Koenigsberg, Richard (July 7, 2021)

We are only able to see and know the repressed unconscious because it is projected into the external world. This is how human beings reveal themselves to themselves. Human culture is a "vast arena" in which the logic of the transference works itself out. We cling to culture so desperately; to recover lost parts of the self.

It once seemed we had reached "the end of history." Human beings could become satisfied with their individual lives. Some said the "end of history" theory was "wrong." Well, it became wrong because human beings could not bear the end of history, History was res-erected.

Bin Laden rescued us; saved us from a world that was on the verge of becoming bereft. Princess Di and O. J. Simpson could not fill the emptiness.

How satisfying 9/11 was to many people. The return of the repressed: the world of political fantasy born again.

Brown, Norman O. (1959/1985). Life against Death: the Psychoanalytic meaning of History. (page 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.  Human consciousness can be liberated from the parental (Oedipal) complex only by being liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic state and the patriarchal God.  Thus culture actually does for all mankind what the transference phenomena were supposed to do for the individual."