‘The Love of a Pitiable Dog’: Gregariousness, Reciprocity and Altruism in Early Twentieth-Century British Social Psychology

Abstract

The interwar period is commonly figured as a period of cultural pessimism and uncertainty, as the traumatic wound to hope brought about by of the Great War was translated into an intellectual climate characterized by Richard Overy as a ‘morbid age’. In this narrative, psychological inquiry — and particularly, in Overy’s account, an emergent British vein of psychoanalysis — is understood to reflect or confirm a generalized fear of impending crisis: social anxieties surrounding economic collapse, the erosion of empire, demographic decline and genetic transmission of constitutional defect were linked to a concern over the effect of authoritarian political regimes and the fear of war — even pacifist movements and utopian politics spoke of ‘social dismay’.¹ One symptom of crisis held up by contemporary commentators was the attraction, for a newly enfranchised working class, of urban pursuits and entertainments whose debasement was expressed in arguments denigrating the inferior populism of an imported commercialized ‘mass’ culture and pointing to its influence on a ‘manipulable’ population, distracted from the task of cultivating character and rebuilding national futures.² More recently, contemporary psychological models of the ‘crowd’ as an undifferentiated and irrational mass subject to primitive impulses have been understood as representing a new kind of attention to the ‘human aggregate’, explaining the inherent instability of the ‘mass mind’ through the unruly operation of the instincts and the unconscious, which rendered individuals susceptible to the adverse influences of mass culture.³