Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (Second Edition)

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF DEVELOPMENTAL TIME, CULTURAL SPACE: STUDIES IN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY Psychogeographic scholars address the questions: Where does culture come from? What keeps culture going? What are the causes of cultural change? Traditional Western science has long contended--tautologously--that culture comes from culture; current history comes from what happened before, and so on. Scholars of psychogeography trace the unconscious roots of societies. We view people's metaphors and other cultural images as a royal road to the unconscious lives of people. Put another way, the unconscious can be explored in the world of ordinary symbols and ritual (i.e., in large groups)--not just in psychoanalytic psychotherapy (i.e., in individuals and therapeutic dyads). Far from being superorganic and automatically internalized, much of culture proceeds from the inside out. Ideas and fantasies are externalized, cognitively reified, and then re-internalized. Culture is a projective screen and stage on which unconscious dramas are enacted, and experienced as being located out there.