The Infantile and the Need for Narratives as Essential Myths

Narratives and essential myths carry a fundamental holding function. Human beings need their beliefs to experience a sense of coherence and security. In this essay, I argue that individuals and collectives also need to reflect upon the arbitrariness of their own cultural matrixes. This process is anxiety-provoking and elicits strong individual and social resistance. Analytic institutions, as well as individual analysts, need to develop tools to look at their own cultural surroundings and their embeddedness in these necessary but arbitrary collective narratives. As analyst-citizens, we can expand our tools and skills beyond the individual to the large-group level, to perceive and make conscious our own sociocultural determinants—national and professional ones, historical, and contemporary ones. Intercultural experiences and perspectives can be used to facilitate an insight into the ways cultural narratives shape our identities and bind us to larger collectives. The social unconscious can be brought to light. We can analyze what kind of air was, and is, breathed into us. The author, as a German-American psychoanalyst, uses personal experience to illustrate the necessary working-through process of analyzing unconscious aspects of the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the cultural determinants of our respective individual and collective backgrounds.