Society and the Unconscious: Cultural Psychological Insights

This book will interest anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of the psychological relationship between individual psychological dynamics, social structure and the unconscious collective paradigms. It focuses on an analysis of patriarchal culture, which is, as it were, the psychological enclosure in which all individual and collective processes take place.

Starting from the genesis and current structure of this culture, the strong social changes of the last 50 years are examined:

• the change in relations between men and women
• social relations in terms of solidarity and desolidarisation
• the situation of social security
• the social and political power relations, and
• the economic dynamics.

At the same time, collective fantasies are elaborated that emerge from the socio-structural changes. The basis of the study is psychoanalytical cultural theory in the form of a cultural-critical deconstruction of its fundamental assumptions. In 16 interesting chapters, essential questions of psychological cultural theory are answered and practical applications of this theory to current sociostructural processes are shown.

Dr Dieter Sandner is a psychoanalyst and group analyst in private practice in Munich. He studied psychology, sociology and philosophy at the University of Munich and habilitated in 1995 at the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Psychology with Special Reference to Psychoanalysis. His teaching focuses on group analysis, cultural psychology and clinical social psychology (depression and society, borderline personality disorder and society).