I apologize for the interruptions in delivering this course. I’ve been finishing writing my new book – about which more later!
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As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.
Today we are turning to one of the most formidable – and influential – minds of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud. Freud was founder and proselytizer of psychoanalysis – a mental health therapy grounded in the relationship between the analyst and the analysand. He was, however, at least as interested in the dynamics of groups, especially large groups, as in those that are one on one. Interestingly, counterintuitively, they are closely related.
Freud understood that his therapeutic approach depended on the degree to which his patients saw him as an authority figure. He further understood that this was similar to, if not even the same as, the way people in groups see their leaders as authority figures. Authority figures on whom they depend for safety and security.
There is, in other words, a direct correlation between Freud’s groundbreaking work on groups and his groundbreaking work on individuals, specifically on psychoanalysis. All of it emanated from and related to his ideas about power and authority – about leadership and followership.
As far back as 1921, in one of his early books, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud wrote about how groups need some sort of centripetal force – a leader – to keep them from disintegrating. Using the Catholic church and the military as examples, Freud described how in each of these large, disparate groups, individuals were deeply, profoundly connected to their leaders, and to each other.
In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, which appeared in 1939, during the time of Hitler, Freud attempted to answer the question that he himself posed, arguably humankind’s most vexing: “How is it possible,” Freud asked and then sought to answer, “that one single man can develop such extraordinary effectiveness, that he can create out of indifferent individuals and families one people…?”
From Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921.
The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father: the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extraordinary passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for obedience.
From Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930.
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority come together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals…. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.
From Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1939.
Why the great man should rise to significance at all we have no doubt whatever. We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill treats them.