Cultural ideas and ideals, manifested in their narrative form as myths, pervade the innermost experience of the self. One cannot therefore speak of an ´earlier´ or ´deeper´ layer of the self beyond cultural reach. As a ´depth psychology´ psychoanalysis dives deep but in the same waters in which the cultural river too flows.
The questions relating to the ´how´ of this process are bound up with the larger issue of the relationship between the inner and outer worlds that has been of perennial psychological and philosophical interest. Freud´s ´timetable´ of culture entering the psychic structure relatively late in life as ´ideology of the superego´ has continued to be followed by other almanac makers of the psyche....