The Psychoanalytic Meaning of Culture and History: Review Essay of Norman O. Brown
Date posted: May 24, 2011 | by Richard Koenigsberg | Comments
| THE LIFE AGAINST DEATH: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Wesleyan University Press)  “One of the most interesting and valuable works of our time. Brown’s contribution cannot be overestimated. His book is far-ranging, thoroughgoing, extreme, and shocking. It gives the best interpretation of Freud I know”—Lionel Trilling
Norman O. Brown was Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is considered one of the most important thinkers of the Twentieth Century. Brown’s book is one of the most significant ever written on the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture and history. If you have not read it, now is the time to do so. Brown sets forth a vision to expand the scope and meaning of psychoanalysis beyond the clinical setting. Life Against Death is available now through Amazon.com at a special, discounted rate (prices as low as $2.81).
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Norman O. Brown sets forth a vision for the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture and history—one that has not yet been actualized. Why has this project had such difficulty making its way into the world? Perhaps most significantly, psychoanalysis has become identified as a form of therapy. Brown, on the other hand, is concerned with “reshaping psychoanalysis into a wider theory of human nature, culture and history” to be “appropriated by the consciousness of mankind as a new stage in the historical process of man’s coming to know himself.”
Another problem with implementing Brown’s vision has been the direction of academic thought. Brown states that the human being is an animal that “represses himself and creates culture or society in order to repress himself.” Most of the academic world—not to mention liberal thought—has been allied against this view: human beings do not repress themselves; rather we are accosted by various forms of “oppression” that can barely be resisted. We are enslaved by the power of hegemonic discourses.
In typical academic thought, human beings have nothing to do with the societies that we create: they exist in another dimension of space and time. It’s as if something emanating from “up above” imposes its will upon us. But how are we to account for the nature of those discourses that constitute culture—and the power that we invest in them?
Brown states that culture—like the transference—exists in order to allow us to “project the infantile complexes into concrete reality.” We enact our fantasies in the external world. Human culture, Brown says, is “one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out.” The “infantile fantasies that create the universal human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered,” but their “derivatives in human culture can.”
We live today within a bizarre, violent political world, which people critique and oppose. However, most of those who do so are under the illusion that society functions according to rational principles—and that rationality can be brought to bear upon this world. But what if this is not the case? A new space opens up—for understanding and potentially for transformation—once we recognize that political ideology and many other forms of culture are based on the projection of unconscious fantasy into the external world.
Brown states that “Projections, with their fetishistic displacement of inner fantasies, distort the external world.” Well, perhaps “distort” is not the correct word since many cultural forms are based precisely on projection—the displacement of inner fantasies into the outer world. Politics, in particular, is that dimension of society that allows neurotic and psychotic fantasies to be projected into reality and enacted.
However, we do not call the political world neurotic or psychotic, however “insane” it appears to be. We don’t have a language to characterize psychopathology that occurs in society. Indeed, we often fail to recognize the world that we have created as our own. Societal ideologies or institutions such as warfare seem to be “out there on their own.” It often seems as if what occurs in culture comes to us from afar: from another world. As Brown puts it, projections bring the inner world into external reality, but only “under the sign of negation or alienation.”
Who created the symbolic order? Who creates discourse? What is the source of the “power” of society?” Freud observed that the mythological conception of the universe, which survives in the most modern religions, is fundamentally psychology projected into the external world. Brown suggests that not just mythology, but the entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Stephen Spender, “The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.”
What a radical idea! What an obvious idea? That we human beings are the source of that which exists. We have created various social forms because they represent the fulfillment of our desires and function to allay anxiety. It’s easy now to say that reality is a social construction. But constructed based on what? By whom?
We have no trouble acknowledging this truth—that human beings are the source of cultural forms—when it comes to airplanes or air-conditioners or baseball games or Hershey bars. Obviously, these social forms exist because they represent the fulfillment of our desires. We have a great deal more difficulty acknowledging that we human beings are the source of war, genocide and the race to create atom bombs. With regards to these societal institutions, we would prefer to believe that we have nothing to do with them.
