The replacement of the crime of lynching with juridical models of criminality has enabled forgetting of its collectivity. Popular discourse about lynching seems to remember it as a hate crime in anti-racist narratives or legal execution in racist narratives. Neither substitution captures the collectivity of the crimes. The juridical language of these substitutions cannot explain the collective appeal for the bloodthirsty crowds of lynchings. Using lynching photography from James Allen's Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, my paper reconstructs the collective nature of lynching as a site for psychoanalytic and cultural analysis. Freud's articulation of the sublimated violence in social groups provides a theoretical framework for my argument.