Group psychology and charismatic leadership: identification, ego ideal and the surrender of singularity in groups of total adherence

Abstract

Drawing on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), this article examines the psychic mechanisms that sustain the cohesion of groups organised around a charismatic leadership figure, and the correlated reduction of individual critical capacity. The Freudian formulation is reconstituted in its own terms — the substitution of the ego ideal by a common object, the reciprocal identification that follows from it, and the libidinal economy rendering the internal bond inseparable from hostility towards the outside — and situated in relation to Le Bon's description of the crowd and to Adorno's analysis of the deliberate use of these mechanisms by authoritarian propaganda. The notion of the group of total adherence is then proposed as a conceptual construction allowing description, without imputation to determinate organisations, of the configuration in which the group bond becomes exclusive and irreversible. Finally, the contrast between this configuration and contemporary models of community leadership drawn from the field of communication is discussed, arguing that the decisive difference lies not in the intensity of the bond but in the reversibility of exit and the preservation of individual judgement.