This is what Brown means when he says that when we project unconscious fantasies into the world to create society, we perceive what manifests “only under the general sign of negation or denial.” We want and need to project complexes and conflicts and fantasies into the external world. However, we deny that we are the source of what we have created. This splitting off of culture from the self represents a fundamental and extremely powerful dynamic. We imagine that the world of culture exists as a domain of reality separate from us.
One may suggest that the following dynamic—particularly in the domain of politics—governs the creation of many cultural forms. First, a fantasy is projected into an ideological structure. The shared fantasy establishes the shape of an ideology or institution and is the source of the energy that sustains it. Second, human beings deny that they are responsible for the institutions and forms of behavior that have come into being as a consequence of fantasies that have been projected into reality. We pretend that the ideology or institution exists as a dimension of society—but that we have had nothing to do with creating or sustaining it.
Brown suggests that once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch (or recognize that talk from the couch is still an activity in culture), then it becomes plain that there is “nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze” except these projected fantasies that constitute culture. Thus, Brown says, psychoanalysis “fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis.”
But who will psychoanalyze the shared fantasies—those projections that are the source of the nightmare of history? Apparently not the psychoanalysts huddled away in their “clinics.” In my view, there has been nothing more destructive to Freud’s aspirations than the identification of psychoanalysis with the “clinical situation.”
Some say that Freud and psychoanalysis are passé. In actuality, Freud’s vision has yet to be understood or actualized. True, people nowadays seem to have less of a desire to be “psychoanalyzed”. But neurosis and psychosis don’t happen simply within individuals. Neurosis and psychosis are all around us, embedded within civilization. Perhaps the domain of politics especially is where human beings manifest and enact their deepest fantasies and anxieties.
It’s difficult to know and say this. We are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that civilization itself contains or constitutes a radical form of pathology. We are oppressed and repressed by this symbolic object—“society” or “the nation”—in which we have invested so much psychic energy. We tremble before it, lest it destroy us, yet refuse to abandon it: like an abused child that refuses to separate from mother.
The political system appears to be a symptom – yet another symptom of our inability to go beyond our own pathology – I am working on a model – a psychological/analytical model – for a society where nature is respected where energy is sustainable energy and where respect for the environment becomes an integrated part of living – which in my opinion it always should have been – and I have the idea that this respect – which I somehow see as a fundamental respect that should have been present obviously towards the environment but also a respect that should be visible in political life – one does not only make political campaigns to get elected but to further a larger cause (ideology versus egocentricity) – Somehow I believe that the individual should be able to obtain a more sophisticated psychological level – that the individual should be able to profit from insight – profit from a psychoanalysis that could become more commonplace – what I am saying – and what I believe you are saying as well – we have sickness in our society but we also have a cure – do you think we could put the two together?
regards
PIA
Religion, the nation, are not subjects of discussion for the general public.
These topics – as a main driving force for destruction of “the others” – are created and utilized into a destructive drive by these instititutions, themselves; only a paranoid leader needs to arrieve, and he’ll turn on the engine of destruction… in my opinion.
Well, I’m not the general public. I’m General Koenigsberg.
I believe that Freud gets more respect that comes across here but, at the same time, he is not popularly acknowledged for his influence. Jonathan H. Turner, in his book *A Theory of Social Interaction* (1988), gives Freud his due within the scope of the text.
In fact, I think Freud has tremendous residual influence within the agency-structure school of social theory, as does Marx, and that this school of social theory starts to come to terms with whether it is the outside pushing into the individual or the individual projecting outward (though still biased toward oppression over repression).
I think Freud needs corrective due to the preference for locating or labeling projections as “infantile,” especially given how much we have learned about developmental psychology and its physiological linkages to somatic development as well as linguistic development (i.e., not all projection are infantile and some could never have their roots in the infantile state).
In other words, Turner’s (1988) chapters on “Motivational Processes” reveal where Freud’s contributions are fundamental, but also makes clear that more recent developments in social psychology are necessary to understand why people interact with each other (and the world) in ways that keep them in states of “false consciousness” (to use a Marxian phrase). There is a dialectical relationship with history and culture (also discussed by Marx), but there is a strong tendency to leave the “life project” (a phenomenological phrase) unquestioned or otherwise not reflected upon, which can leave us without an awareness of our projections (and introjections?).
