Approaching the complex subject-culture articulation ¹

From the beginning of psychoanalysis, Freud explained that the subject is inseparable from culture. The subjective experience necessarily implies the reference of the subject to the Other, object of love and hate, and language. In this article, we discuss the contribution of psychoanalysis to the approach of culture, highlighting its specificity, which is that its hypotheses originate from the clinic. From psychoanalysis, we can observe that if the discontent present in culture is unavoidable, due to the constraints that are imposed on drives, psychic illnesses usually critically point to “unhealthy” aspects of culture at certain historical moments.

Keywords:
psychoanalysis; psychopathology; culture; subjectivity