Comment by Richard Koenigsberg: In The Dream of Culture, one of the most important anthropological texts of the Twentieth Century (INTRODUCTION DIRECTLY BELOW), Howard Stein proposes that much of culture is not 'like' dreaming, in the sense of poetic license’s love of fantastic simile. Nor is it mere analogy. It is day’s counterpart to night. In culture, "ours is the tragic conceit to "dream that we are not dreaming, and to make wakefulness the most heinous sin." 

Stein's assertion that culture is form of dreaming seemed fantastic when originally put forth. Today the idea seems anything but fantastic. Day after day, those who participate in "culture" enter into a fantastic dream; a nightmare from which they are unable to awaken.

Fantastic, bizarre assertions appear in the domain of politics at an accelerated rate. Laughter turns to horror. What seemed ludicrous one day is taken for "reality" the next day.

Yet as I walk out into the street in Elmhurst, New York City, the nightmare disappears. The sun is shining on both sides of the street. People amble by one another. They purchase Big Macs at the mall. The nightmare dissolves; it is nowhere to be seen or found.

Still, the dream-world conveyed by "media" is experienced as "reality" by so many. A dream of reality compelling to so many people, "sucked in" to a fantastic world; unable to resist the excitement and danger it depicts and conveys. 

People use terms like "lying." I often thought in terms of "psychotic delusion." However, based on conversations with my colleague Andrew Hammer, I'm persuaded that we obtain deeper understanding by viewing today's politic "world" as a dream that many people are having at the same time; mixing "reality" and the fantastic. 

At times, today's political world (closely) resembles a Marx Brothers movie (Duck Soup comes to mind click previous link to take a look). But not comical. More like a nightmare-come-true, with a master magician narrating the horror, supported by his "followers."

But most importantly supported by the intelligent ones; those who embrace rationality and "the truth." They are sucked in most deeply. Not recognizing that it is not possible to argue against a dream, which exists in a place beyond truth or falsity.

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HOWARD F. STEIN.
INTRODUCTION TO THE DREAM OF CULTURE

What is culture? Where is it located? What is it for? Where does it come from? Why do cultures persist over time? How do cultures change, and at what levels of experience? Why do people join, identify their very core selves and destinies with, live and die for, their cultures? Why for some and not for others? Why do people leave one culture for another—or never leave?

These are questions that have long vexed social scientists of all disciplines, and before social scientists, philosophers and theologians. Who and what we are as human beings (and each group, from tribe to biomedical specialty, regards itself as the human beings) is a question every person asks and attempts to answer as if his or her meaning to life depended on it—and not only anthropologists who study culture professionally.

Human beings, for most of our lives, and human culture, for most of its history, strive to keep emotionally and intellectually asleep while priding ourselves, through our cultural products, on being wide awake. Just as the work of dreaming is to safeguard sleep (Freud 1900), much of the work of culture is likewise to keep us from thinking, feeling, and knowing too much during waking hours.

Much of culture is not “like” dreaming, in the sense of poetic license’s love of fantastic simile. Culture is not dream’s parable. It is not merely somehow “like” a dream. Nor is it mere analogy. It is day’s counterpart to night. In culture, ours is the tragic conceit to dream that we are not dreaming, and to make wakefulness the most heinous sin. Dreaming together is our sensing together—consensus—in cultural groups.

Culture is our dreaming while we are wide awake. It draws upon mental processes which occur during sleep (Freud 1900). Sleep and culture thus “protect” each other even as they are largely isomorphic with one another. They do this often to our peril, for they prevent us from knowing, from feeling, what we most dread.

And in so protecting us, they place us at even greater peril. They doom us to look for our dangers and hopes in the wrong places, to repeat history—despite George Santayana’s warn­ing—in the guise of making history anew, of reversing it. If culture is like dreaming, then dreaming is equally like culture in the very nature of its processes.

The work of culture is largely also the work of dreams. Reality (the Reality Principle, in Freud’s model of mental functioning) is far more elusive than we dare admit. We weave our tenuous net over anxiety’s abyss with the substance of dreaming. To say this is not to stretch some metaphor, to take literary license, but to describe common processes and their unconscious source.

People in groups, awake, do with their shared symbolic and ritual materials, their technology and their environment, what we each also do while asleep: wish what we may dare, and disguise our wishes; contrive our forbidden victories and stage our defeats; attempt to master what we have found overwhelming.

Culture, as dream, is wish and resistance—compromise, mask, disguise. Culture and dreams are part of each other, twin (isomorphic) facets of the same process, just as are “culture” and “personality,” (as Spiro showed four decades ago [1951]).

Awake as asleep, we use defense “mechanisms” such as condensation, displacement, symbolization, projection, and reversal, to disclose and to hide, to reveal and to conceal, to give our id its due while bowing to the ego’s conscience and ideals—sometimes gently guiding, sometimes vicious—its superego.

I explore the work of culture as if it were a species of dream-work. That is, we humans are doing much the same in “reality” during our waking hours that we do when we sleep. Much of the paradoxical work of culture is to reassure that our sleep will not be disturbed. We stay in cultural sleep to maintain, at least symbolically, our earliest symbioses with mother, family, and group.

To awaken from the dreaming of culture is to feel separateness, loss, mortality, and grief. We “adapt” to the shadows of our childhood (La Barre 1991) cast on the landscape of nature and society. If much of dreaming takes place on a dream screen upon which are projected our unconscious wishes, fantasies, and feelings, likewise much of human culture is constructed of projection upon the screen we objectify and name as “culture” or “society.”

