In a series of monographs—Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (1974), The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek Culture (1979), At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression and the State (1985), The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America (1991), and Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror (2001)—Sagan elaborated his psychoanalytically informed theory of social evolution. The breakdown of the kinship system that served as a psychic container for primitive man released intense separation and persecutory anxieties that human societies have since attempted to bind in differing ways: through magic and religion, the institution of the omnipotent god-king, practices of human sacrifice, and various forms of domination. The emergence of the ideas of human rights, equality, and democracy and the gradual de-legitimation of virtually all forms of domination in modernity (racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, childism) has resulted, for many people, in the forms of extreme reaction or “backlash” that Sagan calls “modernity psychosis”—a perspective that is very relevant for an understanding of our contemporary social and political condition. 

 

The first two chapters of Eli Sagan's Freud, Women & Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil are available online here for reading prior to the meeting. The paper is also available for download from the Member's area.

 

Open to all