État mental collectif
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L’état mental collectif est un concept appartenant principalement au champ lexical de la philosophie, avec des applications circonscrites en psychiatrie et en psychologie. Il se définit comme la modulation de la condition psychophysique d’un sujet induite par la présence effective ou symbolique d’autrui. Son évaluation requiert l’examen attentif de multiples facettes de l’activité psychique : la course des idées, les propriétés mnémoniques, la tonalité affective, l’humeur, l’acuité des facultés cognitives ainsi que le tonus vital. Cette analyse doit intégrer, de manière fondamentale, la méta-superposition résultant des interactions dynamiques entre les individus, laquelle engendre des phénomènes émergents non réductibles à la simple somme des psychés individuelles.
Un état mental collectif se définit comme une entité psychique distincte, émergente de la synergie d’états mentaux individuels conscients[1],[2],[3]. Il se constitue comme le substrat à partir duquel s’élabore, en contrepoint, la réflexion individuelle[4],[5]. Cette juxtaposition favorise une appréhension plus aiguë des émotions, des conditions d’existence et du sentiment d’individualité. De nature composite, cet état procède de l’agrégation d’esprits conscients et autoréflexifs, formant une structure bien plus complexe que des phénomènes comportementaux simples, à l’instar d’une fuite panique (bousculade) au sein d’une cohorte animale, elle-même déclenchée par un mécanisme d’imitation de spécimens sentinelles[6][13]. Sa simulation peut être induite artificiellement, notamment par le biais de la relation scénique unissant un artiste à son public. L’art du stand-up comedy, par exemple, a pour finalité d’amener un assemblage de personnes à éprouver de manière synchrone et collective un affect identique : le rire[14].
Contexte
Lorsqu’un état psychique se trouve partagé par une proportion notable des membres d’un groupe ou d’une société, il peut être qualifié d’état mental collectif. Gustave Le Bon, dans ses écrits, a avancé l’hypothèse que ces dispositions psychiques se propagent par un phénomène de contagion, semblable à une transmission quasi épidémique des affects. Sigmund Freud, dans son ouvrage Psychologie des masses et analyse du moi (1922), a évoqué la notion de « fièvre guerrière » pour illustrer cet état collectif, où l’exaltation ou l’enthousiasme guerrier s’empare d’une communauté entière. Franz Borkenau, quant à lui, a décrit des phénomènes de « démence collective », tandis que divers auteurs ont exploré la notion de dépression collective, marquée par un abattement généralisé au sein d’une population. En ce qui concerne les troubles psychotiques, il est reconnu que ceux-ci peuvent, dans de rares cas, se transmettre d’un individu à un autre, sous la forme d’une psychose induite, connue sous l’appellation vieillie de folie à deux. Ce phénomène, toutefois, se limite généralement à une dyade et n’engage que rarement un plus grand nombre de personnes. Lorsqu’un état mental affecte une large population, il est préférable d’employer un langage usuel et accessible, délaissant les termes techniques de la psychiatrie ou de la psychologie, afin de rendre la description plus intelligible et universellement compréhensible.
Exemples d'états mentaux collectifs
- Église (congrégation) avec des états collectifs comme la prière, le culte, les hymnes, le parler en langues, etc.
- Sports avec audience collective, comme les huées, la corrida, la WWE, le football, le football américain (y compris l'audience collective à domicile de ces événements)
- Concerts où se produisent moshing et chant collectif
- Émeute
- Carnavalesque[15]
- Racisme[16]
- Public des films d'horreur[17]
Un exemple paradigmatique d’état d’esprit collectif harmonieux peut être observé lors d’une assemblée festive, telle qu’une kermesse musicale ou un raout consacré aux arts sonores. En ces circonstances, les individus, réunis par un attrait commun pour la mélodie, peuvent éprouver une quiétude ou une félicité intérieure, et ce, malgré la présence d’une foule d’étrangers et un cadre sonore et sensoriel tumultueux. Cette convergence autour d’un objet partagé favorise un sentiment d’unité et d’apaisement. À l’opposé, dans des situations périlleuses, un agrégat humain saisi par l’affolement peut être en proie à une appréhension ou une angoisse exacerbée. Par exemple, lorsqu’une cohorte nombreuse s’efforce de quitter précipitamment un édifice, les personnes situées à l’avant risquent d’être comprimées contre les huis par la pression exercée par celles qui les suivent, engendrant une situation de désarroi collectif potentiellement funeste[18].
