Le Bon, Gustave (1841-1931)

LE BON, GUSTAVE (1841-1931)

Gustave Le Bon, a French physician and philosopher, was born in 1841 in Nogent-le-Rotrou and died on December 24, 1931, in Paris. Le Bon's name has for years been associated with The Crowd (1895/1995), which made him one of the founders of group psychology. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the book's phenomenal success—it has been translated into several languages and was reprinted many times—Le Bon has been disparaged and misunderstood by the scientific community. He has been reproached for the summary, polemical, even reactionary nature of his analysis. A prophet and harsh critic of mass society, he ushered in the "age of the crowd," "the most recent sovereign of the modern age."

The son of a civil servant, this country doctor developed an early interest in anthropology, then sociology and psychology. A tireless worker, he made a living as a writer and editor. Although he was never an academic, he was well known, much more so than someone like Emile Durkheim. Government officials, writers and scientists attended his "lunches": Théodule Ribot, Bergson, Valéry, Henri and Raymond Poincaré, Aristide Briand, and Marie Bonaparte, who introduced him to the work of Sigmund Freud and who remained Le Bon's friend until his death.

In 1902, Le Bon began editing a collection of scientific works for Flammarion, the "Bibliothèque de philosophie scientifique," intended for the lay reader. The series had considerable success. He published the majority of his own writings as part of the collection, as well as Henri Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse and Marie Bonaparte's Guerres militaires et Guerres sociales.

Taine's influence on Le Bon was considerable, but so was that of Ribot and Charcot. All of Le Bon's work bears the mark of the intellectual climate of fin-de-siècle France: an attraction to the irrational, the primacy of feeling over reason, and the role of heredity and race.

Freud read Le Bon and was directly inspired by him in writing Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). Like Le Bon he sought to explain the phenomena of collective life through individual psychology. But Freud eliminated the notions of heredity, mentality, and suggestion and replaced them with a model of unconscious identification. Le Bon's idea of the unconscious as an archaic heritage of the human soul was closer to Jung than to Freud. Their ideas of the social also diverged. Freud wanted to clarify the irrationality of the group in order to reduce it, while Le Bon appeared to systematically cultivate it.

Annick Ohayon

See also: Bonaparte, Marie León; Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytical Study ; Fascination; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego ; Otherness; Suggestion.

Bibliography

Le Bon, Gustave. (1910). La psychologie politique et la défense sociale. Paris: Flammarion.

——. (1980). The French Revolution and the psychology of revolution. With a new introduction by Robert A. Nye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. (Original work published 1912)

——. (1995). The crowd. With a new introduction by Robert A. Nye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, c1995. (Original work published 1895)

Freud, Sigmund. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.