In the depth-psychology corpus, ‘crowd’ is rarely treated as a neutral sociological category. From Jung’s sustained critique in Civilization in Transition and The Undiscovered Self through Neumann’s account of uroboric group submersion, the crowd figures as the primary antagonist of individuation — a field in which the anonymous mass overwhelms personal moral responsibility and facilitates regression to collective unconscious dominance. Jung draws directly on Le Bon’s crowd psychology to argue that gatherings of even mildly psychopathic individuals produce abnormal phenomena at scale, while his concept of the ‘collective man’ frames mass movements as symptoms of compensatory reversion against individuation’s gains. Von Franz sharpens the typology by distinguishing crowd from group and mass, noting that primitive aggregations can topple more easily between order and chaos. Edinger excavates the Greek ochlos — unorganized, mob-like multitude — as distinct from the body politic, locating in the Passion narrative a mythic encounter between the individuating hero and collective man. Flores and the group-therapy tradition invert the valence: Ettin’s dictum ‘By the crowd they have been broken, by the crowd they shall be healed’ recasts the crowd as therapeutic instrument. Bion’s work dissolves the group/individual boundary altogether, insisting that no individual stands outside group psychology. The tension between crowd-as-dissolution and crowd-as-cure constitutes the central dialectic around this term.
The mass as such is always anonymous and always irresponsible. So-called leaders are the inevitable symptoms of a mass movement.
Jung argues that the crowd’s anonymous irresponsibility is the precondition for the emergence of demagogic leadership, making the crowd structurally opposed to individual moral agency.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes. But if the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning
Jung demonstrates that crowd magnitude operates inversely to individual significance, and that this arithmetic of nullity drives susceptibility to totalitarian State ideology.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
If they get together in large numbers—which is what happens in any crowd—abnormal phenomena appear. One need only read what Le Bon has to say on the ‘psychology of crow’
Jung invokes Le Bon to argue that the crowd acts as an amplifier of latent psychopathology, producing collective abnormality from individually borderline deviations.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
This term (ochlos, crowd, mob) refers to ‘an unorganized multitude, in contrast to demos, the people as a body politic.’ The corresponding verb, ochleō, means ‘to disturb by a mob or tumult.’
Edinger draws on Greek etymology to establish the crowd (ochlos) as mythically coded as chaotic mass-man, structurally opposed to civic order and threatening to the individuating Self.
, The Christian Archetype: A Jungian Commentary on the Life of Christ, 1987thesis
a crowd, i.e., a random accumulation of people; and a mass, i.e., a big crowd which is emotionally and instinctively unified and generally follows a leader.
Von Franz distinguishes crowd from group and mass within sociological typology, arguing that primitive aggregations shift between these categories more violently than modern groups do.
, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis
‘By the crowd, they have been broken, by the crowd they shall be healed.’
Ettin’s aphorism, cited by Flores, inverts the depth-psychological suspicion of the crowd by asserting that the same collective force that produces addiction can be therapeutically mobilized to heal it.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis
Among the basic phenomena characteristic of the uroboric existence of the group and the submersion of each part in the group psyche is the government of the group by the dominants of the collective unconscious, by the archetypes, and by instincts.
Neumann locates crowd-like submersion in the uroboric phase of consciousness, where archetypes and instincts govern the group and individual ego-consciousness is dissolved into collective affect.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting
It also means the crowd within, the collective unconscious; it is the crowd soul, the collective soul of man.
Jung identifies the inner crowd with the collective unconscious itself, arguing that the external mass has its psychological analogue in the undifferentiated contents pressing upon individual consciousness.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988supporting
It is the sheep mentality, the crowd-man, which drives them into military service, but this collective adaptation can be—and is sometimes temporarily—a help to pull away.
Von Franz describes ‘crowd-man’ as the vehicle of unconscious collective adaptation, which paradoxically can serve as a first step away from the mother complex despite its undifferentiated character.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
to give that up and to accept being just somebody or nobody, in the crowd, is to a certain extent a cure, although only a temporary one and not the whole cure.
Von Franz acknowledges that temporary submersion in the crowd can function as a partial therapeutic corrective to the inflation of the puer aeternus mother-complex, even if it cannot constitute full individuation.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
The men were herded—sometimes to one place then to another; sometimes driven together, then apart—like a flock of sheep without a thought or a will of their own.
Frankl documents the concentration camp as a site where enforced crowd existence strips the individual of interiority, reducing persons to herd animals governed entirely by external compulsion.
, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946supporting
The individual cannot help being a member of a group even if his membership of it consists in behaving in such a way as to give reality to the idea that he does not belong to a group at all.
Bion dissolves the boundary between individual and crowd psychology, arguing that group membership is constitutive of individuality rather than its antithesis.
, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959supporting
The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision on how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit.
Jung traces the political consequence of crowd-logic in the modern State, where the mass unit replaces the morally responsible individual as the basic social atom.
, The Undiscovered Self, 1957supporting
Jung’s definition was ‘the many as compared to the one.’ We are influenced by many collectives, both groups with which we affiliate and those of which we are not members.
Estés applies Jung’s formal definition of collective to argue that crowd-like pressures operate through multiple overlapping cultural affiliations, not only through visible mass gatherings.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The apparent difference between group psychology and individual psychology is an illusion produced by the fact that the group brings into prominence phenomena that appear alien to an observer unaccustomed to using the group.
Bion contends that what appears distinctive in crowd phenomena is an artifact of unfamiliar observation conditions rather than the emergence of genuinely new psychological instincts.
, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959aside
the collective shadow is particularly bad because people support each other in their blindness—it is only in wars, or in hate for other nations, that the collective shadow reveals itself.
Von Franz identifies the crowd’s mutual reinforcement of shared blind spots as the mechanism by which collective shadow remains invisible until it erupts in collective violence.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside