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154—The unconscious can become conscious only through projection onto the external world.  But human culture is a set of projections of the repressed unconscious. Like the transference, human culture is created by the repetition compulsion and constantly produces new editions of the infantile conflicts.  Like the transference, human culture exists in order to project the infantile complexes into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered.

155—Human culture is thus one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out; the infantile fantasies which create the universal human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered, but their derivatives in human culture can. 

168—As Ferenczi said, the tendency to rediscover what is loved in all the things of the hostile outer world is the primitive source of symbolism...Nonbodily cultural objects (sublimations) inherit the fantasies, and thus man in culture, homo sublimans, is man dreaming while awake.

Fantasies, like everything else, exist only in the present, as hallucinations in the present, and must be attached to objects in the present.  According to psychoanalytic theory, after their detachment from the body (in Freud's blunt style, after masturbation is given up) they are projected into reality, forming that opaque medium called culture, through which we apprehend and manipulate reality.

But the ego cannot get rid of the body: it can only negate it, and by negating it, dialectically affirm it.  Hence all symbolism, even in the highest flights of sublimation, remains body symbolism...Infantile sexuality (in the infantile sexual organizations) negates the world and attempts to make a world out of its own body.  Sublimation negates the body of childhood and seeks to construct the lost body of childhood in the external world.  Infantile sexuality is an autoplastic compensation for the loss of the Other; sublimation is an alloplastic compensation for the loss of the Self.

170—The repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into an external perception, by being projected.  According to Freud, the mythological conception of the universe, which survives even in the most modern religions, is only psychology projected onto the outer world.  Not just mythology but the entirety of culture is a projection.  In the words of Spender, "The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts."

The first breakthrough of the insight which flowers in psychoanalysis occurs in German idealism, in Hegel's notion of the world as the creation of spirit and, even more, in Novalis notion of the world as the creation of the magic power of fantasy.  In fact, there is a certain loss of insight reflected in the tendency of psychoanalysis to isolate the individual from culture. 

Once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch or rather, once we recognize that talk from the couch is still an activity in culture, it become plain that there is nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze except these projections—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—and thus fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis.  It also follows that consciousness of the repressed unconscious is itself a cultural and historical product, since the repressed unconscious can become conscious only be being transformed into an external perception in the form of a cultural projection.

171—Human consciousness, in addition to the function of exploring the outside world, is burdened with the additional task of discovering the sequestered inner world. Projections, with their fetishistic displacement of inner fantasies, must distort the external world...Projections bring the inner world to consciousness only under the general sign of negation or alienation; their relation to the inner world must be denied.

281—The basic characteristic of sublimation is the desexualization of sexual energy by its redirection toward new objects.  But as we have seen, desexualization means disembodiment.  New objects must substitute for the human body, and there is no sublimation without the projection of the human body into things; the dehumanization of man is his alienation of his own body.  He thus acquires a soul (the higher spirituality of sublimation), but the soul is located in things.  

284-5—The death instinct is the core of the human neurosis.  It begins with the human infant's incapacity to accept separation from the mother, that separation which confers individual life on all living organisms and which in all living organisms at the same time leads to death.  It is in the nature of finite things, says Hegel, that the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.  Hence the incapacity of the human species to die, and therefore to live, begins at birth, in what psychoanalysis calls the birth trauma.  Thus the Platonic argument for immortality really amounts to a denial that we were ever born.  Humanity is that species of animal which cannot die.