Another problem with implementing Brown’s vision has been the direction of academic thought. Brown states that the human being is an animal that “represses himself and creates culture or society in order to repress himself.” Most of the academic world—not to mention liberal thought—has been allied against this view: human beings do not repress themselves; rather we are accosted by various forms of “oppression” that can barely be resisted. We are enslaved by the power of hegemonic discourses.

In typical academic thought, human beings have nothing to do with the societies that we create: they exist in another dimension of space and time. It’s as if something emanating from “up above” imposes its will upon us. But how are we to account for the nature of those discourses that constitute culture—and the power that we invest in them?

Brown states that culture—like the transference—exists in order to allow us to “project the infantile complexes into concrete reality.” We enact our fantasies in the external world. Human culture, Brown says, is “one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out.” The “infantile fantasies that create the universal human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered,” but their “derivatives in human culture can.”

We live today within a bizarre, violent political world, which people critique and oppose. However, most of those who do so are under the illusion that society functions according to rational principles—and that rationality can be brought to bear upon this world. But what if this is not the case? A new space opens up—for understanding and potentially for transformation—once we recognize that political ideology and many other forms of culture are based on the projection of unconscious fantasy into the external world.

Brown states that “Projections, with their fetishistic displacement of inner fantasies, distort the external world.” Well, perhaps “distort” is not the correct word since many cultural forms are based precisely on projection—the displacement of inner fantasies into the outer world. Politics, in particular, is that dimension of society that allows neurotic and psychotic fantasies to be projected into reality and enacted.

However, we do not call the political world neurotic or psychotic, however “insane” it appears to be. We don’t have a language to characterize psychopathology that occurs in society. Indeed, we often fail to recognize the world that we have created as our own. Societal ideologies or institutions such as warfare seem to be “out there on their own.” It often seems as if what occurs in culture comes to us from afar: from another world. As Brown puts it, projections bring the inner world into external reality, but only “under the sign of negation or alienation.”

Who created the symbolic order? Who creates discourse? What is the source of the “power” of society?” Freud observed that the mythological conception of the universe, which survives in the most modern religions, is fundamentally psychology projected into the external world. Brown suggests that not just mythology, but the entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Stephen Spender, “The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.”

What a radical idea! What an obvious idea? That we human beings are the source of that which exists. We have created various social forms because they represent the fulfillment of our desires and function to allay anxiety. It’s easy now to say that reality is a social construction. But constructed based on what? By whom?

We have no trouble acknowledging this truth—that human beings are the source of cultural forms—when it comes to airplanes or air-conditioners or baseball games or Hershey bars. Obviously, these social forms exist because they represent the fulfillment of our desires. We have a great deal more difficulty acknowledging that we human beings are the source of war, genocide and the race to create atom bombs. With regards to these societal institutions, we would prefer to believe that we have nothing to do with them.

This is what Brown means when he says that when we project unconscious fantasies into the world to create society, we perceive what manifests “only under the general sign of negation or denial.” We want and need to project complexes and conflicts and fantasies into the external world. However, we deny that we are the source of what we have created. This splitting off of culture from the self represents a fundamental and extremely powerful dynamic. We imagine that the world of culture exists as a domain of reality separate from us.

One may suggest that the following dynamic—particularly in the domain of politics—governs the creation of many cultural forms. First, a fantasy is projected into an ideological structure. The shared fantasy establishes the shape of an ideology or institution and is the source of the energy that sustains it. Second, human beings deny that they are responsible for the institutions and forms of behavior that have come into being as a consequence of fantasies that have been projected into reality. We pretend that the ideology or institution exists as a dimension of society—but that we have had nothing to do with creating or sustaining it.

Brown suggests that once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch (or recognize that talk from the couch is still an activity in culture), then it becomes plain that there is “nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze” except these projected fantasies that constitute culture. Thus, Brown says, psychoanalysis “fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis.”

But who will psychoanalyze the shared fantasies—those projections that are the source of the nightmare of history? Apparently not the psychoanalysts huddled away in their “clinics.” In my view, there has been nothing more destructive to Freud’s aspirations than the identification of psychoanalysis with the “clinical situation.”

Some say that Freud and psychoanalysis are passé. In actuality, Freud’s vision has yet to be understood or actualized. True, people nowadays seem to have less of a desire to be “psychoanalyzed”. But neurosis and psychosis don’t happen simply within individuals. Neurosis and psychosis are all around us, embedded within civilization. Perhaps the domain of politics especially is where human beings manifest and enact their deepest fantasies and anxieties.

It’s difficult to know and say this. We are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that civilization itself contains or constitutes a radical form of pathology. We are oppressed and repressed by this symbolic object—“society” or “the nation”—in which we have invested so much psychic energy. We tremble before it, lest it destroy us, yet refuse to abandon it: like an abused child that refuses to separate from mother.