The Group Mind

By Willam McDougall

"Until the later decades of the nineteenth century, psychology continued to concern itself almost exclusively with the mind of man conceived in an abstract fashion, not as the mind of any particular individual, but as the mind of a representative individual considered in abstraction from his social settings as something given to our contemplation fully formed and complete..."

William McDougall was an early 20th century psychologist who wrote a number of highly influential textbooks, and was particularly important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world. He was an opponent of behaviourism and stands somewhat outside the mainstream of the development of Anglo-American psychological thought in the first half of the 20th century; but his work was very well known and respected among lay people.Group Psychology itself consists properly of two parts, that which is concerned to discover the most general principles of group life, and that which applies these principles to the study of particular kinds and examples of group life. The former is logically prior to the second; though in practice it is hardly possible to keep them wholly apart. The present volume is concerned chiefly with the former branch. Only when the general principles of group life have been applied to the understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate account in all its concrete fullness.

NY. G. P. Putnam. 1920. 423p. CONTAINS MARK-UP