Introduction

When it comes to psychohistory, the first thing to come to mind is Isaac Asimov’s character of Hari Seldon from the fictitious world of the famed literary series “Foundation.” Of course, the interdisciplinary tendency of psychohistory does not include the “Seldonist” mathematics from the novels. However, psychohistory, which is a kind of synthesis of psychology and history, analyzes the psychological origins of intentions and behaviors as the perpetrators of history and aims to reveal the psychic dynamics which give the “historical action” its unique motive. Psychohistory (Noland, 1977, 296) is defined by Noland as the dialogue in which both the discipline of history (due to the addition of a psychological dimension to historical data) and the discipline of psychoanalysis (due to the addition of concrete historical data to the laws of general human behavior) benefit at the same time. Psychohistory can be explained through its two basic conceptual tendencies, one of which has not yet been amplified.

The first and more popular of these tendencies consists of psychobiographic psychohistory studies which are conducted to reveal the psychic causality that influences the actions of the people who are deemed most important over the course of history. Psychobiographic psychohistory studies utilize a psychoanalytic understanding of psychology because of certain methodological necessities that arise in the analysis of their subjects’ processes of subjectification within their particular history. Noland draws attention to the indisputability of this fact by saying “…Unquestionably, the main line of psychohistory has been psychoanalytically oriented” (Noland, 1977, 295). These studies with a focus on the individual use the set of concepts of psychoanalysis and analyze the individual’s history of subjectification in order to understand the causality of the unique motives behind their behaviors or creations which have had great influences on the world. Today, psychohistory is stuck in the writing of psychobiography, which allows for a form of nonclinical individual psychopathology for mostly deceased great people.

The second forgotten wing of psychohistory is Freud’s large-scale project of “Pathology of Cultural Communities” which was never fully realized. “Psychodialectical Cultural Reason Theory” is a tool for realizing this project which is a new and dynamic direction for the discipline of psychohistory. As it is well known, there is a relationship between psychoanalysis and history tied by two knots – one from the particular perspective and the other from the universal perspective. First, from a methodological point of view, psychoanalysis conducts its pathological analyses by examining individual history, which is the process of subjectification. Secondly, according to the data of psychoanalysis, psychic phenomena encountered in the human psyche carry a clear repetition of humanity’s thought pattern. For this reason, Freud states that examining the psychology of neuroses is important in understanding the developmental process of civilization (Freud, 2015, 112), and that there are reflections of primitive humans in the dream where the censorship mechanism is relaxed (Freud, 2017, 126). In other words, Freud discovered the fractal development of culture in the human and the human in culture. Brown also explains that Freud’s noticing of neurotic symptoms identical themes with the great mythical themes of human history compelled him to grasp human history within the framework of psychoanalysis (Brown, 1996, 22). Similarly, Otto Rank states that the history of the world, which seems to have gone through random stages, has an orderly structure and says that the mechanism that acts with great power in humans seems to work also in history (Rank, 2014, 165). From this point of view, Freud explains that he accepts the comparability of the development of civilization to the development of the individual in their process of subjectification (Freud, 2013a, 56). Since it can be seen from Freud’s perspective that the universal development of humanity is repeated in the development of a single human, the history of humanity is consequently the history of consciousness, as stated by Rank (2014, 21). Works such as “Totem and Taboo,” “Moses and Monotheism,” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in which he embarks on psychopathology by treating a period of history as a single individual, are built on such an intellectual ground. Because the most fundamental relationship between history and man is that history is shaped by super-subjects, called culture, who are symbolically structured by taking strength from the collective libido transmissions of the people who compose it. In this context, the aim of the second tendency of psychohistory based on Freud’s unrealized project is to consider culture as self-consciousness and to use the psychoanalytic concept set, which analyzes the dialectical movement of consciousness that makes itself visible in the individual subject, to analyze the culture as collective-subject. In his book “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud mentions the feasibility of such a study and states that the effort to transfer psychoanalysis to cultural societies is not absurd or inefficient, and one day one will venture to embark upon a “pathology of cultural communities” (Freud, 2013a, 100–101). In this context, the second trend of psychohistory is based on the search for unity between psychoanalysis and historical sociology. In contrast to the psychobiography wing of psychohistory, this trend analyzes not, for example, the influence of the early moments of Moses’ particular life on Judaism, but rather the place of a hypothetical paternal killing in Jewish collective behavior. Therefore, what is being analyzed is not particular but universal; not the individual but the culture. In fact, some research tried to realize this project. Gerald Izenberg expresses that the Frankfurt School made the first attempt to combine psychoanalysis and historical sociology (Izenberg, 1975, 139). Authors such as H. Marcuse, E. Fromm, J. Kovel, L. Rubistein, and E. R. Dodds tried to produce sociological data with the psychoanalytic method. However, the aforementioned studies are not what Freud desired; they are not based on the systematic expansion of psychoanalysis into the collective dimension, taking into account the differential positioning of all elements in the concept set. Rather, it is the evaluation of randomly accessed data in the context of generalizations based on psychoanalysis while taking a historical phenomenon backwards with the “path dependecy” understanding of historical sociology. But the second tendency of Psychohistory suggested by Freud, especially in his last works, could not be developed because the dominant paradigm in science was positivism in the process of accepting the discipline. In this process, psychoanalysis was positioned in natural sciences instead of social sciences by medic-origin psychoanalysts. Therefore, an intellectual field in which cultures can be analyzed as macro-subjects based on psychoanalytic historical sociology has not yet opened. This article, which intents to present the theoretical approach developed in general, aims to provide a theoretical basis for applied studies that will approach cultural problems with the concept set of psychoanalysis.

Architecture of Methodology: Defining the Tools of the Theory

The “Psychodialectical Cultural Reason Theory” that we have developed aims to strip all the elements of the concept set of psychoanalysis (by considering their role in the dialectical development of consciousness) from the content of human anatomy in order to realize the pathology of cultural communities mentioned by Freud. Thus, the analytical positioning of the concepts that have been transformed into concrete formal conceptions will be made suitable for use in collective consciousness structures without distorting their differential equivalents in the meaning pattern of psychoanalysis. The need for systematic psychoanalysis, as highlighted by Izenberg, can only be met with such a radical step. For this, as some examples can be seen in the next section, psychoanalytic concepts based on individual-subject will be abstracted with dialectic on the basis of their structural functions. Thus, terms separated from the content and taken to the level of analytical concept will be transferred to the collective dimension by pantographic scaling.

