This paper was originally presented at the 35th International Congress, July7 1987, Montreal, Canada, and appeared in the Int. J. Psycho-Anal (1988) 69:171-178. I am grateful for being able to re-publish it with some alterations to bring the ideas up-to-date, as of 1997. The paper considers the effects of Folk Philosophies on personal actions -- and the effects of enormous changes in the global economy. In particular, the crises produced by extreme changes in the availability of information because of the global uses of computers. There is danger of a lag in the capacity to archive and access this glut of information. The argument in this paper is that all of these developments can play a part in the global system becoming unstable, in a way comparable to "state changes" observed by physicists and mathematicians (a simple example is the sudden changes of H20 between ice, water, and water-vapor). There are many examples of such violent changes in nature when there are sudden "jumps" from one phase to another that are not usually understood nearly as well as state changes of water. The movement toward or away from these state changes approaches or moves away from near chaotic conditions. These ideas are related to my paper on Deterministic chaos and the sciences of complexity, vs93a., which investigates them in much more detail.

Arriving (perhaps safely, perhaps not) toward the last years of the twentieth century, people are thankful but acutely aware that the world is still a dangerous place. And we can't help but remember what history has taught us -- including the unraveling of the old Graeco-Roman-Jewish-Christian folk philosophies. These folk philosophies helped us believe, at least unconsciously, that there was rational sense in the world. In fact our view of the world was in part made up by these informal philosophies. The various ideologies some of us once followed were surface products of these same systems of belief.

Folk philosophies are constituted by shared, mostly unconscious systems of rules-- in the formal sense of rule theory (Spruiell, 1983a, 1984). They pertain to everyday wisdom ('what everyone knows'), the taboos in al cultures opposition to murder, incest, thievery, etc.), a sense of history (at least minimal familiarity with the great thoughts of the past), assumptions about nature (abstractions in which confidence has been placed generally and which has grown out of magic into what scientists and their followers believe at any particular time), and moral and ethical presumptions. Freud liked to quote F.T.Vischer's epigram, 'What is moral is self-evident').

Together, these assumptions and presumptions make up a large part of the matrix of the representations of the external world within our minds. They play a part in all our mental acts--thoughts, feelings, and behavior. And they join to influence group behavior, in small groups and even in the well-led masses. They affect not only the lives of the body and intimacies of the family and ordinary civilized behavior outside the family, they even influence the selection of abstract ideas which at any one time are found acceptable and which thus prevail in the highest intellectual, scientific and governmental circles.

If shared by enough people they give a certain base-level of signals which affirm that we indeed belong to other people and are mostly sane. To say this in a different way, folk philosophies are the proscriptive and prescriptive shared systems of rules which govern what is ordinarily considered to be realistic, moral, and appropriate, and what is equally ordinarily considered not to be. Shared and hardly noticed rules determine ranges of taboos and ideals from the naughty to the hideous, from socially appropriate to the admirable and beautiful.

But among contemporary semi-literate and even literate people in the West, the old, overriding folk philosophies have disintegrated and their places taken in the minds of too many people by fragmented, primitive, and dangerously aggressive belief systems--cults. Spell-bound true believers chant their slogans, led by real or imagined heroes--putative demigods created by circumstances or by their own ruthless ingenuity. A dangerous proportion of the best-educated Western young people have dissociated themselves from their cultural histories and have chosen perversions of individual freedom that amount to slothful license--not even respectable anarchy. They eschew all values except hatred of the values of even the most benign and rationally-based authority. They want their murdered fathers to care for them.

That in nexus of historical reasons for the growth, dynamics, and disintegration of folk philosophies is spectacularly complex. Its parts might be grouped into scientific, economic, technological, marketing, political, demographic, communicational, artistic, and even philosophical forces, wadded into a tangle of mutual influences. Only a fool are a genius would try to disentangle them.

