Culture and Psychoanalysis

The concern with literature, the fine arts, film and more recently also music is an established part of psychoanalytic discourse. It builds on the great legacy that Freud left us in his writings on literature and art – to which film and music have been added in the last two decades.

By contrast, there is no established psychoanalytic tradition of reflecting on culture and socio-cultural processes of development and change, although Freud also left us some fundamental works on these themes. In his principal works on the psychoanalysis of culture, Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, he formulated some proposed answers to the questions of how culture emerges and develops, as well as the role of the individual in culture. He also examined the cultural institutions of art and religion, the latter in The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism.

Freud’s above-mentioned works on the psychoanalysis of culture have borne fruit in various ways in other scientific fields and these have proceeded to have an effect on psychoanalysis itself in turn. I should mention, for example, the cultural anthropology work carried out by René Girard, who, against the backdrop of Totem and Taboo, emphasizes sacrifice – among other things – as a key factor in the emergence of culture. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of these re-importations, the impression emerges that reflection on cultural questions outside the realm of art is a poor relation of psychoanalysis.

After Freud, psychoanalysis was constituted as clinical psychoanalysis. This raises the question as to whether the psychoanalysis of culture, understood as applied psychoanalysis, is peripheral and ultimately superfluous, while analysing films, literature and so on can still be understood as a form of stimulating exercise for clinical practice.

A specific depth perspective would be missing if any attempt were made to understand culture and society without psychoanalysis. On the other hand, psychoanalysis would remain blind and obtuse if it ceased to make its specific contribution to socio-cultural self-reflection, and did not allow itself to be critically and creatively stimulated in reflection on its practice and its models by the socio-cultural realm. Freud the clinical psychoanalyst would not have existed at all without the Freud who was deeply connected with culture and, conversely, Freud the psychoanalytic cultural theorist is indissociably connected with Freud the clinician.

From:
Gerhard Schneider - Culture and Psychoanalysis (www.ipa.org)