The cultural experience

Stating that culture is of major importance to psychoanalysis is commonplace. Yet fathoming the relationship between culture and psychoanalysis is all but a simple work. On one hand, culture seems the main field of what is called “applied psychoanalysis,” that is, “the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to explanatory, methodological, or technological problems arising in disciplines or human endeavours other than psychoanalysis” (Edelson, 1988, p. 157). On the other hand, cultural products, especially artistic and literary works, have been essential to the development of psychoanalysis, Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex included (Freud, 1900). One could note a reciprocity of influence between culture and psychoanalysis (Esman, 1998).

Freud observed early enough a parallel between the processes involved in the making of cultural products such as poetry and the noncritical self-observation required in psychoanalysis. He writes:

I have noticed in my psycho-analytical work that … the self-observer … need only take the trouble to suppress his critical faculty. If he succeeds in doing that, innumerable ideas come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never have got hold … the adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge ‘of their own free will’ and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The ‘involuntary thoughts’ are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. In a passage in his correspondence with Kórner … Schiller replies to his friend's complaint of insufficient productivity: ‘The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more concrete by a simile. It seems a bad t