The focus here will not be on causes but results. Only two aspects of the whole transitional group psychological picture which have causal effects will be singled out. One will be attention to the dynamics of us small rather than a large group -- ourselves, psychoanalysts who make up the group, Psychoanalysis. The other focus has to do with the simultaneous explosion of semi-literacy and a parallel explosion of an almost unbelievably large amount of raw data -- available to ordinary people. This raw data is sometimes misidentified as "knowledge'' or at least "information."

Sane individuals who are non-hermits are involved in reverberating systems with their groups. Changes in the content and the stability and intensity of particular elements of folk philosophies support or fail to support individual unconscious fantasies. The reiterated effects of individual fantasies, in turn, affect the groups. If shared by enough people, old standards, principles, and conventions are supported or new versions are created. They all have to do with shared assumptions about accepted realities. These group standards in turn play back powerfully upon the individual's perceptions and -- more important -- the relative stability of the constructed world. World views are partly derived from internalizations out of the deepest past, partly from what the person senses about him, and partly from what peers believe or claim to believe are truths. Motives derived from perceptions and constructions of external reality interdigitate with the other great sets of intrapsychic motivations which underlie every personal psychic act, from interests of the id, ego, and superego, and the constructions of the perceptual systems.

 II

We are in the midst of a revolution that may be greater than any yet known. The danger, short of total destruction, would come in the form of crowds and mobs which have lost their differentiation and are ready to follow in any brutish impulse without guilt. No longer made up of integrated sub-groups, crowds-gone-to-mob's are led by calculating manipulators or madman screaming crazy ideologies. That is a fear somewhat confirmed by the daily news. The hope, on the than other hand, is that a new folk philosophy may come to be accepted the which is not based on the magical charms of religion are other "True Beliefs", but only reason and committed acceptance of the inner and group needs of human beings.

I don't want to idealize the past. A little while ago life in the Western world even among the middle and upper classes was apt to be short and hard. Physical suffering in ways impossible for most of us to imagine was ordinary and unavoidable. And the measurable psychic byproducts of the old ways were reflected in the existence of particularly labeled social deviants -- some of them later to be called psychoneurotic or psychotic. But these deviations, however internally painful, were not in the past necessarily expressions of disillusion. That is not so now.

The present is not fit for idealization and either. There is longer life for the lucky -- nested in this sticks of magical toys, the feathers of useless grandiose objects, packed in styrofoam. Such lives are apt to be numb; rather than pain they experience emptiness. The inevitable contemporary psychic byproducts may not be neurotic suffering at all. Many people are unable to suffer. The horrifying byproducts of our contemporary warring, fanatic and incompatible cults are not necessarily physically or psychically painful for the individual cult members themselves as they are for other people -- their objects. Contemporary psychopathology tends toward anomie or impulsivity, overt perversions and character perversions among the elite -- sometimes asceticism -- and paranoia among the leaders. Put another way, the detritus of 20th-century personal psychopathology consists largely of the benumbed rather than the neurotic or the borderline. But rather than label our present culture from secondary features, i.e., 'An Age of Narcissism', it would be better to call it an age of disorganization disguised by technical organization, disillusionment, and destruction. 

III 

What a vast subject! A private belief, no matter its fervency, is not an ideology. An ideology consists of shared overt beliefs, capable of being expressed by slogans, usually manifested and enunciated by a living our imaginary leader. The words, crowd, group, mass, and mob, do overlap, but are hardly synonyms. Are there nevertheless qualitative identities among them? This essay is part of a discussion whose purview includes the psychology of these entities -- if they are entities. But it is difficult to talk about them: accurate translations are difficult even amongst the various languages of the Western world. 

Moscovici's (1985) treatise, The Age of the Crowd, summarizes work begun by le-Bon, Tarde, Freud, and continues it. I am impressed by that work -- and frightened by it. But I'm not sure that it covers some other important though less immediately terrifying group and ideological effects of this age. That is, can Moscovici's formulations be used to understand groups which develop ideologies which are not necessarily insane, brutal, totalitarian, and destructive? Gloomy as his diagnoses are, he does mention that collective activities are responsible for some of the most admirable works of man. Rather than repeat his ideas, I shall attend to other features of group life along with the resulting ideologies -- and their contemporary breakdowns. 

