Human character structures are undergoing cataclysmic deformations worldwide. This disruptive process is accelerating exponentially. The factors involved are well known. They include alienation, cynicism, and collective paranoid psychosis, exemplified by the irrational social overreactions to the fear of terrorism. More profound factors include the loss of values and role models of sublime nobility or generosity of spirit. We have also suffered the loss of true communication in the deluge of data streams and technological apparatuses that interrupt, rather than summate, lines of thought leading to wisdom and genuine rapport. There has, in short, been a collective loss of soul in the human species. This could be considered the meaning of the postmodern. The loss of soul follows a previous loss of spirit that brought about modernization in the first place. The loss of both these dimensions of human reality remains unnoticed by the collective discourse. That discourse has become too dumbed-down to even be able to conceptualize, let alone grieve, such losses.

The continuing deformation of human character outpaces the capacity of the field of psychology to describe or understand its dynamics. Diagnostic manuals become obsolete before they can be published. The only field even endeavoring to keep up with the shifting psychic sands of human consciousness is that of psychoanalysis. But that field has become mired in its own battles with the establishment for legitimacy, resulting in compromises with the psychiatric preference for neurological explanations and the pharmaceutical industry’s preference for pill-pushing, rather than the offering of insight and understanding, let alone transformation. Moreover, psychoanalysis, like Freud’s role model, Moses, stops before the promised land of superconscious presence, and thus can never guide patients beyond the threshold of neurosis to the real inner peace that passeth understanding. (more…)