We must be prepared to analyze clinically as neurosis not only the foreign culture we dislike, but also our own.

The essential point in the Freudian diagnosis of human sociability (seen by Roheim): men huddle into hordes as a substitute for parents, to save themselves from independence, from “being left alone in the dark.”

Society was not constructed, as Aristotle says, for the sake of life and more life, but from defect, from death and flight from death, from fear of separation and fear of individuality.

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.

The ambition of civilized man is revealed in the pyramid—the achievement of the first modern individualists. In the pyramid repose both the hope of immortality and the fruit of compound interest. The Iron Age, at the end of which we live, democratized the achievements of the Bronze Age (cities, metals, money, writing) and opened up the pursuit of kings (money and immortality) to the average citizen.

But the inevitable irony redresses the balance in favor of death. Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things; money is the man; the immortality of an estate or a corporation resides in the dead things which alone endure. 

The human neurosis begins with the human infant’s incapacity to accept separation from the mother, that separation which confers individual life on all living organisms and which in all living organisms at the same time leads to death.

Norman O. Brown