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The devotion of the soldiers of Napoleon's armies to their Emperor has become part of legend. Devotion to duty, however, or even the operation of the instinct of self-preservation under duress are not sufficient to explain the tenacity with which the Napoleonic armies fought. Tolstoi, in his epilogue to War and Peace, seeks to explain the essence of Napoleon's power over the multitude of men comprising the Grand Army of 1812. He cannot accept the assumption that this great army was galvanized into action merely because Napoleon issued a command to make war. After a discussion of many hypotheses, he arrives at a brilliant conclusion. “If the source of power lies not in the physical or in the moral qualities of the individual who possesses it, clearly that source must lie external to the individual, and lie rather in the relation of the individual to the masses. … This relation between the commander and the commanded is what constitutes the essence of the conception which we call power.”
Analysts of Group Psychology between Tolstoi and Freud failed to emphasize the importance of the relationship between the group leader in the group, as Freud describes in his literature summary in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” In this work Freud, in one of his most important contributions to ego psychology, goes far beyond Tolstoi and Le Bon in an attempt to analyze the relationship between the group leader and the group he commands. He formulates the following hypotheses:
Groups are held together by internal libidinal ties and by external binding to the group leader.
The leader or commander-in-chief is like a father who loves all of his children equally. He must constantly maintain
this equality of the members in order to keep the external binding intact.
The tie between the group members and the group leader has its roots in identification. The ego of each group member identifies with and incorporates the leader as a new object, and replaces its previous ego ideal wit