The Psychomythic Dimension: Psychosexual Development and Cultural Evolution

WCPSI Applied Psychoanalysis Community Event – All Are Welcome

The Psychomythic Dimension:
Psychosexual Development and Cultural Evolution

with Daniel S. Benveniste, PhD

This WCPSI Applied Psychoanalysis Community Event is open to everyone who is interested in learning more about psychoanalysis. You are welcome to join us whether or not you have a clinical background.

The lecture presentation is based on Daniel Benveniste’s book, Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo. It leaves behind Freud’s psycho-Lamarckian assumption, and looks for analogous relations between libido development, psychopathology, prehistoric cultural evolution, myth, and ritual. Benveniste considers human social instincts in relation to primatology and Hominin evolution and finds their manifestations elaborated in the artifacts of prehistoric culture. These analogous relations are schematized in four stages of “psychomythic development” characterized by clusters of metaphors embedded in technology and the spiritual life. These stages illuminate the way psychology has been projected into mythic thought and out onto the walls of the universe throughout our cultural evolution. Dr. Benveniste will address the way the solutions to psychosexual challenges influenced the solutions to cultural challenges in the Paleolithic, Neolithic, High Neolithic, and Urban Revolution. Also included will be a discussion of Yanomami shamanism and the way the shaman slides from oneness to twoness, from primary process thinking to secondary process thinking, and this will offer us a model to help us think about our own Paleolithic minds.

Daniel S. Benveniste, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in Sammamish Washington; an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association; the author of Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo (2022) and The Interwoven Lives of Sigmund, Anna, and W. Ernest Freud: Three Generations of Psychoanalysis (2015); and is a Visiting Professor of Clinical Psychology in Wuhan, China.

Endre Koritar, M. D., FRCP(C), FIPA, is a training and supervising analyst with the Western Canada Psychoanalytic Society Institute. He is an Assistant Clinical Professor of the University of British Columbia affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry. He is on the Board of Directors of the ISFN, the National Council of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, the National Training Committee, and an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is interested in researching and elaborating on the ideas of Sándor Ferenczi, who was a harbinger of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and technique.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will revisit Freud’s ‘Totem and Taboo’ and learn how the solutions to psychosexual challenges informed the challenges of prehistoric cultural evolution.
Participants will recognize how prehistoric cultural evolution has created myths, rituals, and technologies that are analogous to the metaphors and dynamics that emerge in psychosexual development.

Registration closed.