There is one other way in which we regress in the service of the ego that pertains in particular to our participation in a large group. There are some of us living today who find very few “safe places” in which many of their feelings can be expressed. For example, it is not safe for a Black man in an urban area of America to be shouting at the top of their lungs that “the ^%&%@#%^ should be stomped on and given a good kick in the head!” However, this exclamatory phrase can be declared at full voice when this Black man is sitting in the stands at a major sporting event. He can threaten members of the opponent team without meaning any harm. And this includes no harm to him. This man will not be arrested, handcuffed, or sent off to prison for his verbal violence. He was only being a “fan” (as in “fanatic”).
Roger Brown (1986) writes about another type of “fan” who finds a safe place to express their emotions. Addressing his own “fanatic” devotion to Grand Opera, Brown identifies the way his operas serve as an outlet for emotions he usually cannot express as a “true” man. It is only at the opera that fanatics like Brown can cry, wildly applaud, and become immediately infatuated with one of the singers. Brown (1986, p. 555) describes a Ligato phenomenon in describing the benefit to be derived from being a fan (fanatic) of a specific sports team, movie star or (in Brown’s own case) opera singer:
“The test of being a fan is very simple. Your own self-esteem must rise and fall with the successes and failures of your object of admiration. In addition, though you may be a solitary fan with no nearby like-minded group, a fan cannot rest content with his private opinion but must try to convince others that his evaluation is objectively correct. That means he must make propaganda to build a social consensus that will establish the reality he believes in.”
In essence, we surround ourselves with other people who look and sound like us. They will like (and not challenge) what we share about ourselves. As in the case of the Black man, Sanctuary is provided to this man with pent-up emotions—and this regression is certainty of benefit to the Black man’s or opera goer’s sanity (just as the temporary regressive “madness” provided sanity for Carl Jung). Regression is taking place in a safe place and, as a result, is being engaged on behalf of the adaptive, stress-reducing, self-esteem-building ego.
RITSE is truly an extraordinary capacity of the human psyche. We can move backward in personal and collective history to explore alternative portrayals of reality and to be selective regarding how best to guard against the massive intrusion of anxiety-producing memories, impulses or existential concerns. Someone like Carl Jung could plunge for a short while each day into “madness” as he chisels on granite blocks and as he prepared the visual illustrations and the narrative (written in beautiful old Gothic script) in his Red Book (Jung, 2009). An artist such as Edvard Munch, can enter his Oslo Norward studio and create a series of deeply troubling paintings depicting anguish and despair without slipping into deep depression himself. Thomas Wolfe (2011) retains his sanity while write “madly” on tablets about his troubled childhood in North Carolina and about his inability to ever “go home again.” We protect ourselves and find support inside ourselves for insightful and creative endeavors, while pushing the boundaries of emotional regulation.
Acceleration: the larger the group/crowd, the bigger the bang
If there is a reduction in personal responsibility when we are in a crowd, then why do some people take action to help others who are stressed. Why did the temporary “citizens” of the Woodstock world go out of their way to help other “citizens’ who are struggling with lack of food, lack of sanitation or a drug-trip? Why, in other words, is there altruism in the midst of potential group indifference.
Sometimes this altruism has to do with focus. In the movie about Oskar Schindler taking responsibility for the safeguarding of Jews in his factory during the Holocaust, there is a scene where Schindler is looking at one small girl dressed in red (only color in this movie) wandering through the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, while atrocities are occurring all around her. When attention is directed toward the distress of one person, then a binding sense of morality might be engaged. As Reinhold Niebuhr (1932) would put it, we become moral men acting responsibly in an immoral society.
