Ideologies contain and make manifest the group’s deepest (repressed) desires. The role of psychoanalysis is to analyze and interpret these collective desires or phantasies.

The domain of politics consists of bizarre forms of behavior manifest as institutions we call war, genocide and terrorism. When these behaviors occur within the framework of politics, however, we prefer not to call them bizarre. 

Within this domain of politics, mass-murder is rendered "normative." After all, mass-murder has occurred so frequently in the human record, it must be normal. This is equivalent to saying that cancer and tuberculous are normal (not forms of pathology) because so many people have been afflicted with these diseases. 

It's time to focus, as Norman O. Brown said, on the "disease called man." There is a “scotoma,” as Freud put it, blindness in this arena; a refusal to see. 

We are unwilling to say that the “normal” is simultaneously profoundly pathological; that there is no separation between civilization's sacred ideals and the massive forms of destructiveness enacted in the name of these ideals.

We extend psychoanalysis to study collective dreaming in addition to individual dreaming.  We shift our lens from the microscope of the clinic to a telescope that allows us to look outward to perceive the psyche in its projective manifestations.

What is "out there" is us. Culture is a magnification of who we are. "Society" is not separate from the psyche. We can understand this more deeply now thanks to the Internet, which allows individuals to externalize their personal psychopathology into the world. Individual neurosis and psychosis is transformed into collective madness.

Richard Koenigsberg