From Crowd Psychology to the Dynamics of Large Groups

This book offers transdisciplinary research on the history of the study of social formations, ranging from nineteenth-century crowd psychology in France and twentieth-century Freudian mass psychology, including the developments in critical theory, to the study of the psychodynamics of contemporary large groups.

Carla Penna, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and a group analyst in Brazil. She is a member of the Psychoanalytic Circle of Rio de Janeiro and the Group Analytic Society International.

Acknowledgments Series Foreword by Earl Hopper Introduction CHAPTER ONE Nineteenth-century crowd psychology CHAPTER TWO Twentieth-century Freudian mass psychology CHAPTER THREE Twentieth-century left-wing mass psychology CHAPTER FOUR Reflections on a society of individuals CHAPTER FIVE The Northfield experiments: the cradle of group work in England CHAPTER SIX Group relations and Bion's legacy CHAPTER SEVEN Towards new basic assumptions in groups CHAPTER EIGHT Foulkes and group analysis: the development of the theory of the social unconscious CHAPTER NINE Large-group psychodynamics in group analysis CHAPTER TEN Traumatic experience in the unconscious life of social systems: Earl Hopper's theory of the fourth basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I: A/M Epilogue References Index