SUBJECTS OF TOLERANCEscience, and impulse control. The group is dangerous for having these qualities and also
signifies a literal undoing of the individuated subject, who must be, in Freud’s words,
‘‘conquered’’ by the requirements of civilization.^32
While Freud elsewhere links civilization, instinctual repression, and maturity at both
the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, only inGroup Psychologydoes he elaborate the
politico-theoretical implications of these relatively conventional metonymies: organicist
societies are inherently less civilized than liberal individualistic ones because nonindividu-
ation signals a libidinally charged psychic economy, which constrains rational deliberation
and impulse control. This renders individuation both an effect and a sign of instinctual
repression, conscience, and the capacity for self-regulation. It renders groups inherently
dangerous because of the de-repressed human condition they represent—the psychic state
of urgency, unbridled passion, credulousness, impulsiveness, irritability, impulsiveness,
extremism, and submissiveness to authority that Freud, drawing on Le Bon and McDou-
gall, takes to be characteristic of the group.^33
Freud also defines organicist societies as problematic because in them love operates
in the public or social realms, instead of being (properly) confined to the private and
familial ones. Such societies represent the dangerousness of public ardor and signify the
importance of containing love in the domestic domain for civilization to produce the
rationality and individuation that is its mark.^34 If love civilized is love domesticated, then
ardent attachments of any sort—to a God, a belief system, a people, or a culture—must
remain private and depoliticized if they are not to endanger civilization and the autono-
mous individual who signifies a civilized state. Culture is thus dangerous if it is public
rather than private, a formulation that is significant in distinguishing liberal from nonlib-
eral states, and even more so, ‘‘free’’ societies from ‘‘fundamentalist’’ ones. What is
achieved by starting with the egoistic individual who then (consequentially and detrimen-
tally) sacrifices his individuality as a member of the group is the valorization of the liberal
individual as a rational, self-regulating subject, and hence as a modestly free subject. This
becomes especially clear if we remember that Freud’s pathologization of the group per-
tains not just to its crude and dangerous behavior but also to its enthrallment, its constitu-
tion through domination: ‘‘It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters.’’^35
If what holds a group together is slavish devotion to something external to it, and if such
devotion incites the naturally egoistic subject to give up a significant part of its individual-
ity, then Freud has succeeded in defining group belonging as the inherent sacrifice of
individual freedom (rooted in deliberation, self-direction, and conscience) on the altar of
love for that which dominates it. Strong social bonds arise only and always as an effect of
domination and as a sign of dangerous regression to a de-individuated and hence de-
repressed state.
Above all, Freud has made organicist societies signify a condition in which subjects
are less conscience-bound and civilized than the mature individual and less individualized
becausethey are less conscience-bound, that is, because their ego ideals are conferred on
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