I’ve been reading John Mack’s “Nightmares and Human Conflict” lately. It’s a rather clinical/psychological exploration of nightmares. I’ve read rather broadly in psychological literature over some 30 years.

The other night, as I was reading analyses of children’s nightmares, and the typically Freudian deconstruction of them… which, while useful, I also find misguided in many ways… I suddenly realized that most of our psychological problems are not actually endemic to human beings in general, but are, rather, the result of having to live in bizarre and dystopian situations where ‘the individual’ is seen as a discrete unit. This would be like imagining lungs ‘outside of the body’.

Nearly the entire range of maladaptive psychical, behavioral and emotional ‘problems’ … it is apparent to me … arise not from human nature, or even the nature of the psyche… but are the result of being subjected to entirely ridiculous and artificial situations that result from an insistence upon something that is formally impossible: that human beings are, primarily, individuals.

This has never been the case. Our nature is so inherently communal that, when deprived of meaningful social relationships, roles, identities and activities… the ‘psyche’ must respond by symptomatic efflorescence. In any actual society, as if such a thing could exist in modernity, the ‘functions’ of the psyche would naturally tend toward integration, healing, recoherence and dreaming.

I suspect that nearly the entire edifice of ‘psychology’ is a result of loss of communal context and relationship, not ‘the nature of the human mind or psyche’ as it is commonly presented and analyzed.