So, I celebrate learning about Brown’s new book, but caution against over reliance on Freudian analysis because it is just a part, insightful as it is, of the theoretical basis for interpreting the relationship between the individual (agent) and society (structure).
Brown’s book isn’t new. It was written in 1959.
Some ideas don’t catch on right away (e. g., those of Galileo).
Dear Richard and colleagues, I cannot adequately underscore the significance of Dr. Koenigsberg’s theoretical work, including the current review essay, for our understanding of what culture (and history) is for, and for the central role of projection and its permutations in playing out unconscious processes on the screen and stage of “reality.” Much social science and economics have long erred in thinking that culture is primarily adaptive and responsive to reality, and that people are primarily rational actors who are maximizing enlightened self-interest. A number of psychoanalytic anthropologists have made their life-work the exploration of how culture becomes a realization of the unconscious: Weston La Barre, George Devereux, Melford Spiro, George DeVos, and Alan Dundes, come immediately to mind. In 1994 I published a book titled The Dream of Culture in which I explored many facets of human culture (and history) as largely wakeful dreaming. Around 1985 I believe that I coined the term “symbolic object” to evoke and represent how people largely imagine their cultures, as projective, then introjeced, embodiments of the unconscious, which in turn includes early object relations. Dr. Koenigsberg not only diagnoses the projective foundation of culture, but offers a radical solution: the withdrawal of projection and the “owning” of unconscious fantasy, desire, and conflict.
Hard to say how atomic warfare would be “adaptive.”
The belief in and attachment to “rationality” seems difficult to abandon.
Human beings in politics behave in ways that border on the psychotic (hundreds-of-millions of people killed in the Twentieth Century), but we are unwilling to call these behaviors psychotic.
And yes, Stein’s concept of “symbolic objects” has been very useful: how we invest certain ideas or entities in the external world with psychic energy such that they become part of psychic structure.
How can psychoanalysis avoid looking at the role of symbolic objects (such as one’s nation or God) in shaping the psyche?
Well, for a long time it was necessary that psychoanalysis isolated itself from society: to create a boundary to discuss things within the clinical setting that could not be discussed outside this setting (in culture).
But the boundaries no longer hold. Psychoanalysts can’t keep themselves apart. The world is too powerful. It impinges upon the self. How can one separate the psyche from the tools (such as the Internet) that reflect and embody the psyche?
How can I separate my being from these words that I am putting out into the world? These words are on the borderline between internal and external. In the past, I would have written them in a journal: for myself. Now there is no separation between a journal and a document written for publication.
This message is both an entry into my journal and a publication: no separation between self and world.
I am more of a Marxian than a Freudian, but open to learning from sociologically astute Freudians. I have been impressed by Joel Kovel’s White Racism: A Psychohistory and The Age of Desire, which I discovered by excavating the bibliographic references in his more recent works such as The Enemy of Nature. Kovel has clearly been influenced by Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, the latter of whom I was previously aware only through Reason and Revolution and One-Dimensional Man. I’m almost finished reading Eros and Civilization, and I suppose Brown’s Life Against Death needs to be on my reading list soon.
Kovel has learned as much from Marx as from psychoanalysis. I suspect that Kovel’s approach has more to teach us than a reliance on psychoanalytic resources alone.
It seems to me that sometimes Dr. Koenigsberg is concerned with diagnosing the political-cultural-economic problems our world currently faces (as I am) but that he is reluctant to urge anything but an individual social-psychoanalytic solution to this problem.