In pantographic scaling, which is the ideational tool we have defined, the concepts that are stripped of content by dialectical abstraction and transformed into solid-formal structures are expanded from the particular dimension to the universal dimension without distorting the proportion of the distances in their differential topological positioning in the concept set in which they reside. Two things are taken into consideration here: the concept’s structural distance from the other related concepts within the same set of concepts, and the basic qualities of the contents which are severed and transferred. Pantographic expansion copies the solid forms separated from their content through abstraction into new content on a different scale. For abstraction, which is the separation of form and content, dialectic, the logic of occurrence, is used.

Pantographic scaling aims to fill the empty “form” with new “content” on a different scale after the separation of the form and content of a concept on the basis of dialectical function. The content and form that constitute the concept are two aspects of objective reality that are intertwined. There cannot be content without form and form without content. In its most general definition, “content” is the whole of the process and elements that make up an object or phenomenon, while “form” is the structure of the object or phenomenon that makes its existence clear with distinctive qualities. An object is “content” determined by a “form.” In other words, a “concept” is the fixation of form and content.Footnote 1 Since it is not possible for a pure form to be visible, each form becomes visible through its content. Therefore, as stated by Sheptulin, from a dialectical point of view, “…every form is naturally tied to a certain content…” (Sheptulin, 2013: 296). In the same context, Levine also stated that creating order is the function of the form (Levine, 2017: 21). Because the form is made visible through the content, and thus, the content is organized by the form. The existence of order in a place indicates that there is content material structured by form. In this context, the relationship between form and content is a structural relationship that brings each other into existence. It is dialectically impossible to have content without form and form without content as an object or phenomenon. Indeed, Sheptulin states that matter emerges in the process of the struggle between form and content (Sheptulin, 2013: 298). In this case, the transformation of conceptualization from the concreteness of being to the fluidity of becoming, in other words, the liberation of the concept from a state of simple equality with itself, will make the concept malleable on the basis of logic. What is done here is the “moving” of the concept within itself. The way in which a concept can be moved from the state of “being”Footnote 2 in which it is fixed and positioned to a state of “becoming” again is through the separation of form from content (abstraction). As a matter of fact, Politzer also explains the existence of movement with dialectics; “…there is no movement that is not the product of a contradiction, a struggle of opposites” (Politzer, 2018: 93). Just as contradiction is the moving force of dialectics, movement, which is the basis of becoming, is the basis of being that makes itself manifest. Indeed, “Motion is an attribute of matter” (Sheptulin, 213: 185). It is possible for a concept to be removed from the state of being in which its form and content are articulated, frozen, and fixed, only by emptying itself of the content that fills its form in order to return to the dialectical movement of becoming that brings it into being.

By separating form from content (moving the fixed concept within itself), the pure structures of form as a theoretical-hypothetical being can be accessed. Unless these solid structures are filled with content, they can only exist as theoretical patterns. Therefore, it is impossible for pure form without content and pure content without form to exist as a real entity, except as a hypothetical becoming. In this case, we can only break the relationship between form and content through abstraction within the possibility of theoretical space. The purely formal structure we will obtain must be filled by content in order to be meaningful. In fact, as Ollman states, the word abstract derives from the Latin word “abstrahere,” meaning “to take away” (Ollman, 2015: 47). In this context, abstraction means that the structural skeleton of the form is withdrawn from the content in which it is embedded. Therefore, what is realized in abstraction as a rational activity is the formulation of the form as a function and process by extracting the content in becoming. But the realization of the abstraction for a single concept may cause random separation of form and content. For this reason, first of all, stationary and mobile elements should be separated in the integrity of the concept. For dialectically, all concepts are developed in thought in order to make a being, an absence, or a becoming determinate. In this context, one of the most powerful ways to abstractly analyze the structural skeleton of a concept set is to identify the positioning of each concept within the dialectical movement of the process that the concept set seeks to define. Thus, the stationary element will basically constitute the form and the mobile element the content. When the crucial difference is movement, it becomes clear that the most accurate form of abstraction is to break down the concept on its dialectical basis. Because dialectics is the logic of “becoming,” that is, of movement. In this context, each of the concepts of psychoanalysis must be stripped of content on the basis of the relation imposed by its differential function in relation to other concepts that bring into being the development of consciousness in human content. In other words, for each concept, one should look at how the formation of consciousness manifests its own formation in this concept. Pantographic scaling aims to separate form and content, which have become fixed and solidified in the concept, by pulling them back to the dialectical order of becoming on the basis of function, and then to make it possible to fill the form abstracted from content with another content. In other words, pantographic scaling is a dialectical abstraction tool that breaks the form-content unity that is fixed by sticking together through the movement of the state of becoming. All concepts will be abstracted based on the functions formed by the network of interrelationships with other concepts within the entire concept set of psychoanalysis and by considering their dialectical functionality in the development of consciousness; thus, concepts will be drawn into the field of thought as purely analytic and bare formal functions stripped of their human content. In other words, the solid-formal structures of psychoanalysis regarding the development of consciousness, which are made visible by filling them with human content, will be revealed through dialectical abstraction. These structures will be expanded pantographically, this time by filling them not with biological/individual but with cultural/collective content, and they will be fixed again as a concept.

