The story can be told as it has been told: Sigmund Freud, accompanied by two of his closest collaborators, Hungarian Sandór Ferenczi and Swiss Carl Gustav Jung, was arriving, for the first and only time, in the United States. The date was 29 August 1909 and Europe still slumbered under the gilded illusion of a Belle Epoque which seemed unwilling to draw to a close.

The founder of psychoanalysis, that skilful myth-mapper of the human mind, had attired himself with the elegant precision of the Viennese style of those memorable times. This polish and style, not without a shrewd symbolic significance and imbued with a subtle aesthetic melancholy, jump out at the viewer from the photographs taken during this expedition to the New World.

When the ship on which he travelled made its slow approach to New York’s docks, on the mouth of the Hudson River, and he caught sight of the Statue of Liberty, bearing aloft the torch with which it claims to illuminate the world and even the universe, the author of The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, but also of Totem and Taboo and Civilisation and its Discontents, exclaimed to his fellow missionaries: ‘They don’t realise that we’re bringing them the plague.’

Freud had been invited by the educator, psychologist and pioneer of these disciplines, Granville Stanley Hall, to deliver five lectures on psychoanalysis, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, over which their host presided.

The persevering and imaginative dissector of the complexes, drives, reminis- cences, motivations and traumas lurking in the hidden depths of the human unconscious found his trip to the USA an odious experience, and took little joy from his encounters with most of the citizens of the vast nation of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

He disliked American society, which he found to be competitive, uncouth and brutal, and hated its insanely voracious materialism. He was therefore never interested in making a return visit – he never again set foot in this vast and violent country, where psychoanalysis was to become a widely followed apostolic religion and an almost obligatory redemptive cult, transforming itself, once it had been naturalised and domesticated, into a valuable American export product.

In these crass, anger-filled years through which we are living, we can hear Freud’s venomous jest about the plague of psychoanalysis, uttered in a voice tinged with a bitter, tragic irony, as distressingly prophetic. It is as if the Americans wanted to repay the aversion that the European physician and founder of psychoanalysis had felt for them, by turning the content of the predicted plague into a threat of pandemic contagion and a wave of insanity which is spreading across the world.

That this is so is plain to see. Hour by hour, minute by minute, we can watch as a mental perversion is paraded with public psychiatric symptoms which, if we want to reach a better understanding of its exuberant manifestations and correctly identify its underlying causes, requires us to have urgent recourse to the pestiferous couch.

Little by little, it is as if the burning necessity of that plague that our trio took to North America were now returned to us and demonstrated, counselling us to seek aid from its portentous analytical ambition, but at the same time showing itself to be insufficient to explain the nature and degree of this aggressive money-grabbing monomania. This pathological obsession with power and this insane and unseemly exhibitionist hallucination, which, in an insidious system of non-imputability, has also transformed into an irresponsible regime of impunity, is polluting the world and driving it into the abyss.

Every day, on television and in the newspapers, from the most austere to the most lightweight of media outlets, from the most sophisticated to the most sensationalist, one question is asked: how was it possible for derangement to have taken possession of the highest offices of a dominant state and to have installed itself in the most crucial centres of global power, and from there to have spread chaos so widely? How is it possible, even after perverse lunacy has been continuously paraded on a daily basis for years, accompanied by acts of psychotic delirium, that vast crowds in the grandstands, real and virtual, should continue to respond with thunderous applause to the lunatic goings-on in the arena of this new, global Roman Colosseum?

Of the most exhibitionist of the gladiators in this circus, we may say that which the narrator of a novel by the American writer Philip Roth, a shrewd cultivator of dark humour and keen observer of his country and its people (if he were alive, what a phenomenal novel he would write about America today!), said of one of his characters: ‘All that had worked to make him himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic.’

Everywhere, at every hour of the day and night, politics, geopolitics, economics and sociology are stripped of their classical vocabulary and their traditional analytical methods and instruments, which have found themselves abundantly – and perhaps inevitably – replaced by the lexicon of the most alarming and radical psychiatric pathologies and mental disorders.

From the old ‘everything is political’ we have moved on to the modern ‘everything is psychological’. This all-conquering movement whereby the political is being captured by the psychological, justified and imposed, at breakneck speed, by the daily spectacle of individual delirium, collective degradation and a decadent civilisation, amounts in any case to the culmination of a long process of capture of the world and our lives by psychology, in which every event, phenomenon, instance, state and situation is reduced to its psychological, psychiatric and psychoanalytical aspects, and in which everything is understood and explained by traumas, ticks, complexes, disorders, disturbances, emotions, drives, sensations and feelings, whether primary or secondary.

