Culture

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘culture’ is treated neither as mere backdrop nor as neutral transmission medium, but as a living, contested field of force that shapes — and is shaped by — the psyche itself. The range of positions is striking. Damasio grounds culture biologically, arguing that arts, governance, and moral institutions are homeostatic inventions through which feeling-laden organisms regulate suffering and flourishing across generations. Benveniste, by contrast, defines culture as an entirely symbolic phenomenon: a complex of representations organized by codes of value, interdiction, and tradition, co-extensive with human society at every level of civilization. Pargament foregrounds culture’s embedding function in coping, insisting that the individual’s entire search for significance is ‘grounded’ in cultural matrices that can be both sustaining and devastatingly inadequate. Hillman introduces a characteristically adversarial note: culture takes shape in closed, fermentative spaces, and ‘civilized’ culture risks becoming an Apollonian, patriarchal arrangement from which soul must periodically revolt. Maté extends this critique most urgently, arguing that contemporary socioeconomic culture functions as a toxic biochemical broth that systematically undermines well-being. Barrett occupies a constructionist middle ground, showing that emotion concepts — and thus cultural norms — are literally wired into developing brains across generations. The tensions among biological necessity, symbolic structure, pathological constraint, and transformative possibility make ‘culture’ one of the most generative pressure points in this literature.

In the library 20 passages

j’appelle culture le milieu humain, tout ce qui, par-delà l’accomplissement des fonctions biologiques, donne à la vie et à l’activité humaines forme, sens et contenu. La culture est inhérente à la société des hommes… ce phénomène humain, la culture, est un phénomène entièrement symbolique.

Benveniste defines culture as the totality of the symbolic human environment — everything beyond biological function that gives life form, meaning, and content — and insists it is constitutively symbolic, organized by codes of relation and value including religion, law, ethics, and art.

Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis

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our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways… a culture is a biochemical broth custom-made to promote the development of this or that organism.

Maté argues that contemporary capitalist culture functions as a toxic physiological and psychological medium that systematically produces pathology, using the laboratory metaphor of a ‘culture’ broth to literalize the point.

Maté, Gabor, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, 2022thesis

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The arts, philosophical inquiry, religious beliefs, moral faculties, justice, political governance, economic institutions… technology, and science are the main categories of endeavor and achievement that are conveyed by the word ‘culture.’

Damasio establishes a comprehensive working definition of culture as the full range of collective human intellectual and institutional achievements, transmitted across generations by language and the artifacts cultures themselves produce.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018thesis

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our visions of the future, our sense of the past, our ability to interpret and learn from experience, our definitions of ourselves, and the meanings we make of life are all embedded in a larger culture. Culture, in short, provides the grounding in the search for significance.

Pargament argues that individual coping is never autonomous: culture provides the very substrate of selfhood, temporality, and meaning-making, functioning as the indispensable ground of the search for significance.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001thesis

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Sociocultural homeostasis was added on as a new functional layer of life management… organisms… invented forms of consolation for those in suffering, rewards for those who helped the sufferers, injunctions for those who caused harm, norms of behavior aimed at preventing harm and promoting good.

Damasio frames culture as ‘sociocultural homeostasis’ — a biologically motivated superstructure of norms, rewards, and consolations that extends the organism’s self-regulatory drive to the collective level.

Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010thesis

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Culture takes place in closed, even closeted places, involving the alchemical putrefactio, or decadence as the body of fermentation. Generation and decay happen together; and they are not

Hillman locates culture’s generative power in processes of putrefaction and decay — the alchemical ferment in which dissolution and creation are inseparable — challenging any progressive or triumphalist account of cultural development.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture, there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about that culture. A culture that requires harm to one’s soul in order to follow the culture’s proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed.

Estés issues a diagnostic judgment on culture as a potentially pathological force that demands soul-sacrifice, positioning the ‘sick culture’ as the primary antagonist against which the wild, instinctual feminine must assert itself.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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Infants grow minds full of concepts as they learn the mores and values of their culture. This process goes by many names: Brain development. Language development. Socialization.

