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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give sense to that life, the empty space, the gap is enormous.
DOES IT HELP US BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE PUBLIC NARRATIVES being offered and our felt experiences to identify and understand the psychic mechanisms required to live here now? In these two papers, now five years old, Neil Altman and I set out to capture the underlying psychic dynamics that permit the current pace of life and the mood it generates. We believed our combined psychoanalytic training, clinical, and personal experiences offered us a unique window into the interior domain of life in American society. The public narratives (ideology) we are offered relating to freedom, democracy, and opportunity create a complex veneer through which it is often difficult to locate ourselves or see through to what is actually going on within and around us. As psychoanalysts, we know how difficult it is to penetrate beyond the wall of fantasy to reality—to challenge that creative world of illusion and dreaming that can become a barrier to embracing the real world in all of its splendor and disappointment. The world of public fantasy (ideology) is equally, if not more, difficult to penetrate to the realities of societal life. Our investment in that ideology (which unwittingly infiltrates our fantasy lives) is enormous.