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One form of psychoanalytic social criticism locates an object central to political and social issues
and then describes how that object becomes a repository of various fantasy projections that govern or dictate fantasmatic rather than just or realistic relations with that object. For instance, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's The Anatomy of Prejudices describes how anti-semitism, racism, homophobia, and sexism are the expression of classes of fantasies generated by cultural and personal history. In her analysis, particular groupings of people are assigned a role in the fantasy script of a dominant culture. In another analysis, Lewis D. Wurgraft's The Imperial Imagination describes how British-ruled India, as an object, served a fantasy space for the acting out of primitive magical thought and narcissistic fantasy. Quoting Geza Roheim that “our first responses to the frustration of reality is magic” (55), Wurgraft documents how British citizens repeatedly found India a place of romance, magic, and enchantment. Karl Figlio's book follows a similar analysis, but its object of focus offers a more complex and elusive object for analysis: nature, the natural world, the inanimate ground of scientific study.
Figlio situates his work neatly in relation to some noteworthy philosophical and historical issues. What allowed the shift in the Western world to a modern worldview that grasps nature as an inanimate object, whereas before nature had always been animate, alive, filled with gods and spirits and supernatural forces? Figlio points out that Freud usefully described our view of reality changing as the result of three great blows to our narcissism. The first was our recognition through Copernicus that we were not at the center of the universe. The second was Darwin's suggestion that we were not fundamentally different from animals. The third was Freud's argument that we were not masters of our conscious minds. To these three wounds, Figlio wants to add a fourth: “There is a fourth