“Cultures and Their Discontents: On the Cultural Mediation of Shame and Guilt.”

Hollan, Douglas. “Cultures and Their Discontents: On the Cultural Mediation of Shame and Guilt.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, vol.32, no.6, 2012, pp. 570-581. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2012.703898

In several places, Freud implies that the relationship between happiness and cultural conditions

may be contingent in important ways. For example, early in the essay he muses, “Whether and

in what degree men of an earlier age felt happier and what part their cultural conditions played

in that matter” (1961, p. 36). Later in the same paragraph, he eventually concludes that changes

in values and attitudes over time make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to know with certainty

what other people’s subjective experience has been, but he leaves the larger question about the

impact of cultural conditions on human subjectivity dangling. 571

Taken at this level of abstraction, I think many contemporary anthropologists and psychoanalysts

would agree with Freud that life in communities is always challenging, if not hellish at

times, and that at least some of this is related to renunciation of desire. And yet I think many

would also now question how illuminating the argument is when pitched at this level of generality,

raising but never seriously addressing the issue of how differing social and cultural conditions

affect human subjectivity, either in terms of happiness or despair.571