How Culture Runs the Brain: A Freudian View of Collective Syndromes

(Hardback)

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Freud was right: mind and brain evolved together, adapting progressively to cultural change; responding regressively to wars, genocides, and forced migrations. 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. They may breed heroes, sociopaths, revolutionariesor potential terrorists vulnerable to the siren call of internet shamans. How Culture Runs (and sometimes ruins) the Brain presents neuroscience findings, revealing fantasy as the brains default mode, as it alters identity during unbearable trauma or loss. The book presents case histories of cultural conflicts among individuals, tribes, and nations, using the examples of the Boston Marathon Bombers, Bowe Bergdahls iconic trial, the Orlando Shooter, and regressive American players in the election of 2016. Conflicting forms of cultural narcissism determine economic survival: the immature narcissism of Trump and his followers challenges the mature narcissism that hid Hillary Clintons hubris. Immature narcissistic oligarchs can act out their economic dominance to deal with the fear of extinction of their own identity. Some terrorists groups use mature global technology in the service of immature fundamentalist identity.

Reviews

In this timely analysis of how collective or social conditions affect the ways human beings respond to their inner and outer worlds, Harris (New York Medical College) offers an important intervention into multiple fields, including neuroscience, psychology, politics, and biography. His readings are built around Freud's struggles to articulate how cultural forces shape and unshape the mind. This book will be identified with its critical readings of traumatic experience and its effort to build an understanding of trauma in relation to contemporary examples of conflict, aggression, and regressions. Examples include readings of the Boston Marathon bombing; the Orlando, FL, shooting; the Bowe Bergdahl military desertion trial; and political regressions in the American political sphere. With an acute grasp of how trauma is induced and its ramifications for individual and collective identities, Harris has made psychoanalysis relevant as a mode of cultural analysis. Few authors in the analytic tradition have done this with as much success. This book will be immensely rewarding for those who wish to think through the relation of psyche and society, and this will include practitioners as well as students. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * CHOICE *
This important work follows Harris previous highly regarded book Minding the Social Brain. It is in the spirit of Ludwick Fleck who contends that scientific contributions are influenced by social, historical, cultural, psychological and personal determinants. He makes a very convincing case that Freud's work was impacted by all those factors. It is a brilliant exposition - a psychoanalytic tour de force. -- Arnold Richards, MD, editor of internationalpsychoanalysis.net

Author Bio

Jay Evans Harris, MD is clinical associate professor at New York Medical College.