ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concept of the phantom as an image related to collective dynamics that operates largely in the background in our culture life. Contemporary culture is a Tower of Babel of competing assumptions and ideologies about human rights, individual and group tensions around differences, resources, and intergroup conflicts both within and between nations, gender, and religious antagonisms. These tensions produce complex moral and ethical dilemmas and push us toward political conflicts and social splits that we use to include and exclude each other. But what are we to do with all this? How do we process these times? Think about this? What actions can we take? The one thing that seems to be missing in our Tower of Babel is a psychological attitude that allows us to see and to relate to what the unconscious is doing with these cultural ferments. In other words, what is missing is a psychological attitude toward the psyche expressed at the cultural level. This chapter explores the author’s discovery and interest in the idea of “cultural phantoms” and how they express intergenerational conflicts that have not been processed psychologically. It shows the value of taking each representation as a bid to continue to what is still unresolved because it is unworked through. It shows how often this is a question of grief over violence that first occurred in a prior historical and cultural context and that still has the power to create dynamics that bid for attention to the original trauma.
