Ever since humans have been inflicting violence on other humans, they
have been devising techniques to deal with its aftereffects. The French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes of “the lived body”—the
body as a receptacle of past experiences, of a knowing that bypasses
knowledge. Think of a culture as a collective lived body, the scars of
its experiences accumulated over generations and fixed into rituals and
mores. A less elegant way of putting this is in the language of therapy:
culture as coping mechanism.
I would speak of culture as metapsychological support. I don’t think that is stupid, and I hope it is intelligent. There must be a mediating intelligence not just between a person and his friends, but between him and the “crowd”. This is what we call culture, and what has been under attack for some time, arguably due to unprocessed trauma.
I look at the European intellectual scene in Post World War Europe–both of them, as you may recall I trace perhaps some of the collective breakdown as having first been expressed by the Dadaists while the first world war was still being fought–and think they might profitably be viewed as sustained cultural efforts to DISSOCIATE, through intellectualism, from the horrors that just happened.
Sartre, my favorite target, was clearly severely dissociated, as was de Beauvoir. It would be interesting to analyzie the Existential movement and their ideas through the prison–I meant to say prism, but will leave my slip as also appropriate–of clinical trauma.
The unrealistic and largely useless idea of radical freedom, for example, might easily be seen as a counter-reaction (in psychology, most all strong expressed sentiments seem to come from the converse) to a sense of helplessness, of hypo-agency.