The methodology developed in this study aims at the translation of psychoanalytic concepts and mechanisms by abstracting from the individual to the collective – based on the structural features of their position within theory – in order to analyze the psychic structures of the culture-subjects in the dialectical logic relation that reveals the objective laws of “being.” In other words, through dialectical abstraction, the concepts of psychoanalysis are purified from their biological contents, and they will be drawn into the field of philosophy as naked formal structures based on their functions and will be ready to be used in the analysis of the psychic structures of the culture-subjects. Thus, the concepts will be rediscovered by “dialectical psychoanalysis” on the basis of dialectical moments of consciousness development. Thusly, “dialectical psychoanalysis” will rediscover the concepts on the grounds of the dialectical moments of reason. For dialectical abstraction, the dialectical position of the concept based on its function within the entire set of concepts will be evaluated as pure forms. What is crucial to our research is to find the equivalents of the psychoanalytic mechanisms based on biology (taking into account the structural functions within the meaning pattern they are connected to) in the cultural dimension, which is a collective order. One of the most important features of Lacan’s works is the removal of anatomical concepts from mere biology and their conceptualization based on their structural features. Bowie says that body-based elements such as the phallus were handled with a comprehension closer to biology until Lacan’s works that “… promoted [them] from anatomy to universal semantics” (Bowie, 2007, 125). This translation based on analogy is meaningful in many ways. As Eco says, an element is comprehended only on the basis of its similarity to another element in the cosmos (Eco, 2016, 41). Again, Freud saw a reciprocal interaction between humanity and history and stated that certain phylogenic schemes such as the Oedipus complex which is innately found within a child passed from human history to the child (cited in Nasio, 2012, 134). From the methodological perspective, the relationship between psychoanalysis and history is an intrinsic requirement in the discipline, as psychoanalysis is based on going back to the establishment, foundation of subjectivity. Therefore, Hans Meyerhoff states that the main project of psychoanalysis is historical and propounds that psychoanalysis consists of discovering what is left of the past in the patient’s current life (Mayerhoff, 1962, 5). In this context, while the clinical experience of psychoanalysis has based its problem-centered perspective on the examination of the historical process of dialectical subjectification, the analyses of the “Psychodialectical Cultural Reason Theory,” which aims at cultural psychopathology, try to consider cultures as subjects and consider their structures (of being “collective subject”) historically. As seen in the “longue duree” concept improved by Braudel, dealing with the long historical perspective for analysis is the common methodological approach of psychoanalysis and historical sociology. Ricoeur states that Freud has always objected to the distance between the psychological field and the sociological field and says that “…there is a basic analogy/similarity between the individual and the group” (Ricoeur, 2009, 139). The theory to be introduced in this context should also be seen as a historical sociology study because it is a structural-historical analysis that examines the formation of the “cultural reason,” which is a discursive conceptualization of collective self-conception, and it analyzes the social changes that cause dramatic transformations in the cultural reason on a macro scale. The article aims to demonstrate the method of defining the characteristics of culture-subject through the formation and development processes of cultural reason in terms of theory by introducing the way in which some basic concepts are abstracted from the individual to the collective.

Psychodialectical Cultural Reason Theory

Cultural Reason in Culture-Subject as Self-Consciousness

On the issues of analysis of the origins of culture-subjects, the subjectification process and the social effects of the problems experienced during this process, the nature of the cultural system, the structuring of the discourse of collective selfhood, the establishment of collective identity perception, social stratification and determination of social movement mechanisms/collective styles, and the dynamics of cultural change, the theory defines two determining processes. These are, respectively, the analysis of the characteristics of the paternal and maternal culture-subjects and their cultural encounter – which led to the emergence of the new culture-subject – and secondly, the psychoanalytic analysis of the dialectical subjectification process of the new culture-subject. Thus, with our method based on psychoanalysis, we are settled in the dialectical perspective that suggests, “A society is shaped by the mediations and tools that are activated in its formation” (Brosius, 2015, 26). Cultural reason is the synthesis of the paternal and maternal culture-subject mediations and the abstract effects of the world experience in the formation process of the collective subject.

In terms of our study, all history is the scene of the conflicting desire movements of collective subjects. Cultures which are settled in the position of “being phallus” in order to complete the deficiency in the maternal culture-subject, and as a result of psychotic feminization, the feminized/passivated cultures become maternal,Footnote 3 by losing their contact with the phallic tools. These feminized cultural subjects are fertilized in a cultural/ideological/symbolic sense by a masculine culture-subject, who represents the law of external reality – the order of existence/things in their own period.

The new culture-subjects that start to develop within the bodies of maternal culture-subjects – namely within the collective discourses of self – separate from the maternal culture-subject’s collective self-discourse after a certain point. This separation, which signifies the birth of a new culture, occurs through the rupture of the identity markers, signs (the sign, which is the fixation of signifier and signified) of the maternal culture-subject. However, in order for the culture-subject to comprehend its cultural birth, the collective self-conception of its autonomous existence must be fully established by completing the dialectical moments of the development of consciousness. In other words, culture-subject is established in accordance with the law of identity, that is, when the culture itself realizes that the collective self-discourse is a form of being completely stripped of the maternal culture-subject. In terms of our study, culture is the particular view of history, which is the transcendent symbolic order, established on the basis of the law of identity in which culture-subjects are formed and articulated themselves to it. Culture-subject is considered to be the dialectical result of a cultural encounter that reveals itself, and the acculturation process is considered as a development of collective self-perception (subjectification).

A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis gives the first definition of consciousness in accordance with the first thought that comes to mind. According to the dictionary, it is “The state of awareness as opposed to being asleep, benumbed and in a state of coma” (Rycroft, 1995, 26). International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IDP, 2005, 333) similarly defines consciousness as “…the immediate comprehension of mental activity by the subject” and states that consciousness is the qualitative comprehension of information from both the outer world and the inner world. As it is well known, Brosius defines the mission of dialectic as putting the opposite of the affirmation up against the affirmation in a way that creates contrast (Brosius, 2015, 45). Putting the affirmation’s (i.e., the old wholistic structure) opposite (i.e. self-negation) up against the affirmation is to break the current situation and create a perception of self. Thus, from the perspective of dialectic, the ultimate, complete consciousness is formed by opposing the mother/unconsciousness that is the old (wholistic) totalisation to the father, who represents the law of external reality, as the element that will provide her negation. The adventure of consciousness of the subject is the process of invalidating itself through externalizing its own conditions of perception of unity with the mother. Consciousness is the realization that this separation is possible so that separation from the original wholeness is also possible. When we transfer the concept from individual subject to collective subject based on its structural features, we can define “social consciousness” as the state of understanding the self-conception of the collective/social structure. The collective consciousness is the negation of the “old order” from which the collective psychic totality emerges as a subject since it is unable to withstand the constant intervention of external reality. Thus, the structure, which develops a comprehension of itself, extends outwards by breaking the integrity of the old order as a “new” totality and prepares the foundation of the independent subject. In this context, culture that distinguishes itself from the culture from which it derives is a self-consciousness structure since it contains individuals whose intellectual impositions are particular elements. Subject is the symbolic design of consciousness which is a perception of self.

