Myths of Psychoanalysis and Culture: Trends and Traces of Influence

Abstract

The inversion of norm and pathology in the field of sexual relations in Western society leads to the problem of the influence of the psychoanalysis myth on culture. We are speaking about the perception in society of Freud's idea of the soul’s irrational life and basic instincts – sexuality and aggression. Instincts are mythologized as Eros and Thanatos. The conflict of Eros and Thanatos with a repressive civilization, rational norms and prohibitions is perceived by the art of modernism, counterculture and the avant-garde. The idea of the opposition of the individual's bodily desires and moral norms leads to modern mythmaking. These are the visualization of dreams, the outrage of free love and psychedelia, black humor and the thanatography of eros. Two waves of Freudian influence on modern Western culture are emerging. The first is Freudianism against Surrealism and Freudian Marxism against counterculture. The second is Jacques Lacan's reinterpretation of psychoanalysis. They leave a destructive trace in the development of the avant-garde in the postmodern situation. The revised myth of psychoanalysis produces regression to the foundations of the unconscious and transgression beyond cultural norms and heterosexual life. This trace stimulates the public consciousness to the indistinguishability of the sexes, fantasies about the transformation of the human body, creating a trend of transgenderism. In the conditions of the decline of morals, the trace of the influence of psychoanalysis on culture lies in the production of the eros thanatography myth.