Everything and anything is a pretext for talking, in a literal or metaphorical, real or figurative sense, about neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, mania, hallucination, anxiety, stress, post-traumatic stress, burnout, grieving, superiority and inferiority complexes, phobias and philias, hysteria, sadism, masochism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, cognitive and attention deficit, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social phobia, panic syndrome, negative feelings, taboo, fetishism, paraphilias, catharsis, castration, Oedipus complex and death of the father, or Stockholm complex.

Or else sexuality, transfer and countertransfer, displacement, disassociation, mirroring, fixation, frustration, triggers, perversion, pressure, drive, denial, psychosomatic illness, toxic behaviour, borderline complex, autism, senile dementia, victimisation, empathy, self-analysis, introversion, repression, reversion, resentment, self, ego, euphoria, dysphoria, guilt, sublimation, manip‑ ulation, mindset, monomania, mythomania and pathological or compulsive lying, mindfulness, libido, megalomania, narcissism, egomania, voyeurism, and exhibitionism.

In the face of this barrage of psycho-isms, very often supplied with misbegotten vocabulary, transformed into an abusively elastic jargon, in many instances misapplied to the phenomena in question, we need to reach, at least, for intelligent humour, irony or sarcasm, such as that which once led the writer Karl Kraus to assert: ‘Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.’ Or Michel Foucault to say: ‘Ours is the only civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex.’ Or, in an epistemological register, the critical allegations of Karl Popper which, with recourse to the principle of falsifiability, deny psychoanalysis the status of a science, to which it lays claim.

Social media is the not-very-magical mirror of this underlying process of takeover by psychology. We may add that this unstoppable tendency is accelerated yet further (‘charity begins at home’, as the saying goes) by the demented way in which the owners of the systems, networks and information and communication technologies used for creating and controlling – the tech oligarchs, the new feudal masters, the Dostoevskian gamblers, the players of all games – parade themselves on the world stage. These technological emperors seek the power to be able to do and have everything their way and to turn everything to a torrential profit stream, using their portentous, unprecedented and uncontrolled resources, mechanisms and instruments to secure voluntary or involuntary servitude, conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect, active or passive.

For these tamers of the world, morality is an anachronism devoid of current meaning, truth is the lie they find necessary or useful, respect for others a dangerous and unprofitable idea. For them, money is the – only! – yardstick for all things and all people, inequality and exclusion are the sine qua non of success; love is an opportunity for privatisation, ownership and possession; friendship is a complicit association of interests, a productive satisfaction of desires and the convenient securing of advantages and gains; politics (and also religion) is an acquiescent instrument of power, control, instrumentalisation, normalisation, capture and surveillance for achieving their purposes; nature is a domesticated and inexhaustible source of supplies and consumables; culture is a threat of tedium and useless and dispensable waste of time; life is lawless and endless war.

To see them is like watching a third rate, cringe-inducing B-movie that never ends, in a cinema with no exits. Astonished, offended and humiliated we witness the return to a primitive world, featuring only violence, brutality and fury, to a deafening soundtrack. On a stage set defined by triumphal and triumphant kitsch, existence is secured by successive murderous coups, sustained by the celebration of insolent venatorial rites and upheld by relentlessly bloodthirsty rituals.

As the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, recently said, the one percent own all the media, all the money and everything else, and think they’re gods. These oligarchs have surrounded themselves with flatterers who repeat their absurdities in their name, whilst those at the bottom of the social pyramid have seen their rights suppressed.

With its totalising purpose of explaining everything, the excessive psychologisation of the world and of life, which has been expanding and creeping into every domain, has led to a defeat of thought. This capture by psychology has instituted itself as a vicious circle: it reflects the world that it reflects and which is reflected in it. The world is now seen as a psychological playing field and life has been transformed into a therapeutic venture. Everything exists in order to be understood through psychology, to be vehemently emotional and to secure validation of feelings and egolatric rewards.

Ethical responsibility (the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said that our ethical responsibility starts when faced with the other) has been discarded in favour of self-contentment, self-knowledge, self-esteem and self-help. The quest for a degree of objectivity has retreated and given way to the affirmation of total, relativistic and arbitrary subjectivity – and knowledge has been carelessly swapped for opinion.

