Abstract

This article studies the relation between mass and love in two of the most important texts of Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Crowds and Power. With the aim of sustaining that there is a contact point 573 between both proposals, in the sense that for both the mass always loves its own lack, we will revise the previous interpretations which found a complete and self-identical mass in those texts. In this way, we will firstly sustain that, in contrast to the lacanian readings that see in Freud’s mass the cancellation of the subject’s singularity, there resides —within that figure— a love for the Other that safeguards the most proper of each one; in the second place and as opposed to the applause of the metamorphosis held by Canetti scholars, we will argue that the mass is always moved in his work by the love for what it is not. Far away from being absolutely opposed, both texts therefore come together in the view of a mass that, throughout love, differs from itself.