The Insane Look of the Bewildered Half-Broken Animal

To have attacks … that are of a sexual nature perpetrated by men ostensibly of Muslim origin is symbolically devastating for a public commitment to asylum.

[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel reiterated calls that “we must continually re-examine whether we really have done everything, as far as expulsion orders and actual expulsions from Germany are concerned.”

We are alive at a very dark time. We have good reason to doubt the inevitability of historical progress, of civilizations holding together, of thought maintaining its relevance. We can sense the reemergence of the Crusader mentality, the increased and terrifying presence of both organized and lone-wolf predators. Ours is a time of desperate people, desperate cities, and a ravaged planet, of madmen and of dragons. Yet somehow, it might also be a time for psychoanalysis. But how? How can we locate ourselves here and now? How can we legitimate our claim to still belong?

Here is Freud in 1927, grounded in drive theory and clinical experience, making his case for the relevance of psychoanalytic thought: “an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is