Nov 5, 2022 Live Zoom

Freud’s 1921 Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse appeared in English the following year as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. This English title unfortunately has obscured for many readers the relation between it and Reich’s 1933 Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, in English, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The connections between these two books go far beyond the title. Both works are attempts to comprehend historical disasters from the standpoint of psychoanalytic libido theory. Freud, facing the wreckage that the first world war brought upon Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, sought to understand the irrational forces that led to orgies of mass destruction in the name of honor and country. For Reich, the catalyst of his analysis was the need to understand why many German workers gave their preference to the Nazi party over the leftist parties in the elections of 1932 that led to Hitler’s appointment to Chancellor in January 1933 and the subsequent repressive laws and actions that year. Freud’s study discussed previous attempts to understand mass psychology; he particularly he criticized the failure of his predecessors to fathom the dynamic role of “the leader” in mass movements. Reich followed him in this regard by offering an analysis why Hitler was an attractive figure for millions of Germans. Reich’s status, however, as one of the great renegades of the psychoanalytic movement has led to a neglect on the part of scholars of the psychoanalytic movement to study their mass psychologies in tandem. The present paper attempts to remedy this lack and focusses on how Reich’s work extends Freud’s reflections on the leader and the libidinal components of mass psychology, with a view toward appreciating how fruitfully he went beyond Freud’s largely abstract psychoanalytic framing of the problem to reveal how sexual and economic oppression give rise to the emotional plague of fascism and its destructive consequences.

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Stephen A. Cooper is a student of the spiritual traditions of self-formation that developed in late antiquity as a synthesis of Greek, Roman, and Christian philosophical cultures. As a student at Hampshire College, Stephen drank deeply at the fountains of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theory, including Wilhelm Reich. Convinced that the dominant mechanistic worldview of the modern West has led to a distorted understanding of human nature, he immersed himself in the study of ancient philosophy and myth. He received his Ph.D from Columbia University in Religion in 1993 and teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. His courses cover topics from the history of Christianity, ancient philosophy, and psychology of religion, and he has scholarly publications on Platonist-Christian thinkers of the Roman empire. He most recent book is a volume of essays co-edited with Václav Němec, The Philosophy, Theology, and Rhetoric of Marius Victorinus (Society of Biblical Literature, 2022).