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A paradox in my material creates a problem in communicating it to colleagues in both psychoanalysis and social sciences. On the one hand, the straightforward ideas and relationships I have to report may be obscured by unfamiliar words and concepts necessarily drawn from an unusually wide range of disciplines. And on the other hand, some of the ideas themselves are so commonplace that the structure into which they are built could seem banal.
My thesis is (1) that during the last ten thousand years the psychosocial identity and self-esteem of the human species have increasingly grown out of conditions of competition and low social synergy, leading to the conflict, terrorism, and war that now jeopardize us, and (2) that there is on the human agenda a current shift toward greater cooperation and high social synergy which we could recognize and foster through modern communications as our only means of survival were it not for repression, denial, and resistance mobilized against this shift in defense of identity and self-esteem. My thesis is, in other words, that humankind now faces extinction because we cannot yet bear to become conscious of and implement what we have learned about the route of survival.
This makes rescuing our imperiled species not just an economic/ideological/political crisis, but a kind of psychoanalytic emergency. Not that I endorse the naive old notion that psychoanalysis can change the world by treating enough individuals. Rather I will