What I call the psychoanalysis of culture and history is a discipline researching how desires and fantasies are projected into society, creating the world in which we live. Perhaps this is a primary function of culture: to allow us to externalize desires and fantasies into the external world, releasing us from the pressure of our inner world. “Culture” constitutes a transference neurosis.

Lacan speaks of the “symbolic order”—as if this is a domain of existence separate from human beings that “descends” upon us. Foucault similarly writes about “discourse,” also referring to narratives that seem to “descend” upon us from without, shaping or even creating our minds.

I’ve debated with people who hold these perspectives. One of them said, “Where would our minds come from if it was not created by discourse?”

These thinkers have no concept of the unconscious; of fantasy; of infantile sexuality; of a biological and psychological world that exists prior to discourse; of a world of drives, desires and fantasies that develop and are present before the onset of language.

Lacan is not a return to Freud, but an escape from Freud: an escape from the actuality of biology and fantasy that exists before we enter the symbolic order.

But this is nothing new. The flight from Freud was there at the beginning and will be with us forever. There is not a big difference between the struggle against Freud today and the struggle that existed in 1910-1920. There will always be repression; there will always be denial. Resistance is the core of human nature.