My interest in the resources of social psychoanalysis lies in the following area: Since the 1970′s, the best thinkers on the radical left have tried to think in advance about what is needed to get humanity farther on the road to a genuinely possible democratically socialist society than was possible in the period 1905-1980. There have been numerous insights, some of them involving rediscovering of insights in Marx himself: appreciation of uneven development in the world system, the changing mechanisms by which the core (imperialist) powers super-exploit the global south, the growing importance of the ecological question as part of the anticapitalist struggle, the nature of the Soviet-style economies as part of the capital system, the importance of high-intensity democracy (regional, national, and international networks of locally controlled peoples’ councils, including but not limited to, workers’ committees controlling particular economic enterprises), the importance of social ownership of the means of production as distinct from private and from state ownership, the need to move away from commodity exchange (and the misleading policy approaches that determine choices based on monetary indices such as GDP) and toward production of use-values, for what is truly needed.
The long transition away from the deeply problematic capital system is bound to face countervaling tendencies, as we see today in Venezuela, where a government whose leader is committed to fostering high-intensity democracy but whose political supporters at the grassroots lack sufficient organizational and political strength to overcome countervaling pressures from an Opposition philosophically and materially tied to U.S. business interests and committed to maintaining the local expression of the global capital system.
If we cannot simply dismiss the Opposition to progressive change as pawns of the class and/or national enemy, if we cannot attribute their positions merely to conscious calculations of personal material interest, we have to ask what unresolved unconscious forces exist, outside of the range of democratic rational discourse as so far developed, to resist change in a socially healthy direction. If we can understand those more adequately, we can develop strategies for making the unconscious conscious and promoting rational resolution compatible with a systemic, socially determined, i.e., genuinely democratic step forward.
“Psychoanalysis fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis.”
I agree with that, but I want to make some additional comments to what has been said, which I think is a necessary debate in the social sciences.
Firstly, it is absolutely true that the function of psychoanalysis can not be reduced to the clinic. If that is what has been historically happening is not the fault of psychoanalytic theory but psychoanalysts, primarily responsible for the provicialization of psychoanalysis.
The concepts and categories of psychoanalytic theory have tremendous explanatory power of social phenomena, but to break with the logic of therapy must also break the individual approach derived from therapeutic practice. I think this article, while proclaiming the extension of psychoanalytic practice, is vested by this logic of the individual.
For example, let’s take “The Civilization and its Discontents.” Is it not sufficiently clear that the intention of Freud was the search for the cultural determinations over the individual? Only from the narrow logic of the therapist we can grasp that culture is determined by the mere sum of individual fantasies. Such a logic presupposes the (pre) existence of the individual. “The Uneasiness in Culture” breaks with this possibility. On the other hand, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” already we can notice the dimension of the collective as the reality principle. The subordination of the pleasure principle to reality principle is the assertion of the external determination of a cultural field. For Lacan it is the symbolic, ie, the self can only be guaranteed under the gaze of the Great Other. This is the symbolic dimension of the subject, made possible by an encounter with another field, an external one, a pre-existing one.
How individual forms of enjoyment keep the subject within a particular discourse or an ideology, that is another problem. The subject is produced by the discursive interpellation, and not vice versa. But why a subject is challenged more effectively by a particular discourse? That is a matter of enjoyment. But this is in the enigmatic field of the Real, the rest, this excess in respect of the social (the symbolic).
But in relation to social, Lacan is where we find a theory. The seminar XVII, The Upside of psychoanalysis, we are given the discourse structure with its four forms: the master discourse, the discourse of the hysteric, the discourse of the university and the discourse of the analyst. What links social structure are the speeches, the four forms of politics that seek to answer the great question: can society?
For Freud there were three impossible tasks: to govern, to educate, and to psychoanalyze. Some of this is also known by Marxism, where, according to Lacan, the theory of the object “a”, will also find its place.
The task of psychoanalysis can be refound policy today based on the radical impossibility of social relationship. The society is an impossibility. So there is politics. But its revival only takes the impossible as a cause, as a mobile. So does the desire.
Best regards!
“The projection of unconscious fantasy into the external world.” This is good stuff. Rather than see reality for what it is, we hopefully conform its symbols and events to an interpretation of being that is wholly external to us, and yet we cannot expect to get beyond ourselves if we are the perceivers and we are all perceivers, who are limited in our scope given the same sense organs. Even our wildest imaginations are steeped in human terms. We cannot escape ourselves. The author further goes on to say that “The entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Stephen Spender, ‘The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.’”
