How Culture Runs the Brain

Jay Evans Harris, MDis clinical associate professor at New York Medical College.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Contemporary Cultural SyndromesChapter 2: The Cultural Regulation of identityChapter 3: The Freudian BrainChapter 4: How Mind Enters TraumaChapter 5: From Gilgamesh: The Oldest Culture We KnowChapter 6: Darwin through Freud’s EyesChapter 7: From the Primal Horde to the Primal SceneChapter 8: Freud’s Self-Specimen Chapter 9: Freud As GoetheChapter 10: Modernism and Cultural DisciplinesChapter 11: Gender and Surrender: Lessons in Ego Identity Chapter 12: Freud’s Ambivalence about AmericaChapter 13: The Pretense of Cultural LeadersChapter 14: The Evolution of FantasyChapter 15: Syndromes of Restitution and Retribution: The Tsarnaev CaseConclusionReferences

In this timely analysis of how collective or social conditions affect the ways human beings respond to their inner and outer worlds, Harris (New York Medical College) offers an important intervention into multiple fields, including neuroscience, psychology, politics, and biography. His readings are built around Freud's struggles to articulate how cultural forces shape and unshape the mind. This book will be identified with its critical readings of traumatic experience and its effort to build an understanding of trauma in relation to contemporary examples of conflict, aggression, and regressions. Examples include readings of the Boston Marathon bombing; the Orlando, FL, shooting; the Bowe Bergdahl military desertion trial; and political regressions in the American political sphere. With an acute grasp of how trauma is induced and its ramifications for individual and collective identities, Harris has made psychoanalysis relevant as a mode of cultural analysis. Few authors in the analytic tradition have done this with as much success. This book will be immensely rewarding for those who wish to think through the relation of psyche and society, and this will include practitioners as well as students.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.