The Psychical Realities of Modern Culture

The question posed here is a simple one: what contribution does the unconscious make to any given cultural manifestation and how does culture impinge on the stability of the inner world? So much cultural discussion even involving psychological and social issues ignores the impact of the dynamically repressed unconscious. Yet unconscious meanings and significations are always present and operative alongside our conscious and rational thoughts and actions. The avoidance of the intimate relationship between culture and the unconscious makes much public discussion seem bland and sometimes totally misleading. A culture dominated by a scientific logical positivist point of view throws up its hands in horror and disbelief in face of human atrocities. And yet the media are filled daily with news of those insanities.

Another question arises: how can the psychoanalytically oriented observer make an adequate interpretation, observation, comment on any cultural trend without it sounding too predictable, stereotyped or reductionist? This is a familiar problem, and one that psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists come up against every day with their patients: how to make an interpretation in response to the patient's productions that is both empathic and objective, precise but also open-ended, intelligent but not omniscient, and above all how to reach out to and support that relatively healthy aspect of self in an attempt to expose and dislodge psychopathology. One can only begin to be effective in this respect by allowing oneself to become immersed in the patient's psychical reality, by being a container for his/her projections, and consequently by becoming affected and at the same time or shortly afterwards trying to think about the experience, to grasp some fragments and articulate them. It is only from this sort of perspective that comment can be made on cultural phenomena. My book The Denial of the Psyche is written from a practitioner's point of view. It will therefore