The dialectical moments of the development of the collective consciousness will influence the culture-subject’s next form of existence. In this context, careful analysis of two periods is essential for the pathology of a culture-subject; the paternal and maternal subject’s encounter that results in the emergence of the new culture-subject, and the new culture-subject’s passage through the dialectical formation moments of conscious development. Anyone who wants to make a realistic analysis of society in accordance with the logic of dialectic should try to understand society by examining the society before it, with the advice of Brosius (2015, 27–28). In this context, it is very important to study the paternal and maternal culture’s encounter forms, the characteristics of the “culture-idea” transferred from the paternal figure, and the synthesized attributes of the two sides as a result of the encounter. It should be reminded that the collective self-discourse, which is the abstract body/consciousness of the new culture-subject, forms through the disruption of the collective self-discourse of the maternal culture-subject. It should be noted that a lot of qualities of the maternal meta-discourse would influence the new culture-subject. Likewise, the unique interests of each culture-subject, the style and tendencies it develops, are shaped by the determinant structural characteristics of the cultural encounter that initiated its establishment. At this point, the forms of dialectical moments during the structural establishment of culture-subjectivity should also be analyzed by considering them. In this context, cultural reason is the synthesis of the paternal and maternal culture-subject mediations and the abstract effects of the world experience in the formation process that shape the cultural rationale. Cultural reason, which is the unconscious ground of collective rationale, is the unconsciously motivated information system made possible by a culture that is the cultural epistemological tendency. Cultural reason determines culture’s universe of possibilities, defines the correlation of associations, and builds the unique topology of collective consciousness. In other words, the cultural reason is the unique pattern of cultural signs that are woven around the idea of culture which is the main sign. The collective consciousness, which is the collective perception of self, is the unique appearance of symbolic motifs. Therefore, the Psychodialectical Cultural Reason Theory should also be seen as a work of “psychoanalytic historical sociology” because it is the structural-historical analysis of the formation of cultural reason, and of the social changes that cause transformations in cultural reason on a macro scale. Continuing the example in our study, it is understood that the collective consciousness, which is the self-perception of the social structure, is the identity pattern that distinguish the Ottoman society/state from the Seljuks, the predecessor-maternal society/state from which it derives. Any awareness that prevents Ottoman society from calling itself “Seljuk society” belongs to the collective consciousness and cultural reason patterns.

Structural Elements of Collective Personality: Collective Id, Collective Ego, and Collective Superego

Removing the concepts of id, ego, and superego from the human context and moving them to the collective dimension is also very important for our study. According to psychoanalytic theory, “libido,” which is psychic energy, is produced by the id. Indeed, Hall states that the reservoir of psychic energy is the id (Hall, 2010: 83). The basic desire of the id is the direct satisfaction of needs in order to achieve pleasure. However, contrary to popular belief, this is not a desire that provides progress by relieving the tension resulting from the need. On the contrary, for the id, which does not develop any rational strategy for the satisfaction of needs, it is much more advantageous to end the tension completely. In his work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud defines the drive as the immanent impulse of the organic structure to restore the “former (primordial) state” which it had to abandon due to external influences. It is clear that the dialectical equivalent of the “primordial state” is “affirmation,” which is the beginning of the dialectical movement. Stating that the drive is actually the expression of inertia inherent in organic life, Freud states that an improvement is generally expected as a result of the satisfaction of the drive, but the situation that emerges is the opposite of what is expected (Freud, 2014: 47). Because ultimately the satisfaction of the drive takes the organic structure back to the stagnant period in which a need arising from external circumstances had not yet arisen. For this very reason, it is understood that the dialectical counterpart of the drive is the “contradiction” that causes the deterioration of an existing situation. As Politzer points out, in dialectics, “contradiction” is the cause of “movement” (Politzer, 2018: 93). In this context, we can carry the relationship between drive, inorganic-primordial state, and organism-becoming into dialectical logic. Expanding the meaning of this relationship between drive and fulfillment, Freud states that all drives are in fact conservative in nature and their main aim is to return to the initial inorganic state of being. Since inanimate beings exist as antecedents to living beings, the starting point will always be determined as inanimateness. Based on this, Freud concludes that “The goal of all life is death” (Freud, 2014: 48). Death is satisfaction so great as to render the whole cycle of drive satisfaction meaningless, because in the face of the endless renewal of needs, the most economical way of drive satisfaction is to return to the initial inorganic being (to the dialectical “affirmation” state). The id, then, is a tension between returning to the inorganic (primordial) stage by disintegration and opposing it. The id generates energy by absorbing the tension between existence and extinction (life and death). When the concept is abstracted from its biological context and carried to the collective dimension, it is understood that the libido in the cultural sense is the “collective life force” of culture. “Culture-life force” (collective libido) is the collective ideational energy used to hold together and strengthen the discourse of the collective self (identity) that is the social body. By structuring this collective energy absorbed from the masses/crowds, culture and the state keep the meta-discourse (social body) and spatial dominance, which bring society into being, in order. Just as libido in the individual-subject is directed toward various foci such as the mouth, anus, and genitals, causing psychic activities, cultural libido is also concentrated in certain foci of the social body in various situations.Footnote 4 What is important here is not the biological organs (mouth, anus, etc.) but the dialectically emerging functions of these organs (receiving, holding/releasing). Thus, cultures invest collective libido in the stages of consciousness that are the structural equivalents of the oral, anal, and phallic periods during their development. As a matter of fact, the ego and superego are also structured by receiving energy from the id in this process. The ego positions the id’s material of uncoordinated drives into a system. Through the ego, drives are satisfied in a way that is reconciled with reality, while at the same time avoiding death (return to the inorganic/primordial state of being), which means the absolute satisfaction of drives. The superego is the internal representative of the external-paternal element as an agent that is sometimes in conflict with both the id and the ego. In psychodialectical terms, power (or “authority” which is the “collective ego” as the power of order over the masses) is the structured form of the mass, which has no inherent ordering system. In other words, the collective psychic relation between power (like government, dynasty, or any kind of ruling class) and the mass is a kind of manifestation of the relation described by Freud between the ego and the id. Stating that the ego and the id are not separated by absolute boundaries, Freud defines the ego as a “specially differentiated” part of the id (Freud, 2014: 96). Therefore, according to Freud, the ego is not completely separated from the id, such that the lower part of the ego merges with the id (Freud, 2014: 85). In this context, the ego is formed by structuring some of the fluid forces that move unlimitedly and formlessly in the id to form an order. However, this fluidity, solidified as the ego, is not completely separated from the id; on the contrary, it is rooted in the formless content of the id. For this reason, the ego always draws the necessary energy from the id in order to be structured and to keep its existing structure vigorous. When we transfer this situation to culture-subject analysis, it is understood that it is also valid for the power that derives from the mass. Both in monarchies and other forms of power, the ruling center derives from the ruled. Power, which is a specially differentiated part of the fragmented mass/crowd, is not completely isolated from the mass on which it rises even in an absolute monarchy. As a matter of fact, for elements such as education, law, and bureaucracy that make the existence and continuity of power possible, and the army to establish the security network, energy must be drawn from the mass/crowd. Through captivity/conquest, recruitment, upbringing, and education, every power structure from the past to the present has ensured the continuity of power with the energy drawn from the masses. Thus, even though the pinnacle of power seems to be isolated from society, the fringes that sustain this pinnacle dissolve into society. The dynasty/ruling class, the central element of power, is also a later differentiated part of the masses/crowds. The dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, for example, was a part of the unarticulated/dispersed/disorganized masses of Turkmen tribes. Over time, the Turkmen tribes, following the principle of “primus inter pares,” identified the Ottoman family as their leader. The tribes, who wanted to coordinate booty-oriented conflicts without engaging in power struggles among themselves, differentiated a part of themselves and allied around a prince (bey) from the Osmanoğlu family. Limiting themselves by creating an image of unity, the tribes began to construct the collective ego from the collective id. In other words, a “need” among the tribes revealed the “drive” to unite. Thus, in the psychodialectics of power, in accordance with Freud’s famous principle of “Wo es war soll ich werden” (Where id was, there ego shall be), it can be concluded that “Where the mass is, there power shall be.”

