A mass gathering is often a preplanned event, like a concert or sporting event, held at a specific location for a defined duration that strains planning and response resources. However, a mass gathering can also be spontaneous, such as the gathering of mourners associated with the death of a celebrity or a protest. Over the last few years, we have seen an increase in the number of protests, some events that are pre-planned and organized but others that are not and that can quickly become out-of-control and end in tragedy. The bottom line is that despite the many years of dealing with and researching mass gatherings, there remains a lack of in depth understanding of the mass gathering and, despite often being attended by reasonably healthy or well people, the gatherings seem to be more hazardous than expected

Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.