they may be made good in real experience, true only when
verified in fact. To such a mind there is no unctuousness, by which
ideas may be fastened upon others without their assent. Nothing is
regarded as so final and settled that the spirit of inquiry should be
discouraged from efforts to modify and improve it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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