The emergence of power is the first of the collective actions of the mass. The specific structuring of power deriving from the mass is the first appearance of the mass’s specific negation of the external world. At this point, the aim of the collective ego is to prevent the non-articulated/fragmented nature of the collective id from dominating the system, that is, to prevent fragmentation. Indeed, history is replete with the story of numerous states that disintegrated into small fragments, such as principalities, with the disappearance of the dynasty and the ruling class, the embodiment of the collective ego. In this case, we arrive at the dialectical positions that can be seen in Table 1 below.

Table 1 Table of psychoanalytic, dialectical, and psychodialectical positions
Full size table

The fragmented crowd/mass (dialectical “affirmation”) can only become a “society” as a result of a process that begins with a need (in other words, with “a dialectical contradiction” in the face of external reality). In other words, the transformation of the crowd into society is a dialectical process of self-consciousness. The transformation of the “mass,” which constantly wants more, into a “society” is only possible by restricting its desires. As a matter of fact, since the mass does not have a perception of wholeness in the given situation, infinite desires reveal the danger of disintegration. In this context, from a psychodialectical point of view, culture is a symbolic record that integrates the disconnected/unintegrated mass as a society. This symbolic record is the result of a process of collective subjectivation and is structured around a social node of collective identity. In this case, a mass can only become a society when its aspirations are focused on collective goals. Culture is formed when a society’s aspirations are based on unwritten-unconscious rules. In this context, culture is a knot tied to protect the collective integrity of society in its own imagination. That is why the masses are always unconsciously motivated to divide into smaller and smaller parts, and ultimately into families, with the aim of destroying society. But there is also an element that tries to prevent the collapse: the collective ego. In this way, society remains in a state of structural balance. An example of this is the Ottoman Empire system. The Ottoman Empire is structurally a composite of three forces; firstly, the different “groups/masses,” which always tend to disintegrate/fragment and are not articulated with each other (especially Turkmen tribes, who owe their existence to their aggressive nature), secondly, the “Janissaries,” which is a special army partially subordinated to the center and aiming to prevent the fragmentation that may occur with the disintegration of power centers, and thirdly, the “Sultan” as the balance point of all. The collective personality of the Ottoman culture-subject is thus composed of three structural elements: the center (the Sultan and the ruling class) – the unarticulated masses (dispersed tribes, clans, and families) – the private army (Janissaries) which were recruited by alienation from society (Table 2).

Table 2 Table on psychodialectical correspondences of structural personality elements
Full size table

As is known, the collective id tries to prevent the forces trying to restrain it. However, these encounters between the collective id and the collective ego often cross the line and result in violent conflicts. As it is known, in the case of conflict between the ego and the id, the superego is the chief helper of the ego, which tries to control and prevent the drives coming from the id. This function corresponds exactly to the mission of the Janissary army, the institution of the collective superego in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the Ottoman dynasty needed the help of the Janissary Army in suppressing every mass uprising. It is also very important that the members of the Janissary army consisted of children recruited from Christian families. As it is known, Freud states that the superego borrows the power it needs from the father and protects the father’s character (Freud, 2014: 94). As a matter of fact, the Janissary army emerged after the internalization of Byzantium through “conquest,” a cannibalistic way of incorporation, and this special class of soldiers of Christian origin came to control even the Sultan. Psychodialectically, “Byzantium” is a paternal figure for the Ottoman culture-subject due to its decisive-effective role in history. There is a psychodialectical relationship between Byzantium being Christian and the Janissaries being of Christian origin. Just as the superego was formed as a result of the oedipal process, the Janissary army, which restricted the Sultan’s decisions and prevented the revolts of the masses, emerged after Byzantium was conquered (imported through incorporation). Consequently, the purpose of the collective ego is to prevent the fragmented nature of the collective id belonging to the pre-social imagination from dominating the system, that is, extinction.

Maternal and Paternal Figure

Dialectical psychoanalysis will approach the concepts of mother and father in the human context as symbolic positions. From the perspective of dialectic, the mother’s abstraction from its content based on its functionality in the developmental consciousness process shows that the “maternal figure” in its pure-form is the primary structure that one derives from but needs to negate its identical existence in order to complete its own existence as a subject. Since the derivation of the new culture-subject from the maternal-subject is based on the depletion of the maternal-subject’s resources and the fragmentation of its existence, “cultural birth” in the collective subject often results in the destruction of the maternal position. However, in some cases, the maternal-subject may not disappear despite the emergence of a new culture-subject from it. Mother’s counterpart in dialectical logic is “dialectical affirmation,” which means the current state that is necessary for the beginning of the movement. In Hegelian terms, this affirmation, which is “defined,” is a starting point (Brosius, 2015, 24), and it contains the necessary conditions for negation to occur. In other words, for the emergence of consciousness, it is necessary to deny the mother, who represents the same context as the unconscious. In this context, the maternal figure, the functional abstraction of the mother, is a figure that one must overcome by negating it for the creation of independent existence; it is the source that has existed from the beginning, from which the new subject derives both materially and spiritually. While the maternal figure is sometimes absorbing, imprisoning, and disintegrating, sometimes, it frees the new culture-subject by referring to the external law. In the structural sense, if the primary (maternal) figure from which the new culture-subject derives from prevents the intervention of the external law, it stops the negation conditions that would overcome the primary state of being and makes the movement of independent subjectification impossible. Accordingly, maternal culture is the culture from which a new culture derives from by negating it with the intervention of a paternal figure which represents the external reality of its time.

