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The book under review is atypical for the review section of This Journal. It is neither recent nor was it written by a psychoanalyst or for a psychoanalytically informed audience. It may never have come to the attention of the review editor were it not that the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
The book has, however, a claim on our interest since it covers the same ground that Freud dealt with in Totem and Taboo, the Schreber case, and particularly, Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego. The subject of crowd psychology has acquired greater urgency since the rise of national socialism, and more recently during the Islamic revolution in Iran. The author is justified in claiming that modern technology with its rapid communication favors bigger crowds and more dangerous leaders.
This Nobel Laureate, a Jewish intellectual who grew up in Bulgaria, England, Vienna, and Switzerland writes about the subjects enumerated without ever mentioning Freud by name. Even LeBon and McDougal are unmentioned. That this is a personal animosity is evident when Canetti cannot avoid referring to Freud's Schreber case, but resorts to a circumlocution: "… a well-known attempt to find the origins of his (Schreber's) particular illness, and of paranoia in general in repressed homosexuality" (p. 449). The author claims that the destructive power of crowds has never been explained; he fails to mention Freud's explanation based on the abdication of the personal superego to the crowd or its leader. Equally amazing is the statement (p. 203) that the psychology of seizing and incorporating, like that of eating in general, is still completely unexplained. Thus not only Freud's Totem and Taboo is ignored, but also Levi Strauss's contributions. The author quotes in extenso and uncritically accounts of travelers to foreign lands, but no social scientist.