Excerpts  below from Norman O. Brown's Life against Death with commentary below by Richard A. Koenigsberg 

154—The unconscious can become conscious only through projection onto the external world.  But human culture is a set of projections of the repressed unconscious. Like the transference, human culture is created by the repetition compulsion and constantly produces new editions of the infantile conflicts.  Like the transference, human culture exists in order to project the infantile complexes into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered.

155—Human culture is thus one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out; the infantile fantasies which create the universal human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered, but their derivatives in human culture can. 

COMMENT BY RICHARD KOENIGSBERG: We study the unconscious by observing how unconscious fantasies are projected into the external world. Human culture is a transference neurosis. We "see" our unconscious--our unconscious fantasies--by looking outward into the world. The world  is created by virtue of the fantasies we have projected into the world.

Looking outward, we imagine we are observing something "other hand the self." However, everything we see "out there" is us: the projection of our desires and fantasies.

By virtual of denial--the fundamental mechanism governing the creation of culture--we pretend that what is out there is "coming to us" from afar and that we are who we are because of "discourses" imposed upon us.