The father is the negation of the mother. Bella Habip says “…the father represents the non-mother and its existence is the equivalent of a fundamental negativity” (Habip, 2014, 3). However, in dialectic, it cannot be propounded that the father is the first negation that confronts affirmation. Because in dialectic, negation occurs when “…affirmation creates it” (Brosius, 2015, 25). The dynamics that reveal the negation accumulate in the affirmation. However, the Name-of-the-Father comes from the outside, not from maternity (or the child’s illusion of an onto-epistemological universe of omnipotent objects).

In this case, as a function, the analytic abstraction of the Paternal Figure based on form without content should be considered as an embodied representative of the pattern of “being” which enables us to take it all the way back to the origins of existence thanks to its symbolic position from a dialectical framework. The correct positioning of the father within the individual is directly related to the subject’s understanding of self. This is related to the fact that the father as a function actually gives the existence its form of “being” with regard to the history of its mode of “being” at the moment and connects the being to its origin. The paternal figure is the structural element and function that provides the subject with its coordinates in the universal order of existence. It guarantees the order’s institutional functioning and makes us come to terms with the law of the “order of things” which makes the world meaningful. It also enables the awareness that the being is identical to itself, it relates the being’s state at the moment to the original founding state of consciousness, and it logically enables the existence at the moment by creating history since the beginning up till now. Indeed, this is exactly what a surname provides for human-subjects. Father puts the subject inside a symbolic registry and includes them in the ontological genealogy. Because of all these features, “Name-of-the-Father,” the particular representative of the identity law of history, is the center of gravity in the production of meaning. And in the collective sense, the paternal figure includes the culture-subject in history by taking it out of the previous culture-subject; it enables the new culture-subject to grasp its self-identical existence. Formal “father,” in the dimension of the cultural encounter, represents the “Big Other,” the order of history with his name. He is a structural, constructive figure who reaches the maternal, the culture-subject from which the new culture-subject emerges, and causes the new culture-subject to form by intervening and inviting the subject to come to terms with outside reality. For the Ottoman Empire, for example, the maternal figure was the Seljuk Empire, the antecedent historical ground from which the Ottoman society and the state emerged. Just as a baby who is initially part of its mother and only later realizes its own autonomous existence, the Ottoman Empire initially existed as part of the Seljuk Empire and then gradually developed its own collective consciousness. The paternal figure for the Ottoman Empire was the Byzantine Empire, the active figure of the external reality of history. Only after its conflict with the Byzantine Empire and its internalization of Byzantium (as the oedipal process), the Ottoman state complete its institutionalization process and transition to the classical imperial phase.

Psychosexual Development in Culture-Subject: Social Oral and Social Anal Stages

The main question stands; how can we talk about the oral period of a culture which does not have a mouth? For this, first of all, it is necessary to recognize the abstraction of the concept of body. From the point of view of our study, the social body is actually a discursive order that embodies the social consciousness of self. Just as the biological body is the periphery of our existence, the social body is a psychic design that we use in order to mark our own existence by naming it. And what gives a society its identity by defining its boundaries is “cultural reason,” that is, the arrangement of the signs in a way that is unique to the culture. In this context, the imaginary body of culture is the largest set of discourses that interact with each other and can be kept together without being dispersed under the umbrella of meta-discourse that provides a cultural reality scale. This shows that the social body corresponds to Castoriadis’s conceptualization of the “legein” (2011). The network of discourses is established as a “gestalt” by assuming a schema of totalisation with reference to each other since the beginning. The social body is the guarantee of semantic stabilization of cultural reason functions. Therefore, culture is the self-discourse of itself.Footnote 5 In this context, the social body is the embodiment of the collective consciousness.Footnote 6 In this context of our study, the oral and anal stages are the epistemological resources (of the social body) that the developing consciousness utilizes in order to comprehend the world. In this case, we must remember the collective translations of the concepts of mother and body in order to comprehend the structural abstraction of the oral stage for society.

Contextually, the oral stage of a culture-subject must be taken as the starting period when the social body’s psychic energy and interest is nurtured by the maternal figure, when the act of “taking” is the focus. In this period, the new culture-subject has not yet been able to establish its own subject within the context of the law of identity (incest). In other words, the new-culture is not completely separated from the maternal figure from which it derives. Therefore, the new cultural consciousness in the oral period will consider itself identical in being with the maternal figure and will not distinguish between inside and outside. Culture in its oral stage is focused on the transfer from the maternal culture. Therefore, the structural equivalent of the oral stage should be the stage of cultural exchange with maternal culture. This is the primary stage where the established relationship with the maternal culture is intense. Of course, the conceptual analogy upon which the theory is built does not declare that culture has a biological mouth. The abstract equivalents of the compulsory pattern of the psychic designs of consciousness of the centers in the body that the libido turns toward and makes erotic are discussed. Concordantly, from the context of dialectical psychoanalysis, the oral stage is the period of omnipotent ontological perception where a symbiotic relationality with the maternal figure is innate and essential since the new culture is not yet separated from the maternal culture. Since every culture derives from another culture as a result of external intervention, the separation phase in the beginning takes place in phases, and as with human-subjects, a perception of ontological unity with the mother is dominant during these stages. Indeed, this is made necessary by dialectic as the law of existence. As a matter of fact, the breakdown of a primary situation (original state), the emergence of a new being is impossible without going through the dialectical stages.

