Book by Norman O. Brown Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History For information on ordering, please click here.

Abstract: The mythological conception of the universe. according to Freud, is only psychology projected into the outer world. Not just mythology, Brown argues, but the entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Spender: "The world which we create--the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers--is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts." 
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Building upon Freud's theories, Norman O. Brown's Life against Death brings psychoanalysis to bear upon the study of culture, society and "external" reality. Why should psychoanalysis be confined to the clinical situation? What would it mean to bring psychoanalytic insights to bear upon the external world to explore the unconscious sources and meanings of culture and history? 

At the core of psychoanalytic thought and therapy, Brown says, is the concept of transference, the process whereby patients transfer their feelings and fantasies into (or onto) the analyst. At the heart of psychoanalytic practice is analysis of transference. The transformation of psychoanalysis into a project to study (and change) culture resolves around the unsolved problem of the transference.

Brown explains that the unconscious can become conscious only through projection into the external world. Human culture may therefore be viewed as a set of projections of the repressed unconscious.

Culture--like the transference--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 infantile complexes into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered."

This phrase "in order to" separates Brown from theorists such as Lacan and Foucault--who view discourse or the symbolic order as "things in themselves." Brown seeks to examine and understand the sources of discourse and the symbolic order. He views culture as a dependent rather independent variable.

Primal human conflicts and fantasies are projected outward into society and culture. Discourse and the symbolic order, consequently, are shaped by and contain these phantasies. We are not simply "subjects of the symbolic order." We are the subjects who have created the symbolic order. 

Culture is not separate from us. It belongs to us. We have created ideologies and institutional forms as expression of who we are. Institutional forms and ideologies reflect our struggle to master--come to terms--with who we are.

Human culture, Brown explains, is a vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out. Infantile phantasies that create the human neurosis cannot be directly apprehended or mastered. However, by virtue of projection, we are able to "see" unconscious fantasies, now contained within our ideologies and institutions. They are "out there" in the world. Culture, Brown says, does for the human race what the transference phenomena were supposed to do for individuals. The real nature of our primal fantasies is revealed by the fact that they cannot be remembered, but only re-enacted. Fantasies do not exist in memory or in the past, but only as hallucinations in the present. The repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into external perceptions, by being projected.

The mythological conception of the universe. according to Freud, is only psychology projected onto the outer world. Not just mythology, Brown boldly declares, but the entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Spender: "The world which we create--the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts."  

The fundamental mechanism governing our relationship to culture is denial that we are the source. We pretend that what is out there has "descended upon us." We create what is "out there"--then deny we are the creators.

Once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch, Brown says, it becomes plain that there is nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze except these projections: the world of slums and telegrams. Thus, psychoanalysis fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis. It follows that consciousness of the repressed unconscious is itself a cultural and historical product--since the repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into external perceptions in the form of a cultural projections.