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VI. INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
VI. A. Society, Culture, Linguistics, Creativity, Art
As in the dreams, so in his creative endeavors, “Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that reality does not satisfy.” Freud (1913, p. 299)
Freud’s theorizing process included cross-fertilization between psychoanalysis and other fields of inquiry, while recognizing their different domains and methodologies. Such interdisciplinary connections and inspirations from other fields, i.e. anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, folklore, myths, art, literature, etc, led to many fertile analogies and new hypotheses. Mutually enriching complementarity of the culture-bound fixed symbols (frequently conscious) on one hand and versatile idiosyncratic (frequently unconscious) symbolic production on the other hand, is in view throughout Freud’s writing on writers and daydreaming, folklore, myths, jokes and wit, psychopathology of everyday life, group psychology, individual and group unconscious, just as it is in his writings on various creative personalities (Dostoyevsky, DaVinci) and the characters they portray (Moses, Hamlet, Oedipus, Gradiva). Universality of the symbolic representations of masculine and feminine elements in ancient art, artefacts and mythology worldwide, including Native American Aztec and Maya, Greek, Roman, Asian and Arabic, was also studied and confirmed from psychoanalytic perspective by Angel Garma (1954). He found that the differences laid mostly in the tools and technique, given different environmental conditions. The articulation between Freud’s evolving theory based on drive and representation, and the human’s cultural achievements was the subject of his many studies and also of authors that came after him. Freud conceptualized these achievements as sublimation: the sexual drive, in conflict with the (internalized) restrictive formations instituted by society, repressed and redirected at a non-sexual object. He maintained the basic contours of this concept throughout his work of ever growing complexity. Although, with the late dual drive theory (1920), he considered that both drives – sexual and aggressive – could be sublimated (1930), the explicit participation of the death drive in sublimation was not as pronounced as it was in Klein’s theory of sublimation (See also separate entries THE UNCONSCIOUS and DRIVES). Klein conceives the symbol creation as a displacement of the hated object to another object, and culture as a reparation of the destroyed mother-object. Kleinian and post-Kleinian theories maintain the idea that cultural achievements are based mainly on the death drive. Nevertheless, other analysts open the possibility that there is another type of cultural development that is not
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