How Culture Runs the Brain: A Freudian View of Collective Syndromes (Dialog-on-Freud)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.14 (868 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1498562450 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 286 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-12-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
They may breed heroes, sociopaths, revolutionaries—or potential terrorists vulnerable to the siren call of internet shamans. Freud traced innate conflicts between pleasure and aggression in each stage of individual development to corresponding development in cultural stages. Cultural trauma that induces PTSD with a loss of secure identity in one generation induces collective phantasies (mythologies) among succeeding generations, and this may form cultural syndromes of revenge and restitution. Families, tribes, clans, and religious communities can regress together to infant and childhood stages. How Culture Runs (and sometimes ruins) the Brain presents neuroscience findings, revealing fantasy as the brain’s default mode, as it alters identity during unbearable trauma or loss. The book presents case histories of cultural conflicts among individ
It is a brilliant exposition - a psychoanalytic tour de force. (Arnold Richards, New York Psychoanalytic Institute) . It is in the spirit of Ludwick Fleck who contends that scientific contributions are influenced by social, historical, cultural, psychological and personal determinants. This important work follows Harris’ previous highly regarded book Minding the Social Brain. He makes a very convincing case that Freud's work was impacted by all those factors
Jay Evans Harris, MDis clinical associate professor at New York Medical College.