Un état passionnel collectif, fréquemment désigné sous le vocable de « mentalité de foule », se caractérise par l'émergence d'une colère commune et expansive. Au sein de ce concours d'individus, chaque membre s'abreuve à l'affect des autres, avivant par un processus de contagion mutuelle une ferveur belliqueuse. Cette expérience de fusion au sein de la multitude entraîne immanquablement une déresponsabilisation subjective, où le sentiment d'impunité, né de l'anonymat et de la dilution de la conscience individuelle dans le corps collectif, autorise et accoutre des comportements que l'agent isolé eût réprouvés. Il s'ensuit une exacerbation des pulsions agressives, la collectivité outrepassant souvent les bornes que la morale commune prescribe à l'individu.
Références
- ↑ Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, New York, NY, THE FREE PRESS, (1re éd. 1951) (ISBN 978-0-684-83632-4), « Imitation », p. 126 :
« One should say creation rather than imitation, since this combination of forces results in something new…There is a penetration, a fusion of a number of states within another, distinct from them: that is the collective state. »
- ↑ Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, University of California Press, (1re éd. 1969), 83, 84 (ISBN 978-0-520-05676-3), « Society as Symbolic Interaction » :
« Under the perspective of symbolic interaction, social action is lodged in acting individuals who fit their respective lines of action to one another through a process of interpretation; [the] group action [of interpretation] is the collective action of such individuals. As opposed to this view [of symbolic interaction, where selves 'make indications to themselves'], sociological conceptions generally lodge social action in the action of society or in some unit of society. »
- ↑ Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, coll. « The Collected Works: Part 1 of 9 », :
« A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone. »
- ↑ Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, New York, NY, THE FREE PRESS, (1re éd. 1951), 213, 252, 281 (ISBN 978-0-684-83632-4), « Imitation » :
« One of the constitutive elements of every national temperament consists of a certain way of estimating the value of existence. There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or sombre lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life…In normal conditions the collective order is regarded as just by the great majority of persons…If the individual isolates himself, it is because the ties uniting him with others are slackened or broken, because society is not sufficiently integrated at the points where he is in contact with it. These gaps between one and another individual consciousness, estranging them from each other, are authentic results of the weakening of the social fabric. »
- ↑ Henri Bergson, Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, The Macmillan Company, (réimpr. 1912) (lire en ligne) :
« As a general rule, an intense feeling successively encroaches upon all other mental states, and colours them with its own peculiar hue; if, then, we are made to witness this gradual impregnation, we finally become impregnated ourselves with a corresponding emotion. To employ a different image, an emotion may be said to be dramatic and contagious when all the harmonics in it are heard along with the fundamental note...an individual mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood »
- ↑ George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self & Society, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, (1re éd. 1934), 58–59 p. (ISBN 978-0-226-11273-2, DOI 10.7208/chicago/9780226112879.001.0001), « PART II: MIND 8. Imitation and the Origin of Language » :
« [T]he 'herding' instinct, if reduced down to something concrete in the action of the form itself...this may lead to a stampede in the herd. Something of that sort is involved in the so-called 'sentinel.' One animal, a little more sensitive than the others, lifts his head and starts to run away, and the other animals do tend to move with the sentinel form...[Y]ou [humans] unconsciously imitate [dialects]. The same thing is also true of various other [primate] mannerisms...That is what we call 'imitation,' and what is curious is that there is practically no indication of such behavior on the part of lower [life]forms. You can teach a sparrow to sing as a canary but you have to keep that sparrow constantly listening to a canary. It does not take place readily...in general the taking over of the processes of others is not natural to lower forms. Imitation seems to belong to the human form, where it has reached some sort of independent conscious existence. »
- ↑ Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Anchor Books: A Division of Random House, Inc., (1re éd. 1959) (ISBN 978-0-385-094023), p. 15 :
« A 'performance' may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants. »
- ↑ Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, University of California Press, (1re éd. 1969) (ISBN 978-0-520-05676-3), « Society as Symbolic Interaction », p. 84 :
« group action is the collective action of such individuals ['who fit their respective lines of action to one another through the process of interpretation']...the individuals composing...the group become 'carriers,' or media for the expression of such forces; and the interpretative behavior by means of which people form their actions is merely a coerced link in the play of such forces. »
- ↑ Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology [« Étude de sociologie »], New York, NY, THE FREE PRESS, (1re éd. 1951), 125, 129 (ISBN 978-0-684-83632-4), « Imitation » :
