Koenigsberg, Richard (July 7, 2021)

"The repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into an external perception in the form of a cultural projection." (Norman O. Brown, see below). 

Psychoanalysis as the bedrock for scholarly inquiry has only just begun. Why this surprising paradox?

Because we identify so deeply within our own cultural reality or mode of being--that we refuse to analyze it. Yet as anthropologists, we know that each culture has it's own form of reality or mode of being. 

I've been studying Chinese (Hong Kong)  culture for thirty years.  . I saw over 200 films. When I first began seeing these films, I felt I was entering a different planet. One has to enter deeply into the Chinese psyche to understand their movies.

Movies convey a certain way of perceiving and experiencing reality. Each culture perceive and experiences the world in a different way. Each culture is shaped by certain dominant fantasies. Each culture constitutes an externalization or projection of  a certain fantasy complex.

 A culture's shared fantasies define who a people is. Hong Kong yan are dominated by revenge fantasies. They project a violence that cannot be imagined in American culture. Watch a film clip if you dare. This kind of scene is not unusual. Chinese parents allow five-year-old children to watch movies like this. The scene seems bizarre, one might say even comical. But it's a Chinese mode of being: endless revenge; the most extreme forms of violence. Apparently, deeply pleasurable to Hong Kong audiences.

And what one observes in Chinese politics--in Hong Kong now--is only a reflection of these Chinese fantasies of  rage, brutality and domination. It's a mode of being. Reality is a function of the psyche; fantasies are externalized into reality.

Politics is not "the cause." Political ideas and ideologies and  modes of behavior are dependent variables; the consequence of the externalization or projection of shared fantasies.

Human beings live in worlds created by a particular fantasy complexes. We are so deeply embedded in our own world of fantasy (reality)--that we don't even know we are living within a fantasy. Fantasies of others may seem unbelievable to us.

And our fantasies may seem unbelievable to others. I once interviewed a Chinese man and asked him what he thought of the phrase or statement, "I think, therefore I am." He didn't "disagree" with the statement: he didn't know what it meant. The idea of identifying being with "thinking" never occurred to this Chinese man. The idea was beyond his imagination. Yet this fantasy (that thinking is being) dominated Western culture for hundreds of years.

The work of psychoanalysis has only just begun.

Brown, Norman O. (1959/1985). Life against Death: the Psychoanalytic meaning of History. (page 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."

"There is nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze except these projections—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—and thus psychoanalysis 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 by being transformed into an external perception in the form of a cultural projection."