Mission

The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society (APCS) has been established to promote greater understanding of how cultural and social phenomena affect human subjectivity in ways that are socially significant and to promote new, more socially beneficial ways of applying psychoanalysis to social problems. APCS is dedicated to both the diagnosis of the psychological ills underlying social problems and to the development of a psychoanalytic treatment of these ills at a collective level through cultural criticism, education, and other practices.

Greater understanding of the relations among subjectivity, culture, and behavior is necessary if we are to deal more effectively with our most serious social problems. Addressing the psychological factors that are the immediate causes of destructive behaviors such as drug abuse, irresponsible sexuality, and ethnic, racial, and sexual intolerance and violence can produce results that other social, political, and economic programs cannot produce by themselves. Psychoanalysis offers a unique strategy for dealing with these problems: helping subjects recognize and work through the unconscious conflicts at the root of the problematic behavior.

Moreover, since various elements of culture often contribute to or oppose these psychological factors, understanding the roles that culture plays in either supporting or opposing them will allow us to address the social problems more effectively. Psychoanalysis offers the best model we have for understanding how basic phenomena of subjectivity– love, hate, knowledge, belief, meaning, identity, desire, enjoyment, fantasy, anxiety, and so on–are affected by culture. The psychoanalytic investigation of culture thus constitutes a unique and arguably indispensable means of understanding the role culture plays in producing the motivations at the root of many of our most serious social problems, as well as understanding the psychological and social benefits that culture can produce.