This essay presents a view of bourgeois society's ways of orienting families toward the bourgeois socioeconomic adaptational system. It also places the rise of psychoanalysis within that context. Then it considers what concerns might press toward the development of a postbourgeois understanding of personal and social life, and how such an understanding might influence analytic psychotherapy.

The essay's concluding argument is that exploration of what has been called “species consciousness” might come to be as influential in postbourgeois psychotherapy as exploration of sexuality has been for “classical” psychoanalysis.