Symbiosis and Separation: Towards A Psychology of Culture
Richard A. Koenigsberg

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This foundational work shows how our psychological development is deeply bound to our relationship with culture and cultural objects. We relate to national life as a vast transtional object.
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SYMBIOSIS AND SEPARATION lays the foundation for a psychological theory of culture and politics by focusing on how objects in the external world symbolize infantile objects and fantasies.

Culture, Dr. Koenigsberg suggests, facilitates breaking from early love-objects by representing reality as a realm containing omnipotence and the possibility of unlimited gratification. Fantasies of narcissistic grandiosity are replaced by the dream of being bound in an omnipotent tie to one’s great and glorious culture. Society performs developmental functions, facilitating the displacement of psychic energy onto cultural ideals and objects.

Koenigsberg presents a theory of nationalism. Separation from the maternal matrix is experienced as mutilation of one's body—loss of self. One binds to one's country to recover a part of the body experienced as lost. Nationalism seeks restoration of bodily wholeness, One’s tie to a body politic ("Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler") symbolizes the dual-unity.
EDITORIAL REVIEWS
Symbiosis and Separation offer a very thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the interplay of unconscious phantasy and cultural phenomena.
—Thomas Ogden, M.D., author of The Matrix of the Mind
Richard Koenigsberg with Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
EDITORIAL REVIEWS
I read Symbiosis and Separation with a great excitement. Koenigsberg and I have lighted upon the same central springs of psychic activity. Much of my clinical work confirms his insights and theories. His findings have much in common with my own, but he carries them very creatively into the social science field. An impressive,  fascinating book.
—Frances Tustin, author of Autism and Childhood Psychosis
During the course of the past few decades psychoanalysis has become increasingly aware of the psychodynamic dimension of nations, groups and leaders through such works as Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, Ernest Becker's Escape From Evil, and most recently Richard Koenigsberg's Symbiosis and Separation.
—M.D. Faber, author of The Withdrawal of Human Projection: Separating from the Symbolic Order
 

Symbiosis and Separation: Towards A Psychology of Culture

Richard A. Koenigsberg

Table of Contents

I. The Dual Nature of the Human Ego
II. The Conversation Process as a Response to Separation
III. The Denial of Separateness
IV. Internalization
V. The Struggle for Separateness
VI. The Fantasy of Merger as a Source of Anxiety
VII. Conflict and Ambivalence Surrounding Separation-Individuation
VIII. The Transitional Object and the Struggle to Separate
IX. Culture as a Transitional Object
X. The Bodily Roots of the Symbol
XI. The Bodily Roots of Culture
XII. Repression
  Appendix
  Bibliography
  Index