Omnipotence, or the Delusional Aspect of Ideology, in Relation to Love, Power, and Group Dynamics

We begin with the connection between omnipotence and the interplay of three social forces: love, power, and ideology. From the outset I emphasize the irrational nature of omnipotence and locate these three forces in social or interpersonal relations, because love, power, and ideology do not exist in isolation, and because psychoanalysts, due to their traditional preoccupation with the individual, have paid scant attention to Freud's sociological essays. The essays in question are Totem and Taboo (1913), Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921), misleadingly translated by Strachey as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, since mobs and masses, very much on the mind of sociologists Le Bon and McDougall, are more than groups; The Future of an Illusion (1927); and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud is much concerned in these essays with matters of love and omnipotence, much less with issues of power. Ideology became a concern for Freud when he attacked religion as an institution “distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner … by forcibly fixing [mankind] in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass delusion” (Freud, 1930, p. 85).

Due in part to historical causes, interpersonal dynamics have been repressed throughout the decades both by Freud himself and psychoanalysts that followed him in favor of intrapsychic dynamics, with the result that preponderantly monadic theories have been applied to the inherently dyadic life of persons in society (Lothane, 1984, 1997). Starting with the basic group of two of mother and child, and ending with the twosome formed by analysand and analyst, there is no escaping the fact that every act of thought or communication, whether verbal or nonverbal, is both self-directed and other-directed, both intrapsychic and interpersonal, or transpersonal, that every action is an interaction and a transaction. Before