Kant said that democracy is government of laws and not government by men because government by men leads to despotism and tyranny. Today, democracy is under assault and under pressure to move away from a regime grounded in knowledge, reasoning, regulation and self-containment, respecting the separation of powers and subject to checks and balances. Instead, it is turning into a continuous reality show, featuring adulatory and grovelling consecration of the ‘leader’, sensationalist and grotesque exploitation of base prejudices, obscure archaisms, irrational fears, ancestral superstitions, primal emotions and primitive instincts.

The fundamental and founding coherence of democracy, established and developed through loyalty to its principles and values, has been undermined by implanting a premeditated, nomadic and opportunistic system of manipulation through propaganda, emotional extortion and logical paradoxes, of which the most absurd goes by the name of ‘illiberal democracy’.

In the great theatre of anti-rational, populist and demagogic politics, the we has been swapped for me, the you for them, ideas for perceptions, concepts for marketing and image, values for instincts, appraisals for emotions and feelings, purposes for seduction, programmes for personalities, laws for leaderships, citizenship for spectacle, citizenry for audiences and clienteles, rights for results, commitments for motivations, responsibility for success and happiness, solidarity for survival of the fittest.

This is why this omnipresent psychologisation is inseparable from a globalising commodification, in continuous expansion, with its marketing strategies (and stratagems) and its sales techniques (and tactics). Psychologisation and commodification go hand in hand, one boosting the other, and have led to the appropriation of the State by the unholy triptych of dominion, delirium and money. In the absence of resistance and opposition, these are joined by the democratic deficit and perhaps even dictatorship.

Of course, before our own, other ages have been visibly tempted to psychologise the world and those who lived, died, worked, created, loved, hated, suffered, found joy, lost and won in it. The growing importance of the psychological novel (and also novella and short story) in the history of literature over the past two centuries is undeniable proof of this. To interpret this added relevance in the light of what is happening in our time can provide us with an awareness of an evolving history which contains a tendency that has vastly expanded and cannot be understood without taking into account the political, social and culture changes of the corresponding period, with the rise of individualism in bourgeois society and in the capitalist economy.

Many literary historians, whilst acknowledging the shrewd and ancestral psychological perspicacity of Boccaccio’s Decameron, of Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha, and of Shakespeare’s grandiose, complex and inexhaustible dramatic oeuvre, consider that the pre-history of this literary genre begins in 1678 with Madame de Lafayette and her masterpiece La Princesse de Clèves, followed, a century later, by Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, and Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser.

This new conception of the novel developed over time, and in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries scaled new artistic heights and led to great epistemological discoveries, anticipating, to a prodigious extent, scientific knowledge of the complex workings of the human mind and of individual and social behaviour, foreshadowing what students of the psyche and neurosciences later postulated, up to the present day.

In the nineteenth century we can single out, from a host of other examples, Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black, Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Gogols’s Diary of a Madman, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, Chekov’s plays and short stories, and Portrait of a Lady and What Maisie Knew by Henry James.

The first half of the twentieth century brought important and original works such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, Ulysses by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie.

Since then, universal fiction has never ceased – often with acritical contem‑ plation and calculating partiality – to make psychology the land on which it sows and harvests its stories, and the vast, dark cave where it seeks its hostages and its adventures, its true stories and its crimes, its hiding places and its treasures. So it gives voice to words that fill the pages of books with unfinished sentences, misunderstood exclamations, agitated fears, uncertain confessions, sexual sighs, hallucinated insomnia, failed orgasms, flustered starts, humiliating experiences of impotence, insane obsessions, unhappy frustrations, tormented flights. The ever-expanding list of these books has become the map of an empire on which, like that of Charles V, the sun never sets.

In opera, psychology has furnished music and librettos with themes, motives, characters and situations that weave the plot and create the dramatic, melodramatic or comic atmosphere. From Mozart (ahead of the pack) in Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, to Richard Strauss’s Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, from Puccini’s Tosca and Turandot to Verdi’s Macbeth and Otelo (and his unrealised ambition to compose a King Lear), from Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, from Bellini’s La Sonnambula to Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung – the opera house stage has showcased madness, crime, intrigue, suspicion, dissimulation, hoax, usurpation, greed, rivalry, theft, wiles, trickery and malice. And also betrayal, envy, cupidity, revenge, dispute, contempt, ravings, whimsy, nonsense, jealousy, rape, indifference, love and hate. And tears, cries, howls, laughter, smiles, scorn, gesture, mime, flourishes, wriggling, yawning, bubbling and braying.

