SUBJECTS OF TOLERANCEinstinctual repression, while primitive man is a human infant, lacking individuation and
rationality. This paradox, which is distributed across the several Freudian texts mentioned
thus far, also appears in many contemporary liberal discussions of culture and tolerance.
If there is a reconciliation of the paradox in Freud, it is hinged to the very a priori status
of the individual: regressed man, unindividuated man, isn’t regressedtothe group butby
the group to a more instinctual psychic state. And his de-individuation derives not from
his relation to others but from his own instincts. He is without the independence of will
and deliberation yielded by a developed super-ego. Man in a group does not simply
merge—Freud quarrels overtly with ‘‘contagion theory’’—but bears both a shared attach-
ment to something external to the group and a shared lack, a lowered or absent super-
ego. Man in a group ceases to be directed by his own deliberation and conscience. He
ceases to be organized by free will and rationality, those two crucial features of the indi-
viduated liberal subject.
Through this lens, the brutal murders and public torching of four American civilians
by a Fallujan mob in March 2004 converge with the torture scenes orchestrated by Ameri-
can troops in Abu Ghraib revealed a month later. Both could be read as a decline of
individual deliberation, conscience, and restraint in the context of morally depraved
group enthusiasms.^21 Yet this convergence still permits a divergent assessment of the two
peoples from which the acts emerged—such that President Bush could declare the Fallu-
jan incident or the Nicholas Berg decapitation to confirm the ‘‘true nature of the enemy,’’
while insisting that the torture at Abu Ghraib did not express the ‘‘the real nature of
American women and men fighting in Iraq.’’ We shall return to this matter after we
examine the basis for the liberal conviction that group ties cancel rational deliberation
and moral conscience.
For this purpose, we need to enter the story Freud tells inGroup Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego. Freud’s commitment to a methodological and social individualism
requires that his analysis of group psychology commence with the question of how a
group is possible at all before considering why certain group formations induce or pro-
duce animal-like, passionate, and mentally defective behavior among its members. That
is, primary rivalry and atomization have to be overcome, an overcoming that can only
issue from the drive that binds humans, namely, eros. Love for another is all that can
challenge the primary narcissism generative of social hostility and rivalry. Immediately,
however, Freud cautions against imagining that the bonds of a group consist in a simple
love of group members for one another—that would be to eschew both our primary
self-regard and what Freud, borrowing from Schopenhauer, identifies as the ‘‘porcupine
problem,’’ which goes as follows. A number of porcupines, feeling cold, huddle together
in order to benefit from each other’s warmth. But in drawing close, they feel one another’s
quills and sense danger, leading them to draw apart again, but this returns them to suffer-
ing from the cold. The repetition of this movement, in which ‘‘they were driven backwards
and forwards from one trouble to the other,’’ produces for Freud a metaphor of human
PAGE 305305.................16224$ CH15 10-13-06 12:35:32 PS