"Richard Koenigsberg's ideas on human violence and destructiveness are startling all the more for being self-evident once they have been absorbed. His ideas cut through conventional notions about culture and war, enabling us to understand human institutions in utterly new ways." —Professor Ruth Stein, New York University, author of For Love of the Father

Table of Contents Introduction

 

Publication Date: 1989
Pages: 96
Price: Paperback: $25.00
Trim Size: 6 X 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture

Richard A. Koenigsberg

The fantasy of oneness refers to our desire to fuse our sense of being with objects in the outer world. Koenigsberg shows how our relationship to culture is linked to conflicts surrounding fusion and separation. We attach to powerful objects in the external world in our quest to experience a sense of omnipotence. But ambivalence emerges as we experience attachment to cultural objects as oppressive. Society constitutes an arena in which the conflict between the desire to fuse and the struggle to separate are played out.

Table of Contents
  1. The Dual Nature of the Human Ego
  2. The Conversation Process as a Response to Separation
  3. The Denial of Separateness
  4. Internalization
  5. The Struggle for Separateness
  6. The Fantasy of Merger as a Source of Anxiety
  7. Conflict and Ambivalence Surrounding Separation-Individuation
  8. The Transitional Object and the Struggle to Separate
  9. Culture as a Transitional Object
  10. The Bodily Roots of the Symbol
  11. The Bodily Roots of Culture
  12. Repression

Praise for Symbiosis and Separation:

"During the past few decades, we have become increasingly aware of the psychological dimension of our relationship to nations, groups and leaders through such works as Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, Ernest Becker's Escape from Evil, and more recently Richard Koenigsberg's The Fantasy of Oneness." —M. D. Faber, Professor of English Literature, University of Victoria, author of Culture and Consciousness