This theory of Brown’s is as old at least as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s, and if not then certainly Berkeley Philosophy Professor George Lakoff in Philosophy in the Flesh gave it air.
This is a silly statement: “We have a great deal more difficulty acknowledging that we human beings are the source of war, genocide and the race to create atom bombs.” We all know we are capable of inhumanity to man. I saw an art show today (Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture at the Stephen Writz Gallery, See: http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html) that displayed Google images of dilapidated towns in America that gave no hope of business transaction. They were more ghost towns with people in them. What it said to me is that financial ruin creates desperate people and they, like the Germans that gave opportunity to Hitler were just normal people, who as we have seen with Bush’s escapades, we are a people of great damage to others for our own sakes, of which I am a guilty party.
This is an important statement, which is probably the same statement reworded to thus affect a contradiction of my assertion as to it’s silliness, “However, we deny that we are the source of what we have created.” When faced with the Republican view of the world, we can understand it, but we would never hope to espouse it, and yet the grim truth is that an Empire is a black hole that draws everything into it, but it also crushes everything to pieces and nothing comes out at the other end that isn’t completely transformed. I still don’t see this statement (“We imagine that the world of culture exists as a domain of reality separate from us.”) as really true. We embrace culture. The media plays it out for us and we follow it.
Further, the statement: “We are oppressed and repressed by this symbolic object—’society’ or ‘the nation’—in which we have invested so much psychic energy. We tremble before it, lest it destroy us, yet refuse to abandon it: like an abused child that refuses to separate from mother.” I do not see how we can remove an inherent fear brought to us by the hoarding of resources. At a point, we will have to breathe what Bartleby the Scrivener announced with his, “No,” to a request to carry-out a business duty. But the death an mayhem in our having to take it back will be as real as the fear of the unknown.
Human beings have language and a language whose structure includes error and equivocity. Through language, language here understood as Lacan`s linguisterie, humans have built civilization with its symbolic relations. Unconscious formations such as symptoms, dreams , phantasies ,etc. are language formations and therefore can be desconstructed and reconstructed through decomposing its elements. Phonemes are the building blocks.
Our perception of what is called reality is much like virtual reality, made up of language and imagerie, both the symbolic and the imaginary orders in Lacan. Reality is different from the Real.
You have to include the order of the Real to understand the limits to this reality construction. Although the human kind has made tremendous achievements building its civilization, constructing knowledge, arts, science and so much more; Although language is a resource that allowed men to acquire so much knowledge, there is a limitation to what men can know.
The Symbolic order does not cover the Real; we don´t understand everything that happens to us. There is a lack of knowledge about sex, about death, about women and about the Other´s desire. “What do you want from me?” is the eternal enigma.
It is this lack that makes language alive, always open to new formations and rearrangements. It is an ethical point because it explains why humans work against their own well being.
If ethics is the study of the motivation of human action, then unconscious motives are to be studied too.
So, there is a point of lack of knowledge that is a constant and determines our way of viewing even knowledge itself.
How do we deal with what is logically impossible to know? We construct phantasies that gives a reassuring stand-in answer and a momentaneous orientation for our social actions. Most of us, as of a neurotic psychic structure, have a tendency to forget that there is lack and attach ourselves to beliefs that reinforce this kind of forgetfulness (Freud´s secondary repression).We act as if we knew what we were doing and this reassurance and self reliance strings from an illusion.
The sense of belonging to a group of people who have knowledge can supply people with a subjective crutch when they are suffering from insecurity or instability, and can even be momentarily helpful to them in some cases.
Discourse is the figure of language that creates social bond between people. Phantasy is the construction of a phrase with subject and verb that is changed from the conditional mode to the affirmative mode.The individual phantasies that every individual uses in his mind, some unconscious some not to orient his social interactions draws it’s material from language just as much as discourse. This is what they have in common.
It´s seems uncanny when the outer and inner world coincide but the structure of the mind is that of a moebious band where there is continuity between inside and outside.