PSYCHOLOGY & POLITICS: Freud, fundamentalism and fear of groups

Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge
By MARK EDMUNDSON
New York TimesApr. 30, 2006...To most of us, Sigmund Freud, who was born 150 years ago next Saturday, is known chiefly as a provocative and highly controversial student of individual psychology. He is the man who theorized the unconscious and the Oedipus complex. What is less well known — and now perhaps more important — is that Freud devoted the final, and maybe most fruitful, phase of his career to reflections on culture and politics. In his later work, Freud brought forward striking ideas about the inner dynamics of political life in general and of tyranny in particular.
Freud, sick as he was during the early spring of 1938, generally refused to take any medication stronger than aspirin. He wanted to think and to write, and for that he needed to keep his mind clear. He stayed away from morphine and from liquor. But staying away from intoxicants and keeping his mind clear meant more than that to Freud. It meant staying away from religion (Freud was a lifelong atheist); it meant staying away from romantic love (Freud called it "the overestimation of the erotic object") and it meant staying away from the kind of politics embodied by the onetime street rat now traversing Vienna in his Mercedes. Why were people so potently and ruinously drawn to Hitler and to all of the other agents of collective intoxication on offer in the world? Freud believed that he knew.
At the center of Freud's work lies a fundamental perception: human beings are not generally unified creatures. .... more