ABSTRACT
We are now travelling back to the Western world, a world that is increasingly inhabited by otherness, by the presence of other cultures experienced by so many as alien, but no more alien than could be the unconscious. Psychoanalysis voices the alienation that capitalist society creates as a condition for being a human subject, good, but it is also recuperated, neutralised and absorbed into the kind of culture that likes its belief systems to function as world views. In this chapter we home in on one particular manifestation of psychoanalysis as a world view, its commitment to secular democracy and scientific reason. We explore the role of Judaism and antisemitism in the history of psychoanalysis, of its place in Christian culture, and of attempts to acknowledge the impact of a ‘third wave’ of challenge and cultural adaptation, to Islam. But, a warning, we will again have to go round the houses to get a sense of the surrounding ideological territory before we get there.
