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On considering the development of the sciences as a whole, it is repeatedly forced upon one that progress in a straight line usually leads rapidly to a dead stop, so that further advance can only be made successfully from some other, often quite unexpected or unlikely, point of departure. I was able to demonstrate so universally surprising a fact on a previous occasion, when I had to consider Freud's Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, a purely psychological piece of research, as an important advance in biology, that is, in a physical science discipline, an advance that biology would never have achieved by its own efforts. This 'utraquismus' of a real politics of science, as I should like to call it, is maintained not only in the striking contrast of the objective (physical sciences) and subjective (psychological) methods of knowledge, but also within the limits of psychology itself. We had hardly soothed ourselves with the assumption that individual psychological psycho-analytical facts are the essentials, the 'application' of which would solve the more complex manifestations of the group mind (art, religion, myth-formation, etc.), when already Freud's newly published work on Group Psychology destroys the certainty of this assumption: on the contrary, it shows us that research into the processes of group psychology can solve important problems of individual psychology. In the following I shall emphasize the most important advances that the normal and pathological psychology of the individual owes to Freud's dissection of the group mind.
The author puts aside the idea, usually mechanically adopted by all writers, that mass manifestations only occur in a 'crowd', that is, in a circle of a large number of individuals. Rather he establishes the fact that the same affective and intellectual manifestations may equally well