Pages:  118 pages Publisher:   Library of Social Science Author:   M. D. Faber Date of Publication:   June 1, 2013 Paperback:   List Price $34.95   ISBN: 091504207X Hardcover:   List Price $39.95   ISBN: 0915042088 For information on ordering this book through Amazon, click here. Because we believe The Withdrawal of Human Projection is an important book—and wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com—providing your name and the name of your college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover). Professor emeritus of English at the University of Victoria, M. D. Faber is a renowned authority on the psychology of religion and author of nine books, including Culture and Consciousness, The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief, and The Magic of Prayer: An Introduction to the Psychology of Faith.

We are immersed within culture
like fish in the sea

We experience culture as if air that we breathe. Or one may say that human beings are like fish within water—embraced, encompassed and incorporated by “society.” In many post-modern theories, there is barely a concept of a self prior to or separate from the symbolic order. Some theorists contend that our psyche is constituted by nothing more or less than the “discourses that push and pull us.”

Scholars focus on the inescapable power of discourse, yet rail against the dominating, oppressive dimensions of society. The term “hegemony” conveys the idea of culture and its ideologies as an omnipresent—and potentially destructive—force.

But what is “culture?” Why is there such an intimate connection between our minds and society? In The Withdrawal of Human Projection, M. D. Faber departs from conventional approaches—providing a psychological analysis of our need or desire for culture. What motivates us to bind ourselves to the symbolic order?

How is it possible to separate
from beloved objects?

Faber begins with the child’s attachment to mother and family. We experience a deep, profound tie to early love objects. Simultaneously, we are compelled to separate from these objects and move into reality—a place that does not contain the mother. How is it possible to achieve separation from that to which we are so deeply attached? This is the subject of Faber’s book.

Separation from our mother and families, Faber says, generates a “life-long mourning process,” triggering an endless “search for replacement, for someone or something to fill the gap.” The child deals with separation by choosing “transitional objects”—blankets, teddy bears, story books—that afford the magical or illusory belief that one is “staying with the caretaker at the same time he or she is moving away from her or giving her up.” We bind to objects that “symbolize and evoke the comforting presence of the mother.”

Our relationship to culture, according to Faber, derives from our relationship to transitional objects. Cultural objects are glorified, puffed-up transitional objects. We bind ourselves tightly to the cultural domain as part of a ceaseless struggle to come to terms with separation and loss; to solidify and stabilize the self.

Ambivalence

Faber hypothesizes that we are tied to the institutions of society out of the tie that binds us to parental figures within. Our struggle to establish “dual unity” binds us to the objects of our inner world, and hence to an overestimation or attachment to cultural objects that become “projective exemplifications of either acceptance or rejection; in other words, psychological symbols.”

At the same time that we seek to maintain the tie to mother, we struggle to separate. Insofar as cultural objects symbolize mother, our relationship to these objects is inherently ambivalent. We simultaneously seek to fuse with these objects and to differentiate—separate—ourselves from them. We come feel dominated and oppressed—tormented— by the very ideologies, ideals and cultural objects to which we have become deeply attached.

Contemporary scholarship views the power of culture to shape the self as inevitable and nearly inescapable. Lacanians state that “is no other but the other.” Submitting to culture, we become “subjects of the symbolic order.”

However, there are other perspectives. Books like Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents suggest a clear distinction between society, on the one hand, and the individual, on the other. The fact that human beings suffer from—and can perform a critique of—civilization implies that there is a part of the self that is not bound to civilization. Many social movements subsequent to Freud’s book built on the assumption that liberation entails “throwing off” the yoke of society.

Return to emptiness

Faber turns to Buddhism as a method for achieving a "break" from the symbolic order. Whereas Descartes said, I think therefore I am, Buddhist tradition embraces an idea that is precisely the opposite of this French conception. Buddhism—Asian philosophy, generally—contends that thinking impedes discovery and understanding of the self. One becomes who one is by abandoning thoughts—returning to the space of emptiness.

Indian philosopher Rajneesh explains: “Thoughts are like clouds in the sky; they have no roots in you. They come and go. You’re just a victim, and you unnecessarily become identified with them.” The self, according to this view, is not the thinker, but the being who experiences and observes thoughts.

Within the symbolic order, identity is achieved through “identification.” We find it natural and normal to define our selves in terms of our relationship to cultural ideas and objects. People identify with nations, with a political position (“left” or “right”), with an ethnic group, a baseball team (becoming a “Yankee fan” or a “Met fan”), religious belief systems, a musical performer (becoming a Lady Gaga fan), with an actor or actress, or an ideology (libertarianism or socialism).

Identifications are the foundation for what Faber calls “ordinary consciousness.” We define ourselves by projecting existence into cultural objects. Our attachment to these objects replicates attachment to infantile love objects. Living through identification, human beings imagine that they cannot do without—live without—these beloved cultural objects.

Buddhism seeks separation from the symbolic order: abandonment of cultural objects: return to our “original nature.” The idea of “emptiness” lies at the heart of Buddhism. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki explains that emptiness is not merely a state of mind, but the “original essence of mind which Buddha experienced.” Emptiness is the pure, inner space where language, discourse and society cannot enter.

Liberation from the Symbolic Order

Buddhism—separation from the symbolic order—implies the possibility of liberation from ideologies and hegemonic societal structures. Charlotte Joko Beck states that the purpose of Buddhist practice is to “die slowly, step by step, gradually disidentifying with wherever we’re caught in.” As we identify ourselves with less and less, we can “include more and more in our lives.”

Disidentification means withdrawing psychic energy from cultural objects to which we had been attached. Many of us are so deeply invested in culture that we can hardly conceive or imagine such a state of being. We all are “fans”—people who are fanatically committed or devoted to cultural objects.

We imagine that we benefit enormously by virtue of our relationship to society. Yet, we often feel tormented. Culture (e. g., the mass-media) presents an endless, eternal stream of gratification. We feel that we are energized by this connection.

Perhaps, however, an image from The Matrix depicts the true state of affairs. Human beings are batteries—perpetually feeding the symbolic order. We are tied to society by an umbilical cord, precisely as an unborn child is tied to its mother. We feel we are being nourished by the images that enter from the Matrix. In reality, we are feeding the Matrix with the substance of our bodies.