"a collective psychosis, a dream that many persons are having at once"

[pynchonoid]

This was posted today to the PSYART list.  As I read
it, I found myself thinking about Pynchon's work in
general, the PYNCHON-L in particular. Your mileage may
vary, of course. 


From:   PsycheCulture at cs.com
Subject:        Making Conscious the Unconscious
To:     psyart at LISTS.UFL.EDU

       The basic principle of psychoanalysis is that
there are no such
things as "accidents." This is the principle of
psychic determinism.

       If human beings are responsible for their
dreams, slips-of-the
tongues and symptoms, if these express unconscious
desires, then we also
are responsible for behavior that is played out on the
stage of
"cultural reality." That which we create as society
and history
represents the expression of our wishes and fantasies.

       We are responsible for the entire panoply of
destructive events
that are played out on the stage on the "external
world," in the form of
war, genocide, terrorism, etc. These events "do
something" for us. We
"get off" on them. It there was not some gratification
that some (large
numbers) of human beings obtained from these
behaviors, they would not
recur. We create culture and history in order to
externalize or project
who we are.

       That is us. That which occurs, human beings
have created. We
are responsible.

       Human being act out their fantasies in the
domains of culture and
history, which function to express, articulate or play
out the human
neurosis (or psychosis). Culture and history are the
domains in which
unconscious fantasies are made visible.

       We are complicit in the perpetuation of
destructive social
institutions to the extent that we deny that the outer
(the cultural
form) has a relationship to the inner (the psyche). We
imagine that
events such as war and terrorism happen on their
own--at a distance from
the self, "out there," separate from us.

       The next phase in "making conscious the
unconscious" is
recognition that we are the source of what is
occurring "out there."
Human beings are responsible, not only for specific
acts of bombing that
kill persons, but for the very idea of war, bombs,
murdering large
numbers of persons, etc.

       We have created bombs as a response to our
paranoid anxieties, to
defend ourselves against terror. We bomb in order to
kill and destroy.

       Symbolic structures in society contain and
express human desire.
They exist and continue to exist to the extent that
they are able to
articulate human wishes--to help us to repress or
contain anxiety.

       The psychoanalytic task is to reveal the nature
of the desires
that are expressed through particular modes or forms
of societal
behavior. What is the nature of the pleasure that is
obtained by blowing
up human beings? Why do we wish to smash and destroy
the artifacts of
civilization?

       It is not a question of "this war" or "that
war." There are always
reasons. When Freud spoke about repression and the
unconscious, he was
saying that human beings do not know the real reasons
why they do things.

       Psychoanalysis is not like other sciences in
which inevitably
"progress" seems to occur. Since the psyche is shaped
through the
mechanisms of repression and denial, therefore
civilization is always
producing new editions of the human neurosis. About
many things (such as
sex), we know more than we once did. Resistances have
been over come.

       In other domains, however, we continue to
remain entirely unconscious.

       There are "reasons" for every single war, but
the reasons do not
tell us about the unconscious fantasies and desires
that are being
played out.

       Human beings live within a dream that they call
"reality." They
are so bound to this reality, so tied to their own
"symbolic systems"
that they cannot perceive the pathology contained
within these systems.

       The first step in the psychoanalysis of culture
and history,
therefore, is a systematic effort to DISIDENTIFY with
phenomena that
previously we had accepted as "normative." We must
begin to imagine that
we live in the midst of a collective psychosis, a
dream that many
persons are having at once.

       The objective of psychoanalysis as a mode of
activity within
civilization is to begin the process of "awakening
from the nightmare of
history."

Best regards,

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph. D.


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