impulses which a group obeys may according to circumstances be generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but they are always so imperious that no personal interest, not even that of self-preservation, can make itself felt (p. 41). Nothing about it is premeditated. Though it may desire things passionately, yet this is never so for long, for it is incapable of perseverance. It cannot tolerate any delay between its desire and the fulfilment of what it desires. It has a sense of omnipotence; the notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a group.[1]
A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function [Instanz][2] The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated. So that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.[3]
- ↑ Compare Totem und Tabu, III., 'Animismus, Magie, und Allmacht der Gedanken.' [Totem and Taboo. New York, Moffat, 1918. London, Kegan Paul, 1919.]
- ↑ [See footnote p. 69.]
- ↑ In the interpretation of dreams, to which, indeed, we owe our best knowledge of unconscious mental life, we follow a technical rule of disregarding doubt and uncertainty in the narrative
