Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

December 17, 1962. THE DREAM OF REASON: PROPAGANDA SYMBOLISM IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. E. H. Gombrich, Ph.D.

Professor Gombrich believes, with Freud, that the origin of symbolism is the individual, in contrast to those who subscribe to its origin in the personified collective. This paper includes the larger struggle which, 'stripped of its inessentials, could be called the conflict between the collectivists and the individualists'. The collectivists, who stem from Hegel and the Romantic philosophy of history, tend to personify nations, periods, and movements, and ascribe them to a kind of supermind or a superwill; the individualists, among whom the author includes himself, regard events, evolutions, revolutions, styles, and cultures as results of individual actions and reactions. This implies that all collective manifestations must finally be translatable into individual terms.

To illustrate his thesis the author has selected 'that moment in history in which the rush of collective actions is at its most dramatic', the French Revolution, 'when the pressure of events led to the breathtaking sequence of father-killing, the abolition of God, the reinstatement of religion, the rise of Napoleon, and the Romantic Nostalgia for the past'. Proceeding from Freud's allusion to the psychological significance of this episode in the The Future of An Illusion, he takes up the illusions of the period, and the substitute religion to which it gave rise, citing suggestive analogies between the symbol formations in this collective dream and the workings of the primary process in the individual's dream work. The efforts of the revolutionaries to supplant, through propaganda, the traditionally established ecclesiastic and dynastic loyalties of the people with the new abstract concepts of Reason, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity did not and could not succeed. 'We are unable to conceive of anything without images. In the most abstract analysis, in the most metaphysical speculation