Freud made promising beginnings toward a group or interactional psychology, but the promises have hardly been realized. Nevertheless, the beginnings hold validity. I do want to mention that in 1921 Freud meant group psychology to apply to followers. Individual psychology, at that time, applied to the very different actual psyches of actual leaders.

To sketch Freud's distinction at that time: Followers observed the rules of the hive or the herd -- or like bad children are deviants who can either expiate their sins under the gaze of forgiving or punishing leaders or be eliminated in one way or another. Each good follower craves the love or at least the tolerance of the leader and tries to maintain the illusion that he fairly has it. The primary access to that love is submission to the rules, including ad hoc rules imposed by the leader. For group psychology only one side of ambivalence makes easy appearance at one time: love and safety during stability; murderous hatred and fear during instability. 

The Leader loves none of his followers. He loves only himself. But as long as leadership is preserved the illusion is supported that in his person are pooled the functions of collective ego ideals -- prescriptive rules for actions -- and its collective prohibitory rules -- proscriptive rules for the limits of permissible behavior. As Freud also remarked, the leader also usually needs some powers of coercion (1927, p. 8). And most actual leaders of groups which are too large for personal relationships assume that they themselves have a right to ignore rules, or make up special ones that apply only to themselves. Warriors, shamans, physicians, clowns, and fools have selective rights to break rules which apply the others, but leaders do not like to be restricted in any way. If successful, such people are dubbed heroes, or at least shivered before as tyrants. But when leaders are deposed, or pretenders merely presume for themselves these rights of specialness, we call them criminals, or psychopaths, or narcissists.

Freud made only elliptical remarks later about be "individual" psychology of leaders -- although he did once claim that to be one was one of the few routes to happiness. But in the remainder of his work, he usually did not maintain these intrapsychic distinctions between followers and leaders. In any event, there is no such thing as a leader without his real or imaginary group. Without a group of followers person may be a candidate are pretended with no leader. Most of the time Freud used one and only one psychology -- to be applied to individuals and collections of them. In fact, for Freud sociology amounts to applied psychology, i.e., applied psychoanalysis. 

IV 

Without ignoring the mass, mobs, crowds, the rationality of stampede in groups, the tawdriness of most group products, the silliness of so many formal religions, the munching herds and a buzzing hives -- without dismissing these mournful realities -- there are some creative group products. The stonemason's cathedrals, the ephemeral jive session of a small band, the American Constitution's framers, the film made by a team, the fundamentally new understandings uncovered by small groups of scientists producing something new -- all or examples of group creativity. (And so, the some extent, is a completed individual psychoanalytic treatment). And these are exquisite group actions which celebrate past creations. Think only of a symphony orchestra conjuring the avatar of a Beethoven fantasy out of the grave. And think of the activities of the activities of groups within the scientific tradition who maintain and enlarge older creations.

Worth considering are small subgroups which are reasonably well functioning and which operate under the aegis of national and international groups which are reasonably free -- not ideologically dominated. Psychoanalysis, for example, logically relates to other disciplines concerned with humans in relatively small groups. And psychoanalysis is a particularly interesting case because, (1) there can be a psychoanalytic sociology and a psychoanalytic anthropology, (2) there can be and someday will be a sociology and anthropology of psychoanalysis (Figueira, 1983). In fact, a promising new book by the sociologist, Robert Bocock (1983), is one example among many of the swing of the pendulum back in the direction of the inclusion of psychoanalysis in interdisciplinary communications. And Richard Whitley's (1984) dispassionate analyses of the structures of scientific disciplines avoids judgments of the relative value of the end-products but meticulously examines work products, reputational systems, relations with other disciplines, etc.; the work creates a typology of sciences. Kuhn (1977) and others have also attended to the nature of the structures we call scientific systems.

From time to time we need to remind ourselves of something familiar to us, but not to enough other people: psychoanalysis knows more about the inner workings of human minds than any discipline. It is obvious that what is known developmentally about the mind and most private interactions of humans bears relevance to these adjacent fields. But attention here will be directed to the second question already raised: what can be learned about studying psychoanalysis as a group system in itself (Spruiell, 1983; vs83b)? If the analogy isn't stretch and stretched too far, parallels may be found in the smaller system, psychoanalysis, and the larger cultural systems within which it is nested.

