Norman O. Brown states that repressed unconscious energies must “go out into external reality before they can be perceived by consciousness.” The repressed impulses, he says, must first find “real objects in the external world and attach themselves to real objects before their nature can become manifest to the subject.”

My method—consistent with Brown’s theory—enables us to apprehend unconscious fantasies. By observing how images and metaphors link to central terms of an ideology—how fantasies attach to “real objects in the external world”—it is possible to uncover the “unconscious of the text” (Ruth Stein, 2009).

Brown states that human culture is "one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out.” The fantasies that create the human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered, but “their derivatives in human culture can.” Thus, Brown concludes, “culture actually does for all mankind what the transference phenomena were supposed to do for the individual.”

The project of studying ideology as a container for shared fantasy is both theoretical and clinical. In the 20th century, more than 200 million people were killed as a result of violent political conflicts initiated by societies. Most of this violence was generated by ideologies embraced as absolutes and defended fanatically. Why do human beings attach to ideologies so passionately? What is the relationship between passionate attachment to an ideology and societal violence?

A character in James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, said that, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” The history of the 20th century with its horrendous episodes of brutality and mass slaughter resembles a waking nightmare—a bad dream that many people have at once. By becoming conscious of the unconscious fantasies that generate collective violence, is it possible to “awaken from the nightmare of history?” My analysis of ideology is an extension of Freud’s project of interpreting dreams. We turn to interpreting collective dreams.