CULTURE AS NEUROSIS
Richard Koenigsberg
  1. Neurosis = identification of self with objects of culture: the self in fusion with a dream, a dream of culture; immortality. Culture is the projection of one's self and body into society: a double of the self, a projectively identified self, one that exists in a "third dimension," e. g., self-in-library-as-author-of-a-book-in-library.
     
  2. The immortal self is imagined to be contained within the object that symbolizes one’s immortality. One exists as a symbol of one’s self. The book (in library) = one's self = the "body of work" representing the dream of an immortal self. Culture is fusion with "immortal objects;" symbols: insulation from separateness, isolation.
     
  3. The destruction of culture, war, atomic war, is a wish to disintegrate the object with which one imagines oneself to be fused: to destroy that which oppresses the self: the symbiotic tie to objects imagined to confer immortality or omnipotence.
     
  4.  This is the meaning of “HOWL" (Alan Ginsberg): the beginning of the disintegration of American culture that continues unabated to the present day: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” The desperate attempt to liberate oneself from Richie Cunningham: to be somewhere else: on one’s own, a complete unknown, a rolling stone.
  5. The symbolic order is a source of oppression at the same time that is a source of stability. One gives oneself--one’s life's energies--toward sustaining a symbol of the self.
     
  6. The cultural object is a symbol of the "immortal internal object:" self-fused with mother and family. "MacArthur Park is Melting in the Pouring Rain. I don’t think that I can take it. Cause it took so long to bake it. And I'll never have that recipe again." One can't go home again. The "immortal objects" with which one had been fused are dissolving: the dream of Immortality is melting. 
     
  7. The melting of the immortal internal objects, immortal family within, leads in the West to identification with transitional objects (books, works of art, famous people, etc.). This mechanism permits the dream of immortality—the libido liberated when one separates from the family—to be displaced" into objects in the “external world.”
     
  8. Thus, libidinal energy is sequestered for cultural reality. The "melting" of the internal objects leads to sexual excitement (free-floating libido) and perverse sexual energies, which then are "bound" in attachment to transitional objects of culture. The "melt down “or” melting" or "liquefaction" is the destruction of the "hard" immortal objects. The destruction of these objects simultaneously is a wish and a curse. "They'll never get me = they never will liquefy me:" take away my immortality.
     
  9. However, the "liquefaction" of the internal object, melt down, results in liberation of the libido that "comes back to the self' (sexuality, body-building, etc.). The fear of separation (why can't you just walk away from it) is fear of separation from that in which your "immortality" is invested. It is this "cultural immortality system" to which one is symbiotically bound--that is the source of oppression.
     
  10. Fear of separation is the source of oppression, in that one cannot abandon the object that oppresses the self because one’s fantasy of immortality is bound to the object. Therefore, one binds oneself to the object and simultaneously struggles to release oneself from it.  Human beings oppress themselves by virtue of their wish to remain symbiotically connected to objects that promise immortality.