The Psychoanalysis of External Reality
Richard Koenigsberg

To enter into and study the “external world,” psychoanalysis extends the principle of psychic determinism into another domain of human experience. Just as human beings produce symptomatic acts and slips-of-the-tongue as an expression of unconscious forces, so are unconscious forces and fantasies expressed in relationship to the external world, shaping ideas and ideologies and structuring behavior in cultural and historical reality.

The first phase of the Freudian revolution was recognition that the psychic life and behavior of individual human beings is motivated by forces of which we are not aware.

The next phase of the Freudian revolution is recognition that entire societies are driven by forces of which human beings are not aware.

Entering the external world, psychoanalysis interprets fantasies that are enacted by societies, indeed by the entire human race, shared fantasies. According to Norman O. Brown, psychoanalysis fulfills itself “only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis.” The task of cultural and historical interpretation may be described as the project of "making conscious the unconscious on the stage of social reality."  

Psychoanalysis fulfills its mission by focusing not only on events occurring within the clinical situation, but also upon events occurring outside the clinical situation—in social reality. Freud called dreams the “royal road to the (individual) unconscious.” I view political ideology as the royal road to the cultural unconscious.