WENDY BROWNSo this is the nature of the love that individual group members bear toward the leader
or idea. But what binds group members to one another? How do these individual lovers
of a distant figure or ideal become attached to one another, especially given Freud’s hy-
pothesis of primary rivalry in love? Here Freud returns to identification:a group is a
number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal
and in so doing, identify with one another in their ego. The group coheres to the extent that
individual ego ideals have been replaced or absorbed by a common object. In doing so,
the group not only shares a love object and ego ideal but becomes something of a com-
mon ego, a ‘‘common me’’ to a degree that no mere social contract could produce.^30
A group based on the collective experience of being in love with something external
to it is what engenders mutual identification rather than mutual rivalry among the lovers.
The distant (or abstract) character of the love object secures the impossibility of any group
member actually, and hence exclusively, possessing the object. The nonsexual nature of
the love both perpetuates the idealization and assures this impossibility.^31 Nonsexual love
also allows for a persistent oscillation between love of a leader and love of an ideal—the
group is bound by idealization that is at once detachable from a particular person and
sustained through a particular person. The person remains abstract and idealized because
sexual consummation, which would reduce the idealization, does not occur.
Through this rendering of love and identification as the basis of groups, Freud be-
lieves he has explained two crucial things: (1) how groups can exist at all when we are
naturally rivalrous and antisocial, that is, when we are porcupines; (2) why groups repre-
sent a regressed state of the psyche, that is, why group behavior episodically becomes mob
behavior, even among the highly educated or civilized. With regard to the first, our natu-
ral rivalry is resolved through collective identification, the mechanism of which is love for
an external object or ideal. We do not actually love each other but are bound together
through identification that is experienced as love, even as it is a way of living our love for
the unattainable object. With regard to the second, for Freud, being in love inherently
entails a certain regression, a withdrawal from the world and a loss of boundaries—a state
of abandon as well as slavishness. Moreover, being in love entails a loss of the individual
ego-ideal and of the conscience and inhibition it sustains. It is not the group as a group
that is in this condition but rather the aggregate of individuals who are each in this state
vis-a`-vis something external to the group. Collective identification of group members
with one another’s love heightens this state and also forms the basis for the group tie.
Freud’s theory of group formation is quite suggestive for thinking about nationalism,
not to mention fascism. However, we have rehearsed this story not for its explanatory
value but in order to explore its assumptions and explanations as they operate in liberal
figurations of the inherent intolerance and dangerousness of organicist societies. InGroup
Psychology, Freud masterfully articulates an ideology of the civilized, individuated subject
and pathologizes groups and group identities. Basing the group tie on the dynamics of
love and identification produces group enthrallment as a regression from rationality, con-
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