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Since the beginning of the nineteenth century—since Goethe in his Weimar old age—prophets in the West have had a sense of impending catastrophe, for the West, but also, in consequence, for all humankind. From European travelers like Stendhal, de Tocqueville, Burckhardt, from lonely philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, from anticipators of salvation through catastrophe like Marx, and from the preeminent diagnostician, Freud, have come historical conceptions of a profound caesura separating modern people from their ancestors. The prophets have recognized that the world's great traditions, stemming from distinct origins in Europe and north Africa, in China, in India, were coming to a common end in a planetary condition of man-madeness, an age of all-embracing technology, and in a political condition of worldwide interdependence and ambition—eventually of world war, global trade and communications. In the period since the end of the Second World War, which to date has been the nadir of humankind as an actually existent unit, as a unit of technologically and politically common destiny, thoughtful individuals from all regions of the earth have come forth to join their hopes and fears into a conversation about humankind's possibilities.
To this conversation, the followers of Freud bring a particular perspective and experience. We, like all reflective people, can consider the condition humaine currently from the evidence of interactions we observe and read about, media images we receive, travels we undertake, but we can also attend to, attune to, the streams of our own and our patients' associations—to conduits from the unconscious, like oracles