Even in groups such as our own, Freud's formulation about group psychology holds. To some extent, the members of a group have surrendered their individual ego ideals to that of the collective, as manifested by an actual leader who functions as a seemingly autonomous agent. Or the Leader is manifested symbolically; roles are played by office-holders. The frames of mind of members of such groups to some extent, at some times, resemble hypnotic states. The Leader, real or symbolized, becomes an epiphany, a living emblem of the structures of the soul. To be good is to be a good soldier is to be loved by the Leader and one's fellow brothers and sisters. To fail is to be cast out of heaven.

But Freud had many more things to say about interactional phenomena: the absolute necessity for order and regulation of the relationships among people: justice, "the first requisite ... the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favor of an individual' authority and its alterations; the replacement of the power of the individual by the power of the community which 'constitutes the decisive step of civilization" (Freud, 1927, p. 95). And references to morality and group life are scattered throughout his papers and books on social theory.

Central for any intellectual cohort are the interdisciplinary matrices: the shared fundamental assumptions, techniques and agreed-upon problems which a discipline like psychoanalysis can undertake; the control systems : especially the importance of students and schools; the attention to regulation of standards; control of access to publications; the obvious hierarchical arrangements of authority and systems of placing or removing individuals from the various levels. As yet, the applications of a truly psychoanalytic interactional psychology have hardly begun (Spruiell, Clinical aspects of character, vs83a; Thinking blind, vs83b).

Psychoanalysis was first a creation and an organizational construction of one man and it is hard to imagine it having been otherwise. Since anybody could call himself a psychoanalyst, it was especially difficult to define its boundaries so that it could distinguish itself from other theories of the mind and healing enterprises. An absolute arbiter was absolutely necessary. The revolutionary nature of our field made it relatively unwelcome both to organized medicine and twentieth-century universities -- to speak of totalitarian governments. Yet it has remained the only viable system for group investigations of the inner functions of individual minds.

It is remarkable that psychoanalysis as a small group was able to make the transition Freud called the greatest metamorphosis a culture at large can achieve: the move from the ling Leader, the Father, to a more impersonalized system governing the relations of men. It is also instructive to note that there was a transitional period during Freud's extreme old age and the years immediately following his death. It was marked by extreme turbulence within organized psychoanalysis. Then a variety of quite incompatible 'schools' of psychoanalysis threatened mainstream analysis as Jung's and Adler's never had. These 'schools' were really ideological systems -- belief systems. The after-shocks, in the form of evanescent part-theories, have continued (See Kuhn's 'Paradigm and psychoanalysis,' vs93c.

It is for these reasons that world mainstream psychoanalysis has struggled so hard to maintain its cohesiveness and coherence -- to define its absolute boundaries, fundamental assumptions such as the existence of the dynamic unconscious, and validated sets of data such as the existence and development of childhood sexuality; yet not to define secondary theories so systematically that they become ideologies or leave them so generalized they become empty words -- jargon -- or simply grave-markers of lost older ideologies.

An unending task! Psychoanalysis has had to concentrate on its standards, its schools, its publications. (It has not however been able to do much for its public relations.) But it has maintained its organizational structure and has remained an open system, operating in a scientifically informed and aimed fashion, which still constantly examining itself critically. Some observers do not believe we have succeeded well; I believe we have succeeded astonishingly well in transcending the everlasting temptations to become a set of ideologies -- belief systems.

Older analysts have experienced the swings. When stable conditions exist, there is order. When conditions are too stable, one kind of regression is encouraged: not only infantile compliance of followers but also wooden-headedness of leaders; like the apparent states accompanying reliable and reliably reinforced early latency superego formations. These conditions when overly strong support clinical psychoneuroses and neurotic character traits among analysts too. Rigid groups do not favor innovations. There is no doubt that such groups favor states of heightened suggestibility in their members. The suggestion is apt to be, 'don't rock the boat'. Neurotic conditions of repression, conformity, compliance, and blind belief are favored. And in the midst of these states, there is no doubt that some leaders and smaller groups have attempted to fill the vacuum of authority left by the death of Freud. Fortunately, in recent years there has seemed to be a healthy resistance to these formalizing, scholastic trends.

