PASSAGES SELECTED BY THE FOUNDATION FOR THE STUDY OF POLTICAL PATHOLOGY

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.  But. 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.

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. Thus culture actually does for all mankind what the transference phenomena were supposed to do for the individual.