Dreams, Psychoanalysis and the Emergent Economic Electronic Culture1

This article is an attempt to begin to weave together Freud's work — on dreams here envisioned as the original model for virtual reality — and from Fromm's work — on the impact of the market on personality. The contributions of these two psychoanalysts provide a necessary dual foundation for an understanding of emerging aspects of human psychology that are evolving, at the beginning of the 21^st Century, alongside the profound influence of the electronically driven global market. It is time for psychoanalysis to engage more fully in the study of cultural forces. While it is easy to disregard dreams, both in the general culture and of late in psychoanalysis itself, dreams and their interpretation have always been central in human living, in the development of religion and in the birth of psychoanalysis as our own secular religion. Dreams, in their disembodiment and in their fluidity of information transformations have served as one model for developments within cyber culture and virtual living. The destruction of nature is seen as an underlying theme in the development of compatible relativist-subjectivist philosophies and in the growth of cyberculture. Thus, Freud's insights into dreams and Fromm's into the marketing personality are both crucial to an understanding of major contemporary forces.