Social psychology and crowd theory

Gustave Le Bon

1841 – 1931

Gustave Le Bon was a French polymath — physician, anthropologist, physicist, and social psychologist — whose 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind established crowd psychology as a field and proposed that individuals in a crowd regress to an unconscious, quasi-hypnotic mental state governed by suggestion and contagion. His ideas about collective irrationality, the unconscious mind, and the power of symbols and myths over human behavior were widely read by occultists and esotericists seeking a psychological framework for ritual and magical influence. Sigmund Freud drew heavily on Le Bon in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Le Bon's model of the collective unconscious shaped subsequent thinking about religious and magical ritual's social power.