Sometimes insidiously, sometimes abruptly, hastened by walking and talking, one dimly begins to perceive that the world is distinct from the self. Long before one is cast out of preoedipal “Eden” by the demands of the Oedipal father for exclusive possession of mother’s sexuality, one suffers the blessing and curse of self-awareness. One becomes self-exiled.

The world is forever after beyond the self: equated with the tragic hammer blows of separation, loss, and death. Over the course of human history universally, one enterprise that has occupied much time and energy has been the denial, reversal, and undoing of this catastrophic realization. 

"Consensus" is delusionally "reality itself.” It is little wonder that a questioning of group loyalties is felt as betrayal, one invoking wrath if not persecution. The violation of group boundaries by such questioning is experienced as a severing of emotional symbiotic links and rekindles the depression of which the group has been “cured.”

Signal anxiety leads to the extrusion of the noxious question and doubter. In this sense, culture is a profound, if magical, antidepressant, a form of “medication,” so to speak, to which its members become rapidly addicted.

It is not exclusively to the “stimulus situation” or “psychophysics” of change that we must inquire, but to the inner representation or meaning of change to which we must look in order to understand what social change disrupts and activates. The attenuation and disruption of ties, together with the ensuing reparative measures that accompany “culture shock” and “future shock” are incompletely explained without the dynamic concept of separation anxiety.

Here I follow the lead of Anna Freud and Margaret Mahler rather than John Bowlby: that is, the central issue is not the physical distance itself, but the emotional perception of distance, the intrapsychic representation of personal distinctness or separateness. Mahler writes:

The concept of separation means differentiation of the self from the symbiotic object as an intrapsychic process. By “separation anxiety” we do not mean the behavioral sequelae and reactions to physical separation from the love object, as John Bowlby has used the term, but rather the gradual yet inevitable intrapsychic sensing of a danger signal anxiety on the part of a small child during the normal separation-individuation process.

Clarence G. Schultz, M.D., notes that

separation as an intrapsychic phenomenon is equivalent to representational differentiation of self from object. In the second use, we have an “extra-psychic separation” equivalent to the parting from (or loss of) the object. 

One notes further that in “culture shock” and “future shock” alike, the “loss of culture” which represents the catastrophic crisis of identity is experienced as object-loss. Culture (or “group”) is a fantasized maternal object with which the tribalist feels himself to be inextricably tied and upon which he feels himself to be wholly dependent. Culture is likewise a veritable Mahlerian “dual unity” whose “body” the tribalist does not distinguish from his very selfhood.

It is therefore little wonder that tribalists and anthropologists alike commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in their conceptualization and phenomenology of culture: for one truly experiences his group to be “superorganic,” that is, transcending the self yet part of the (symbiotic) self. 

In this formulation the loss of culture is the fantasized loss of an object-environment that mirrors and embodies the “goodness” upon which one depends. “Culture” experienced as an entity is but one member of a class of what I have called symbolic objects whose psychic function is to represent and perpetuate object relations that have been disrupted by death or other forms of loss.
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