Chapter 8 8. Psychoanalysis of Culture

Since the publication of the book "The Mystery of the Evolution of Human Civilization-Psychoanalysis of Culture" by the British Baed Cook, it has opened a mysterious window to glimpse ancient times from modern civilization.This is the first attempt by human beings to understand themselves by applying the collective subconscious theory of Freud, the master of psychoanalysis, and Jung, his favorite disciple. Jung was able to come up with a theory of the collective unconscious, but he couldn't do psychoanalysis of human cultures because he didn't understand them. Bad Cook can analyze European culture and Europeans, but he doesn't understand Chinese.

Now, we set out to make a psychoanalysis of Chinese traditional culture. The tentativeness of this analysis is inevitable, and the degree of accuracy has yet to be tested by time—maybe the test time will be longer than we expected, and, This process is not simply negation or affirmation. According to the cultural psychoanalysis method of Jung and Bader Cook, our analysis steps will include the following five steps for the book of Chinese traditional culture: The first step: the original text of the myth. This part is the ancient memories and fears hidden in our collective subconscious, it is the collection of fragments of ancient times, and it is the most primitive material of Chinese cultural psychoanalysis, which does not tolerate the slightest error.So we have said before: Even if you say a wrong word, you will digress a lot.

The second step: the translation and interpretation of the original text. This part belongs to the "consciousness" part of our nation, that is, in order to avoid the fears and taboos in the subconscious, we have adopted cultural modifications and camouflage to completely deform and distort ancient memories.As Freud thought, the more we are fascinated by the interpretation of this, the more we yearn to avoid something. The third step: psychological mapping of cultural thinking. This is the reduction and refinement of the original material, cutting out the part used for modification, leaving only the most critical core keywords.Then, these keywords are matched one-to-one with the things in our conscious mind to find out the taboo allusion in the ancient memory.

Step Four: Thinking Puzzles. It is to put together the psychological mapping of the original materials in our thinking, so that we get a story description that lacks many details, just like a drifting bottle that has been impacted by sea water for hundreds of millions of years. The written records in the bottle, Although it has become fragmented, it still does not prevent us from judging its original meaning. Step Five: Thinking Interpretation. This is the last step to decipher the original memories and national taboos hidden in ancient mythology. Usually, the same material can decipher completely different stories, but what we need is the most reasonable and most suitable for the survival of ancient humans. status result.

The five steps of the psychoanalysis of culture have been deduced in detail in the previous two sections.To be clear, sometimes we come across so outlandish notions in the collective unconscious that they sound unbelievable.In this case, in order to avoid errors in understanding, we usually make a "thinking puzzle", that is, fill in the "▲" in the thinking puzzle with appropriate Chinese characters. This must be necessary, but it is the correct way to interpret traditional myths.