« Thus we yawn, laugh, weep, because we see someone yawn, laugh or weep...The name of imitation must then be reserved solely for such facts if it is to have clear meaning, and we shall say: Imitation exists when the immediate antecedent of an act is the representation of a like act, previously performed by someone else; with no explicit or implicit mental operation which bears upon the intrinsic nature of the act reproduced intervening between representation and execution. »
- ↑ Henri Bergson, Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, The Macmillan Company, (lire en ligne) :
« Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. »
- ↑ David Marchese (Quote by Norm Macdonald), « Norm Macdonald Unloads on Modern Comedy, SNL, Fallon's Critics, Hillary, and Trump », Vulture: Devouring Culture, (lire en ligne, consulté le ) :
« On TV, every single joke kills. That's not what happens with stand-up. You have to earn every laugh. Another thing is that there's no room for interpretation in stand-up...with stand-up, it's all about getting that noise — getting that laugh. And it has to come for everyone at the same time. Everyone has to think the same thing at the same time. »
- ↑ Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, palgrave macmillan, , 47, 67 (ISBN 978-0-230-11673-3) :
« No one would call a Steelers game an 'illusion,' but theatre artists and the theatre[-]going public often refer to events on stage as illusory and even unreal. ... Emotional contagion entails 'the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally,' note Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson. 'You can catch an emotion, just as you can catch a cold, without knowing whom you caught it from,' says philosopher Robert M. Gordon, who writes about emotional contagion in the theatre as well as in everyday life. »
- ↑ [7],[8],[9],[10],[11],[12]
- ↑ Leigh Woods, Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns, New York, NY, Palgrave Macmillan, coll. « Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History », , 111–112 p. (ISBN 978-1-4039-7536-2), « Growing Pains, 1910-1913 » :
« In the 1830s and 1840s, Auguste Comte had founded the field of sociology on the premise that groups were more important than individuals were in forming and changing societies. Comte's views never gained consensus in France or elsewhere, but they brought a backlash against his egalitarianism, such as it was. One of the sharper responses came in 1895 with Gustave Le Bon's book, La Psychologie des Foules (The Psychology of Crowds). Le Bon believed, as one who's studied him writes, 'from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known...as barbarians.' »
- ↑ Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy, New York, Cambridge University Press, (ISBN 978-0-521-03415-9), p. 20 :
« [T]he model of carnival cannot be offered without reservation as an explanation of the Decameron or of any other comic artefact from the Middle Ages or Renaissance. Carnival, as Bakhtine argues, makes no distinctions but programmatically reduces (or raises) everyone to the same level, trickster along with tricked, spectator along with actor: 'It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated 'comic' event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope: it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival's participants.' »
- ↑ James Baldwin, Baldwin: Collected Essays, New York, NY, The Library of America, (1re éd. 1972) (ISBN 978-1-883011-52-9), « No Name in the Street: Take Me to the Water », p. 397 :
« The racial dividing lines of Southern towns are baffling and treacherous for a stranger…I will never forget it. I don’t know if I can describe it. Everything abruptly froze into what, even at that moment, struck me as a kind of Marx Brothers parody of horror. Every white face turned to stone: the arrival of the messenger of death could not have had a more devastating effect than the appearance in the restaurant doorway of a small, unarmed, utterly astounded black man. I had realized my error as soon as I opened the door: but the absolute terror on all these white faces—I swear that not a soul moved—paralyzed me. They stared at me, I stared at them. »
- ↑ Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, New York, NY, Routledge, , 28, 36, 53 (ISBN 0-415-90145-6) :
« Art-horror requires evaluation both in terms of threat and disgust. ... some emotional states are the cognitive-evaluative sort. And, of course, I would hold that art-horror is one of these. ... The audience's psychological state, therefore, diverges from the psychological state of characters in respect of belief, but converges on that of characters with respect to the way in which the properties of said monsters are emotively assessed. »
- ↑ « The Religious Experience of the Rave - Theatre Arts - UIowa Wiki », wiki.uiowa.edu (consulté le )
Bibliographie
- Borkenau, Franz, 1981. Fin et commencement. Sur les générations de cultures et les origines de l'Occident. (éd. et intro. de Richard Lowenthal). New York, Columbia University Press.
- Freud, Sigmund, 1955. Au-delà du principe de plaisir. Psychologie des groupes et autres œuvres. Édition standard, XVIII (1920-1922). Londres : Hogarth.
- Le Bon, Gustave, 1960. (Première publication en 1895). L'Esprit des foules. New York : Viking.
- Puri, BK, Laking, PJ et Teasaden, IH, 1996. Manuel de psychiatrie. Édimbourg, Londres, New York, Philadelphie, Sydney, Saint-Louis, Toronto : Churchill Livingstone.
- Scarfuto, Christine M., 2009. L'expérience religieuse de la rave
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