On the other hand, if psychoanalysis become too flexible it can drift toward the other pole of maximum indiscipline, infantile pseudo-freedom, disorder, the tempests of anarchy. Too often, as Freud (1921, p. 97) wrote, the destruction of leaders leads from discontent to group panic -- and, one might add, to the terrorism made possible by the existence of terror. At this extreme, a quite different kind of regression occurs, manifested in several ways: impulsivity; acute inclinations toward frivolous suggestibility; traumatic states; magic restitutions, the demonstration of the ease with which the superego may be 'dissolved' -- better said, regressed to the dominance of unstable precursors of conscience and ideals. In short a drift takes place toward perversions of realities and perversion of standards.

When they exist, these regressed, disturbed internal conditions seem to be chronically confirmed by unstable external systems of authority. Cults and conversions to 'true beliefs' spread contagiously and outrageously. Charismatic healers are found and temporarily achieve magical results. But their churches are built on sand because the need for reliable foundations is simply denied.

But all things considered, psychoanalysis has maintained its composure, and should look to itself to discover its own epistemological and scientific rationales. Putative inventors of new 'paradigms' (a terribly misused word!) come and go.

And where are our competitors?

This little sketch of psychoanalysis, short as it is, goes beyond a 'laundry list' of ambiguous words. It poses narrow and broad questions. If the narrow ones are addressed, at least a program to close the gap between psychoanalysis and sociology might begin to turn into an interface. We have a sketch of a program to establish an interactional psychology truly compatible with standards intrapsychic psychology. Perhaps even Freud's belief that there is only one psychology of the operations of individual minds internal and among each other can be reinstituted -- revived. And if the broader questions are addressed, new insights into the larger questions of crowds, masses, and ideologies may stretch our minds.

A tangle of historical forces has led to the present transitional or terminal period. One result with reverberating causal effects has been the explosion of shareable data and pseudo-data. With increasing technological organization, electronic methods of communication have spread. Simultaneously there has been a growth of the minimal literacy necessary to create good consumers. Simultaneously too, higher educational values have been denigrated in comparison to technical and specialty training. All this has accompanied an accelerating breakdown of the self-governing capacities of the masses of the West. Tyrants have the advanced technology to become precisely monstrous. More disguised systems of control have led to the abrogation or perversion

The effects have replaced the old systems which governed transmission of information to elite individuals but restrained that availability to the masses. Now there is a mounting availability of mountains of raw data -- much of it incorrect and by means to be taken at face value. This data is usually without context, without connections. Nobody has sufficient time even if he had reliable ways to distinguish valid from invalid 'information'. The world -- meaning that part of it which has more to do than endure silently or shout slogans -- is like a cow who has broken into the feed barn; with limitless food, her belly stretches to explosion and she still chokes down indigestible data and pseudo-data.

Unexamined data is increasing exponentially, not knowledge, not reliable and thus reasonably valid information, certainly not what might be called wisdom. To the contrary, the great questions having to do with human interests -- what best approaches truth, the beautiful, and the good -- questions that have preoccupied thinkers in the West since the Greeks, have become despised: now all that is valid is what certified scientist can allow themselves to become interested in scientifically -- and that is what takes up most space and is most available for computer searches the memory banks which seem to be inevitably replacing libraries. One part and only one part, of natural science is preserved as an approach to truth; the rest is thrown out with moral philosophy as so much slop.