We project these “hopes and fears of all the years”—as the tender Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” so yearningly sings—upon and into the social symbols and institutions of politics, religion, law, cosmology, economics, and so on. In child-rearing we likewise project wishes, fantasies, disavowed parts of ourselves upon infants (even earlier, in imagining the contents of the uterus, what and who they will become).

These become internalized variously as “introjects,” internal objects, living as haunting presences, as “ego-id” components injected into the early id, making it (together with the primitive superego) feel monstrous if not intolerable as a part of the experienced self. Nature also becomes a screen upon which we project idealizations and demonizations heir to infancy and infancy’s familiality (La Barre 1954).

We identify with what we have removed from ourselves— identify with it in others. It then resonates with what we have incorporated into ourselves. The dreamwork of much of culture—which is to say, much of human history and misery everywhere—is a kind of cinema in which we do not know, and do not-allow ourselves to realize, we are only “at the movies,” that the film is a replaying of our lives. This brings us back to Plato’s allegory of the cave (The Republic, Book 25) and makes it psychodynamically astute.

We are not only ignorant, enthralled by our illusions, but we have deep reasons to keep ourselves ignorant. Alas, one recourse we all take to gird ourselves against our own inner truth (that we are the source of our precious projections) is the delusion of Realism (essentialism, Platonism: “I name it, therefore it is”), according to which we objectify Nature, Reality, History, Economics, even God in order to avoid ourselves. We use, join, groups to flee from our solitariness, to keep ourselves dreaming.

I would rewrite Robert Paul’s account above of the causal relation between dream and culture by saying that, since they are made of the same stuff, the process goes continuously both ways. Just as the dream, the private revelation, of the shaman may be the foundation for some later, socially shared myth or legend, so likewise, the unconscious work of the wakeful person also wends its way into dreams.

The work of dreams (and of dreaming) and of culture derive from the same unconscious source. At times, the unconscious might be better observed, less obstructed by defense and secondary process, through the analysis of dreams than of cultural materials. Yet this does not always hold. Dreams and dream interpretation are themselves shaped by and borrow from cultural materials—they are part of dreams’ disguise and later secondary revision; in this sense, dreams are culturally constructed or constituted.

We would better claim, however, that under certain circum­stances, either dreams or culture are more transparent to viewing the unconscious. We could argue equally well that dreams are part of culture, or that culture is part of dreams. The issue becomes partly definitional, and partly causal. Neither dream nor culture are “chicken” and “egg,” but derive from the same process; and further, both dream and culture affect one another, are part of one another.

Further, daytime culture expands and confirms night-dream’s guile and plausibility through group consensus and ritual (La Barre 1972). Do we not say in American folk language that we “try to make our dreams come true?” In an instrumental (reality, purposive) culture saturated with expressive (symbolic) forces, we try to coerce reality into fulfilling wish, often conjuring instead our worst nightmares, “accidentally on purpose,” as George Devereux (1980) was so fond of saying.

By that measure, Homo sapiens is an advanced primate capable of plasticity and adaptation, and one hopelessly enchanted with our own universal, aboriginal Dreamtime.
Blessed with stereoscopic vision, we nonetheless brachiate from limb to perilous limb with visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads. We become worse off, more dangerous to ourselves, to others, and to our planet, when we are widest awake.

Through the detour of the unconscious, we use culture to elude ourselves. If it is the astonishing musical achieve­ment of artists such as Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Bartok to awaken us from our cultural slumbers, it is the task of culture for most of human history to protect our slumbers, to keep us dreaming. It is culture—as-dream, and our painful, reluctant, ever incomplete awakening from it—our separation from it in our recognition of it as a dream—that is the theme of this book (Koenigsberg 1989).

The world over, each “we” considers our culture to be the finest flowering of life and the measure of humanity. To each “we,” our culture is special, unique, distinct, even chosen, elected or created by the gods. In one way or another, every group calls itself “the people,” “the chosen people,” “the human beings.”

Scarcely realizing that culture never and nowhere exists as a distinct entity or force separate from ourselves, we fend off the painful yet potentially liberating knowledge that we create and continuously revise our culture, that we huddle in groups of “us”-exclusiveness, that we reify our groupishness into Platonic essences, to deny our separateness, our frightening sexuality, our very mortality.

In construing our culture as an independent, self-standing entity beyond ourselves, a symbolic object to which we imagine ourselves belonging, we transfer feelings from our earliest mothering figures, families and memories to groups that become the successors to them and “in” which we try to capture the safety and security, to make us again at one with our parental nurturer and protector.

Culture embodies the dangerous, often maladaptive paradox of absolute loyalty among those who are physically grown-ups but whose admission price of membership and belonging is the tacit consensus not to grow up beyond the culture of the group. What might be known of the self and of the world must be sacrificed on the altar of sacred culture.

Culturally, ignorance is bliss. But at an enormous price. From Galileo to Darwin, Einstein and Freud, the lesson even of Western “scientific” culture is the same as in so-called primitive societies: novel ideas that might be true but which threaten the very ground people stand on are denounced so that what must be true can for defensive purposes be maintained.

What novelty we keep we usually assimilate to the old and familiar, hoist to a remote ego ideal, or degrade into Kitsch. “Paradigm shifts,” those epochal changes of mind and heart named by Thomas Kuhn, are weighted by resistance, often in the form of massive, retrenching narcissism.

Richard Koenigsberg