Psychoanalysis of European Civilization: Fundamental Traumas, Defenses and Anxieties Research

This work is an attempt to comprehend all modern events taking place in the society from psychoanalytical perspective. Every individual is shaped by the society they live in. Society is a complex network of individuals, so the research was based on the link between an individual and a group. To support the conclusions of Freud and Bion who studied the functioning of groups the concepts from other disciplines such as philosophy, mathematics, physics and chemistry were also considered. After analyzing various groups and their interactions over time, the definition of “european civilization" was given as an object of study, and the concept of "quantum individual" was introduced as a metapersona who absorbs the main traumas, defenses, and anxieties of european civilization. Using the concept of quantum individual the european history from Roman times to the present has been studied. Each stage of its development has been correlated with psychosexual developmental stages, supported with real historical events that had taken place in the civilization. It has been determined that the mental apparatus of the quantum individual has both neurotic and psychotic cores, and its psyche functions in different ways at different psychosexual developmental stages. The transgenerational legacy that refers to primal fantasies such as the cannibal meal and the return to the womb, emphasizes inability of the psyche to deal with grief for unfulfilled desires, highlighting the need for narcissistic investment of libido in order to develop the individual’s ego. The mental apparatus sometimes freezes when it faces something that causes re-traumatization and regression to earlier psychosexual developmental stages. This weakens the capacity to mentally process events, pushing the individual to use acting out as a coping mechanism for incoherent intrapsychic anxiety. The object's functioning is governed by the non-neurotic primacy of life and death drives, and the conjunction of these drives is possible through the work of melancholy. The conclusion of this research states that the object is currently in the stage of puberty and ego strengthening of the quantum individual seems unlikely.