PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
Howard F. Stein |
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"Howard Stein is one of the most astute and trenchant observers of the cultural scene, persistently drawing our attention to the dynamics that drive our actions and compel us to shield us from ourselves. --Robert A. Paul, Professor of Anthropology, Emory University
"One of the most insightful scholars of the Twentieth Century."
Richard Koenigsberg, Director of the Library of Social Science
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Psychogeographic scholars address the questions: Where does culture come from? What keeps culture going? What are the causes of cultural change? Traditional Western science has long contended--tautologously--that culture comes from culture; current history comes from what happened before, and so on.
Scholars of psychogeography trace the unconscious roots of societies. We view people's metaphors and other cultural images as a royal road to the unconscious lives of people. Put another way, the unconscious can be explored in the world of ordinary symbols and ritual (i.e., in large groups) not just in psychoanalytic psychotherapy (i.e., in individuals and therapeutic dyads). Far from being superorganic and automatically internalized, much of culture proceeds from the inside out. Ideas and fantasies are externalized, cognitively reified, and then re-internalized. Culture is a projective screen and stage on which unconscious dramas are enacted and experienced as being located out there.
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- The scope of psychogeography, according to Howard F. Stein, is the unconscious construction of the social and physical world. Men and women fashion the world out of the substance of their bodies. They project psychic contents outward. “Fantasies about the body are transmuted into descriptions of one’s own group and other groups--into shapes and features of the world. Projected outward, the fate of the body becomes the fate of the world.”
- Psychogeography, Stein says, is the study of the psychology and social construction of Boundaries: How we delineate inside and outside, who is to be in included and who excluded. How do personal boundaries come to be felt as co-extensive with the boundaries of one’s group?
- People seek secure boundaries in order to "differentiate between us and them, inside and outside, good and evil." Boundaries must be closed, and “anything which might threaten the perfection of greatness within must be excluded. Psychogeography is the study of how nations build walls in order to protect citizens from “demonized dangers from beyond the borders” (Daniel Brownstein).
- National “security” revolves around excluding not-self others. Secure borders mean making certain that aliens do not enter the national body.
Editorial Reviews
Howard Stein has one of the finest minds engaged in the study of culture in our time--Howard S. Schwartz, Professor of Organizational Behavior, Oakland University
Howard Stein is one of the most astute and trenchant observers of the cultural scene, persistently drawing our attention to the dynamics that drive our actions and compel us to shield us from ourselves. Not only an academic scholar, he also is a committed activist and public intellectual.--Robert A. Paul, Professor of Anthropology, Emory University
One of the world's most original thinkers in the human sciences. --Robert Endelman, Ph.D., author of Psyche and Society
About the Author
HOWARD F. STEIN is a psychological anthropologist and Professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. He is the author of fourteen books and over one hundred scholarly papers.
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