As I stressed, the problems with data are only one part -- and probably a minor part -- of what may be our breakdown but more hopefully might be our transitional period. The fragmentation of knowledge and the dismissal of whole areas of human interest are more important than problems of storage and retrieval. Consider some of the things that have happened in the twentieth century: Nowadays the old systems for 'understand' causes, mistaken but efficient for their times, are largely gone. We are faced not only with general uncertainties about causal meanings, about ontology itself, especially about epistemology, we are more urgently than ever confronted with an old philosophical dilemma: on the one had we still believe guilt and responsibility within the individual, on the other that guilt and responsibility are collectivized and spread out infinitely -- or fragmented. We are no longer sure that there is any such thing as an individual. Guilt can be as dead as God. We can claim that responsibility is only an illusion.

Many of us welcome the possibilities of liberation from the old magical folk philosophies and ideologies. We hope for a more rational and humane philosophy of the future, although the 'humane' problem, the problem of who a rational system of ethics might develop, remains stupefyingly difficult (Williams, 1985). Psychoanalysis is an island of hope.

Our world is in a period of great changes; we do not know whether the changes will be wonderful or horrible, or anywhere in between. We need all the information about our world possible for us to assimilate; at the same time, we need some guides that will help us find our ways through the information and the pseudo-information -- yet we hope not to become more bound to our particular intellectual disciplines than we already are. Even the brightest and best educated of contemporary American students are too often appallingly ignorant of the world about them, its past, and its chancy future. They are now free, supposedly free -- but free to do what? Free to become enlightened -- possibly. But also free to become crowds of fanatics or rootless mobs. The destruction during the twentieth century of not only formed religions but the deeper general folk philosophy has also destroyed confidence in external reality -- what's what, and morality. What's evil. And authority. And consequences.

But Freud, that pessimist, reassured the still pious and the merely worried souls like us in this way: 'We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance. And from it one can derive yet other hopes. The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one. It will presumably set itself the same aims as those whose realization you expect from your [traditional] God (of course within human limits -- so far as external reality [Ananke: the God Necessity] allows it), namely the love of man and decrease of suffering ... We desire the same things ... Our God [Logos: Reason], will fulfil whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new generation of men' (Freud, 1927, pp. 53-54).

How optimistic can a sensible person be? It is only to be remembered that for Freud, the study of reason and necessity -- rationality -- constituted 'science'. He admired Goethe more than Bacon or Mill. While he idealized his own vision of science -- and it was the only replacement for a Weltanschauung that he could imagine -- he did not believe that the only things that exist are measurable things. He could have taken the restrictions on the meaning of science promulgated by some contemporary historians and philosophers of science seriously, much less the scientific posturings of many so-called behavioral scientists. 

SUMMARY

Folk philosophies are constituted by shared, mostly unconscious systems of rules -- in the formal sense of rule theory. In the West, there has been a breakdown in the folk philosophies which define reality for most people. Disruption creates disorganization and regression of fragmented groups to more primitive forms, fueled by magic and authoritarian leaders. Psychoanalysis is a sub-group which can serve as an exemplar for both small and large groups. Freedom from the magical and value-ridden 'realities' of the past poses the danger of license but the opportunity that more rational systems may emerge. If managed successfully, such systems may help replace an older and no longer viable folk philosophy with forms which are more rational and humane. The essay also considers the new technical means to store and make data accessible. The danger is accumulation of mountains of undigested data, unevaluated and out of context -- often misunderstood as 'information'. But the opportunities lie in the possibilities to develop new epistemologies.

REFERENCES 

Gocock, R. (1983). Sigmund Freud. Chichester & London: Ellis Horwood Ltd. & Tavistock Publications Ltd.

Figuera, S. (1983). Review of Sigmund Freud by Robert Bocock. Int. Rev. Psychoanaly., 10: 476-482. 

Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. S.E. 18.

------------ (1927). The future of an illusion. S.E. 21.

Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific tradition and Change. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.

Moscovici, S. (1985). The Age of the Crowd.

Spruiell, V. (1983a). The rules and frames of the psychoanalytic situation. Psychoanal. Q. 52: 1-33.

--------------- (1983b). Kuhn's 'paradigm' and psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Q. 52: 253-363.

--------------- (1984). An analyst at work. Int. J. Psychoanal., 65: 13-30.

Whitley, R. (1984). The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences. London: Clarendon Press.

Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.