On the other hand, the anal stage, when separated from its biological content, corresponds to the period where the new culture-subject starts to separate from the maternal culture, begins to distinguish the inside-outside difference, understands its existence’s identity, and starts to comprehend the differences of its qualities. The act of “holding-releasing” in the anal stage actually expresses the start of making choices as “I” between two opposing tendencies. In other words, it expresses the base of an autonomous being. This function of the anal stage was psycho-biologically defined in the human content as the intellectual position where the individual starts to differentiate between what belongs to them and what does not. The anal stage, which is built on not doing something or doing it inappropriately like holding excretions in or releasing them in a wrong way, is the stage of the negative act. At this stage, the self tries to reveal itself by not doing something, i.e., negation. At the same time, we should note that the collective translation of the anal stage contains the beginning of the encounter with external reality. The new culture-subject begins to separate from the maternal culture-subject by making a distinction between what belongs to it and what does not. As pointed out by Brown, ownership is content that belongs to the anal stage (Brown, 1996, 310). Ownership is also related to “the pressure of reality and control” (Charrier, 2015, 63), since it is based on the separation between inside and outside. In this situation, the new culture-subject who has not yet started to separate itself from the maternal culture in the oral stage tries to internalize every new fact from an omnipotent understanding of existence. In the anal stage, the perception of self begins to form through the inside-outside cohesion and comes to the stage of forming an ownership-based identity. The development of awareness, perception of ownership, and holding/releasing actions regarding the inside-outside difference in the anal stage are structurally very important. In the collective dimension of the anal stage, it is clear that holding, ownership, and identity pattern is linked to affiliation, the perception of us and ancestry. Fixation with moral principles, inside-outside relationship, and phenomenon of ownership; tension between impurity and cleanliness, the defects in the perception of value, boundaries between what is from the body and what is not, and over-controlling are encoded in the past of consciousness development as anal-dominant modes of action.

In conclusion, psychoanalysis, which evaluates the information resources that are active in the oral and anal stages, actually extracts a map from the perspective of the body’s sociology of knowledge. The oral stage is not a stage made necessary by the mouth; neither the anal stage is by the anus. These stages are the necessary epistemological channels’ appearance in biology which the process of becoming a subject needs in the course of establishing a relationship with the outside world. Therefore, psychoanalysis, which examines the biology-mediated nature of information sources in oral and anal stages, actually puts forth a map of the body’s sociology of knowledge. For our approach, there is no necessary correlation of the oral and anal stages to the organs of mouth and anus. What is critical is to determine the symbolic meaning of the difference between the mouth and the other organs of the body based on their differential positions and their contribution to the development of consciousness. Therefore, psychosexual stages are not required by biological organs. On the contrary, the organs who give these stages their names are the biological appearance of the epistemological channels that the forming consciousness necessarily utilizes in order to relate to the outside world. This is exactly why psychoanalysis is the historical sociology of consciousness.

Psychoanalysis defines the dialectical moments of the development of reason in human content; therefore, it uses the psycho-biological terms of “oral” and “anal.” Individual-focused psychoanalysis distills consciousness through biology. However, the dialectical pattern that consciousness attains at the moment does not develop because the mouth or anus is already prominent for biological reasons; on the contrary, the term is named by this name since the activism imposed by the dialectical movement of consciousness can manifest itself in an actuality made possible by the mouth or anus.

For example, during the first period of the Ottoman Empire, the social oral period, the Ottoman Empire was not considered to be a separate state from its predecessor, the Seljuk Empire. Even in this period, the Ottoman Empire was neither an empire nor a state. In order not to anger the Seljuk government, the title of sultan was not used. In this period, the Ottoman rulers behaved as a vassal prince, not an independent sultan, and were in a position of “receiving” in the face of Seljuk sovereignty. However, especially from the reign of Murat I, who used the title of the sultan for the first time, the Ottoman identity began to diverge from the Seljuk identity and a social anal period began in which the function of “holding and releasing” was at the core. In this period, the issue of who was Ottoman and who was not, in other words, the issue of belonging, started to gain importance. After the social oedipal conflict at the end of the social anal period in which the Seljuks were gradually distanced from the Seljuks, the Seljuk signs of authority were completely rejected. Thus, Ottoman identity was established autonomously.

Failing Collective Psychic Mechanism: Social Neurosis and Social Psychosis

The conceptualization of “social neurosis” or “social psychosis” does not relay an attribution of neurosis/psychosis to society through a simple analogy. The aim here is to discover the necessary mechanisms of the neurosis/psychosis conceptualization, which is defined in human subjects as an error in the dialectical development of consciousness, also for collective subjects. In this regard, it constitutes a structural and formal prerequisite to seek the collective dimension of neurosis, which is related to the structural formation of the culture-subject. Violent traces of the oedipal conflict, the second negation that takes place in the formation of culture-subject, which is the internalization of the law of identity imposed by the paternal figure who represents the history at that time, are structurally embedded in the subject. The basis of social neurosis is the form of oedipal conflict that imposes the law of identity (“incest” in biological appearance) on a new culture-subject. When the ontological illusion of the mother–child unity is harshly destroyed, it leaves neurosis behind. Therefore, social neuros can be seen in new cultures that have been strongly severed from maternal culture. Social neurosis can be seen in the following structural situations; paternal culture-subject’s complicating the transition process to the symbolic order, paternal culture-subject’s weakness, maternal culture-subject’s reaction to the separation of the new culture, or the new culture-subject’s hesitation in leaving the old order will cause social neurosis. In this context, social neurosis, which is settled in cultural/collective actions and thoughts with macro-phobias, obsessive thoughts and regressions, is a defect in the transition to the intercultural symbolic order, which makes itself visible through collective symptoms.

Subjectivity is the body’s comprehension of its identity with itself. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, identity and body cannot be separated; the physical body is the surface of the subject. In this case, due to the same structural causality, the collective culture-subject’s symptoms of neuroses will be visible in the social body, i.e., the meta-discourse which is society’s self-perception. Consequently, the symptoms of social neurosis will especially appear in the signs of identity which are the boundary signs on the surface of the social body. Signs of identity fulfill the skin’s function of containing and holding together in the biological body and constitute a boundary regarding what belongs to the body and what is on the outside of it. A collective symptom that will appear in identity signs will reveal the deep structural problem through a seemingly unimportant hitch on the crust of social discourse. At times, the halt caused by the symptom will be an involuntary movement that does not create meaning like a tic or twitch. And other times, it will be an unexpected condensationFootnote 7 or contraction in the collective identity discourse. Of course, symptoms can manifest themselves not only on the social-body surface but also on the clear front surface of collective consciousness. In such circumstances, the collective mind also encounters obsessive thoughts stemming from unconscious thoughts that reflect on the surface of consciousness and symptoms that are composed of self-repeating historic images.