Barrett argues that culture is literally neurobiological: emotion concepts, including those defining anger, fear, and happiness, are transmitted intergenerationally by wiring each new brain with the conceptual repertoire of its cultural milieu.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis

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the Christian world reached a condition of collective culture by transferring this same process, as far as possible, to the psychological sphere within the individual himself… a collective culture gradually came into existence, in which the ‘rights of man’ were gu

Jung traces the emergence of collective Western culture to a structural shift whereby the external hierarchy of classical civilization was internalized as the privileging of one psychic function over others, making cultural formation a typological event within the individual.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921thesis

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Where there is a wound on the psyches and bodies of women, there is a corresponding wound at the same site in the culture itself, and finally on Nature herself. In a true holistic psychology all worlds are understood as interdependent.

Estés articulates a holistic ontology in which wounds inscribed on women’s bodies, the cultural body, and Nature itself are homologous injuries — making culture diagnostically continuous with psyche and environment.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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Culture, which once ‘completed’ people, now leaves many with ‘empty selves’… The acceleration in the pace of cultural change has also disrupted the traditional institutions of society, particularly the institution most responsible for the construction and transmission of worldviews — religion.

Pargament diagnoses modernity’s acceleration of cultural change as producing ‘empty selves’ — persons whose orienting frameworks have dissolved faster than they can be replaced — and links this directly to the erosion of religious institutions.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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nonhuman cultural manifestations are often the result of well-established programs deployed in appropriate circumstances and in largely stereotyped fashion. The programs have been assembled over eons, by natural selection, under the control of homeostasis, and have been transmitted by genes.

Damasio distinguishes human culture from its biological precursors in other species by arguing that nonhuman ‘cultural’ behaviors are genetically encoded homeostatic programs, whereas human culture introduces reflective, historically transmitted variation.

Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting

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‘amplification gives culture to the soul,’ … ‘culture, reflection, ideas… come from rot,’ … a culture in need of elders … heroic ego as standing for culture and civilization.

Russell’s index of Hillman’s usages reveals a sustained, multivalent engagement with culture: as what amplification bestows on soul, as the product of rot and decay, as a domain deficient in elder wisdom, and as the domain the heroic ego claims to represent.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting

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we are trapped inside a culture that is so language-determined and language-dependent that we cannot imagine it being any other way… the majority of the messages we communicate are not in words at all.

McGilchrist diagnoses contemporary Western culture as pathologically language-dominated — a predominantly left-hemisphere phenomenon — and argues that this entraps its inhabitants within an impoverished, word-bound conception of communication itself.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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I wish now to consider the state I have described as the ‘dependent’ group culture… The basic assumption in this group culture seems to be that an external object exists whose function it is to provide security for the immature organism.

Bion applies ‘culture’ in a specialized group-dynamics sense, designating the dominant basic-assumption mode operative in a group at any moment — dependent, fight-flight, or pairing — as its prevailing ‘group culture.’

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959supporting

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If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts.

Barrett argues that cultural transmission of emotion concepts is not deterministic: while childhood enculturation shapes neural wiring, adult agency permits conceptual expansion and recategorization, offering a path beyond culturally inherited affect.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting

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Rousseau in his Discours sur les arts et sciences (1749), that the savage state (back to nature: the Noble Savage) is superior to that of civilized man.

Campbell notes a recurrent cross-cultural pattern in which critics of dominant civilization — from Diogenes to Rousseau to the Buddha — arise at the apogee of a culture’s power and articulate a counter-impulse to return to nature or origin.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968aside

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Even the completely untutored, indigenous populations of places such as Papua New Guinea, who have had no exposure to classical Western music, appreciate and understand intuitively the emotional import of the music of Mozart.

McGilchrist uses cross-cultural evidence of universal aesthetic response to argue against purely social-constructionist accounts of culture, insisting that certain values and responses transcend cultural particularity.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside

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