Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History Norman O. Brown

According to Norman O. Brown (1959), anything arising from within seeking to become conscious must “transform itself into external perceptions.” Since there is no direct channel of communication between consciousness and the unconscious, repressed unconscious energies must “go out into external reality before they can be perceived by consciousness.” Repressed impulses must first “find real objects in the external world and attach themselves to real objects before their nature can become manifest to the subject.”

One may study the unconscious by observing how phantasies become bound to objects in the external world. Psychoanalytic data has been derived from the clinical situation. Brown proposes that we may know the mind by studying ideas and objects in the external world, observing how fantasies, desires and conflicts become bound to these ideas and objects. This is the project I call the "psychoanalysis of external reality."

In the academic world, concepts such as “discourse” and “narrative” have dominated social theory. Discourse and narrative (forms of "culture") are viewed as independent variables--conceived as structures or dimensions of reality. The mind, according to this view, is created as human beings are “pushed and pulled by discourses.”

But how to explain culture itself, the nature and shape of those discourses and narratives that become dominant within a given society? Brown theorizes that culture forms exist in order to allow us to "project infantile phantasies into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered.” Culture becomes the dependent variable and unconscious phantasies the independent variable. How do unconscious phantasies and conflicts give rise to and shape cultural forms? What is the transformational process converting unconscious ideas into elements of the external world?

We human beings are the source. Culture forms are externalizations of unconscious phantasies and conflicts. Although we tend to deny this reality; to pretend that culture exists independently of human beings; that it exists as "external reality," an autonomous realm of being that more or less "goes on by itself." I propose the "psychoanalysis of external reality:" How do human beings create reality by projecting their desires, phantasies and conflicts into the world?

The concept of transference grows out of the clinical situation. Broadening the meaning of this term, Herman Nunberg (1990) states that “Transference is a projection.” The patient’s inner and unconscious relations with his first libidinal objects are externalized. The patient displaces emotions belonging to an unconscious representation of a repressed object to a “mental representation of an object in the external world.”

The tendency to transfer infantile experiences into reality and to enact them can be observed, Nunberg states, “not only in the transference situation but also independently of it.” Transference allows energies and affects bound to inner objects to become attached to objects in the external world. Nunberg speaks of the urge to “establish identity of perception through repetition of past experience.”

Why imagine that transference occurs only in the clinical situation? This mechanism is operative at all times and all places—as human beings push inner mental contents outward; project unconscious desires and fantasies and conflicts into the external world.

Brown states that culture—like the transference—is created by the repetition compulsion, constantly producing “new editions of the infantile conflicts.” Culture is “one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out.” The fantasies that create the human neurosis cannot directly be apprehended or mastered, but “their derivatives in human culture can.” Culture, Brown asserts, “does for all mankind what the transference was supposed to do for the individual.”