The theory advances a similar approach on the issue of “social psychosis.” The basic hypothesis of the theory is based on the recognition that a new culture-subject emerges as a result of a type of acculturation process with the encounter between the active paternal culture-subject and the passive maternal culture-subject. During the cultural encounter, the maternal culture-subject’s non-referral to paternity that is in the constructive position of the founding discourse, the maternal figure’s dominance over the law of identity, or the culture-subject’s failure to enter into the symbolic order for some reason, all account for the emergence of a psychotic structuring due to the nature of the formal structures of consciousness independent of human content. The expression of psychotic that we cite here is used to express the structural consequence of a hitch in a moment in the process of consciousness’ dialectic-based existence. Culture-subject’s desire for the maternal culture-subject and the acceptance of the paternal culture-subject as a rival during the development of the new culture-subject’s consciousness can sometimes gravitate in the wrong way and result in an exclusion that will harm the development of consciousness. Social psychosis occurs in the case of the culture-subject’s foreclosure of the paternal culture-subject. In a social psychotic cultural structure, the new culture-subject is not structured independently of the maternal culture-subject because it has not internalized the law of identity. The new culture-subject who could not enter the symbolic order between culture-subjects gets stuck in the imaginary relations with the maternal culture-subject.

The concept of origin stands out in psychotic structuring because the Name-of-the-Father, which provides a smooth positioning as to the logic of existence by including the subject in the ontological genealogy, is foreclosed. On that account, psychotic culture will not adapt to the symbolic order between culture-subjects and will have intercultural problems on the basis of perception of origin and use of language, as can be seen in psychotic individuals. Throughout history, some culture-subjects claimed that they are the children of the sun or that the entire world has derived from their own culture. They cannot share the same symbolic language with other cultures; therefore, they cannot share the same perception of the “order of things” too. In the context of our study, myths are defined as the collective delusion of the cultures that are born out of the cultural encounter. Concordantly, each myth actually fulfills the function of a patch that is produced in order to fill the hole that social psychosis has created in the collective structuring.

In some institutions of culture, the psychic gap created by the foreclosure of the paternal culture-subject will somehow be patched by imagery mechanisms that try to imitate the symbolic order. In this way, the “ordinary social psychotic” structuring will occur. The ordinary social psychotic culture-subject will collapse when the structure that was substituted by a fake/artificial system of images is triggered by an encounter with the foreclosed paternity (“A father,” “One-Father,” or an element that reminds of it). Lacan says that in the state of ordinary psychosis, at the point where the Name-of-the-Father is called upon, only a gap in the position of the other can answer. Because of deficiency on the metaphorical level, this gap will open up a hole that corresponds to phallic signification (Lacan, 1966, 558 cited in Abrevaya, 2017, 129). A foreclosed father’s appearance threatens the existing artificial symbolic order. Therefore, the ordinary social psychotic structuring where collective psychosis is balanced is quite susceptible to social crises and cultural encounters with new dynamics. In fact, the phenomenon described by Shayegan as “the sudden transformation of the social landscape” (Shayegan, 2014, 103) is the disruption in the collective self-understanding of the society, that is, the usual social psychotic triggering. The trigger reveals all dissent and uncompromising structures that were reconciled by imitation. With the collapse of balanced ordinary social psychosis, the appearance of these uncompromising structures relates to the implosion of the artificial social unconsciousness toward collective consciousness. The collapsing social psychotic culture-subject will disrupt the integrity of the social body and blur its boundaries. The collective counterpart of the disruption of this integrty is the fragmentation of the social network of legein, which is meta-discourse. Thus, an unconscious motivation will occur for collective actions and decisions such as removing some parts of society (like civil wars, massacres, and genocides) or trying to cut off the parts of other culture-subjects that are seen as belonging to their own culture (like invasions and conquests). For example, in the Ottoman Empire, Turkishness, the paternal figure that was foreclosed (verwerfung) by the internalization of Byzantium reappeared due to the nationalism movement and caused a trigger. The crisis of origin turned into a crisis of identity and revealed a collective psychosis. This collective psychosis led to delusions of fragmentation and revealed the identity crisis that would lead to the Armenian genocide in order to tear off parts of the social body. Similarly, the myth that “the whole world is Turkish,” which was put forward in the relevant period, constituted an example of delusions of origin that rendered the subject unique in history.

Conclusion

Psychodialectical Cultural Reason Theory, which is a systematic effort to directly relate psychodynamics to social processes, will contribute to the analysis of social phenomena as it enables structural analysis of collective consciousness in the context of its formative conditions. According to Freud, the purpose of psychoanalysis is to establish dominance over objects that have been pushed to the unconscious (Freud, 2013b, 59). In this regard, the study can serve as a guide to produce policies to heal the social effects of social neurotic knots which comes into the consciousness from the collective unconsciousness. Similarly, it is expected that the intellectual mechanisms of the theory will contribute to the development of perception management processes. In this context, the difference of the study is that it allows long-term analysis of the phenomena encountered since the whole set of concepts of psychoanalysis has been translated into collective. In addition, it will enable to reveal of collective symbolic investment areas in order to direct the unconscious motivation of the society. In this context, the theory we have developed will serve in hitting political goals because it will allow the creation of intellectual maps detecting unconscious rhizomatic connections of public opinion. The theory, which aims to conduct the analysis of social consciousness, defines all structural mechanisms starting from the establishment process of culture when social identity crystallizes, and it develops an approach which can detect collective fobies, weak and strong points. Therefore, the theory is expected to contribute to studies of political psychology, public diplomacy, strategic culture, and psychological warfare. By the intellectual tools of the theory, the socio-psychic bonds that unite and hold together the elements that make up the culture-subject can be determined. Thus, researches on strengthening or loosening these social ties can also be conducted. The theory, which can guide the conduct of intercultural communication with the analysis of cultural reason, will be useful in making strategic social predictions and obtaining cultural crisis scenarios.

Thanks to the psychoanalytic psychopathology of culture-subjects, it will be possible to ascertain the causality of the symptoms of social neurosis. Since it construes the structuring of collective consciousness in its entirety, it makes it possible to detect whether the culture at hand contains social psychotic structuring before the triggering occurs. In this way, a number of collective measures can be taken, and social policies can be shaped in the context of psychic dynamics and sensitivities made manifest by psychoanalytic cultural psychopathology. Of course, a culture-subject in its state of balance may be triggered on purpose in order to disrupt psychological collective dynamics as well. Thus, it is understood that the psychoanalytic culture-subject psychopathology, whose theoretical basis we tried to reveal with the Psychodialectical Cultural Reason Theory, has an important practical value as it includes the method of intervention in sociology.