How Culture Runs the Brain (eBook)

A Freudian View of Collective Syndromes

Jay Evans Harris (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
286 Seiten
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-1-4985-6246-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Harris presents neuroscience findings and reveals fantasy as the brain’s default mode as it alters identity during unbearable trauma or loss. The book also presents case histories of cultural conflicts, and examines populist bias vs. elite global influence in a neuropsychoanalytic context.

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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 brain's 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 Bergdahl's 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 Clinton's 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.

Autor

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

Inhalt

Chapter 7: From the Primal Horde to the Primal SceneChapter 9: Freud As GoetheChapter 13: The Pretense of Cultural LeadersChapter 14: The Evolution of FantasyChapter 15: Syndromes of Restitution and Retribution: The Tsarnaev CaseConclusionReferences

Produkt-Details

• Reihe/Serie: Dialog-on-Freud
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Psychoanalyse / Tiefenpsychologie
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Psychiatrie / Psychotherapie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Buzz-Words • Cultural Neuroscience • Cultural Syndromes • Identity politics • Interdisciplinary Social Science • Moral Regression • Neuropsychoanalysis • Neuropsychocoanalysis • social brain • Terrorism Policy
• ISBN-10: 1-4985-6246-9 / 1498562469
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4985-6246-1 / 9781498562461