"The transformation of psychoanalysis into a project to change human culture is the solution to the unsolved problem of the transference. The transference was necessary because the unconscious can become conscious only if it is transformed into an external perception, and the external perception had to be based on enactment and on actual love (or hate). In more technical terms, the unconscious can become conscious only through projection onto the external world.

"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.

"The essence of totemism, which Freud regarded as the primal model of human culture, is the projection of the Oedipus complex onto a real (animal) substitute-object in the external world, and the establishment of the social group by complicity in this symbolic solution to the Oedipal problem. Human history, as neurosis subject to the law of the increasing return of the repressed, through its long evolution from totemism to monotheism on the one hand and the modern state on the other, has projected more and more of the Oedipus complex into the external world, where it can be seen and mastered.

"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.

"Human consciousness can be liberated from the parental (Oedipal) complex only by being liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic state and the patriarchal God. Thus culture actually does for all mankind what the transference phenomena were supposed to do for the individual.

Richard Koenigsberg