Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture

SYMBIOSIS AND SEPARATION lays the foundation for a psychoanalytic theory of culture and politics by focusing on how objects in the external world symbolize infantile objects and fantasies. Culture, Dr. Koenigsberg suggests, facilitates the break with infantile love-objects by representing reality as a realm that contains omnipotence and the possibility of unlimited gratification. Infantile fantasies of omnipotence are replaced by the dream of being bound in a symbiotic tie to one's culture. Society performs developmental functions, facilitating the displacement of psychic energy onto cultural ideals and objects.

Koenigsberg develops a psychoanalytic theory of nationalism. Separation from the mother is experienced as mutilation of one's body--the loss of self. One binds to one's country to recover a part of the body experienced as lost. Nationalism seeks restoration of bodily wholeness ("Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler"). The body politic symbolizes the dual-unity of self and Other contained within a single object. Identification with one's nation, subsequently, may be experienced as oppressive, leading to a struggle for liberation. Koenigsberg illuminates our ambivalent attachment to cultural objects, which simultaneously enhance and diminish the self.

Table of Contents

I. The Dual Nature of the Human Ego
II. The Conversation Process as a Response to Separation
III. The Denial of Separateness
IV. Internalization
V. The Struggle for Separateness
VI. The Fantasy of Merger as a Source of Anxiety
VII. Conflict and Ambivalence Surrounding Separation-Individuation
VIII. The Transitional Object and the Struggle to Separate
IX. Culture as a Transitional Object
X. The Bodily Roots of the Symbol
XI. The Bodily Roots of Culture
XII. Repression