Through the inspired voice and acting of Maria Callas, in some of her greatest moments directed by Visconti, the characters and works revealed their deepest psychological secrets with a dramatic and musical intensity that changed the history of opera.

In the visual arts, psychological themes, in their different scales and variations, gave form, figures and colours to the work of many artists. From Bosch to Hopper, from Vermeer to Hammershøi, from Leonardo to Hockney, from Dürer to Munch, from Lucas Cranach to Delvaux, from Bruegel to de Chirico, from Goya to Marlene Dumas, from Géricault to Beuys, from von Kaulbach to Artaud, from Ensor to Aurélia de Sousa, from Alfred Kubin to Henri Michaux, from Grosz to Kiefer, from Egon Schiele to Max Ernst, from Titian to Columbano, from Bernini to Dalí, from Blake to Dubuffet, from Velásquez to Jorge Molder, from van Gogh to Louise Bourgeois, from Paula Rego to Ron Mueck, from the Gothic to Romanticism, from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from impressionism to expressionism, from surrealism to art brut, from mental illness to the labyrinths of the soul, from madness to melancholy, from ex-votos to vanitas paintings, from mystical transes to hallucinogenic transports, from criminal fury to epic fervour, from amorous ecstasy to sexual rage, in the human being and in the human being in the world, art has looked at the darkest enigmas of life and the most secret mysteries of the mind and the body, turning its gaze into an encounter between light and shadow, reality and the imagination, truth and illusion, the visible and the invisible, the hidden with the shown, the straight line with the curve.

On the themes and motivations that enable men and women to take flight (sometimes as Icarus and Nietzsche) and to explore the abyss (sometimes, that of Sade and Elizabeth Báthory), the curator Jean Clair has put together three memorable exhibitions: Vienne 1880-1938: l’apocalypse joyeuse [Vienna 1880-1938: The Joyful Apocalypse], L’ âme au corps, arts et sciences 1793-1993 [The Soul and the Body: Arts and Sciences 1793-1993], Mélancolie: génie et folie en Occident [Melancholy: Genius and Madness in the West].

Film is a lens. What it shows comes near to us, or distances itself from us. The mind and that which happens in it are fashioned as expression, eyes, face, body, movements, gesture, tremor, situation, relationship. In film, psychology is a vision, a way of seeing, evidential. Because, as Deleuze said, film does more than tell stories – it produces images that generate thoughts.

Some filmmakers have taken this to the limit. They have made the screen into a piece of film between us and what we neither know, nor can bear, about ourselves. They have filmed identity breaking down and fracturing, such as in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, The Double Life of Véronique, by Kieslowski, David Lynch’s Inland Empire or Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. They have filmed desire devouring those who feel it, as in Zulawski’s Possession, McQueen’s Shame, Polanski’s Repulsion or Requiem for a Dream, by Darren Aronofsky. They have filmed human relations as a battlefield or a field of ruins, as in A Woman under the Influence, by Cassavetes, Melancholia, by Lars von Trier, Amour, by Michael Haneke, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, The Worst Person in the World, by Joachim Trier or Don’t Look Now, by Nicholas Roeg. They have filmed memory and loss remaking the real, as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by Michel Gondry, Her, by Spike Jonze, Taste of Cherry, by Abbas Kiarostami or Ozu’s Tokyo Story. They have filmed the truth multiplying, contradicting itself and vanishing, as in Rashomon, by Akira Kurosawa, Spider, by David Cronenberg, or The Master, by Paul Thomas Anderson. They have filmed loneliness mutate into violence, as in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

The difference between past ages and our own is that the times in which we live have turned psychologisation into egocentric hypertelia, a reductive world view and never-ending twaddle. As we have said, and bears repeating, this has irreversibly damaged our politics, which has become a matter of leaders and leaderships, our economy, which is now all about financial performance, our society, which has become an arena for competitive confrontation, without a sense of cohesion, and our culture, which has degenerated into the rivalry of competing egos, subjectivities, prizes, presentations, launches, private views and contests, far removed, for instance, from the impersonality defended by T.S. Eliot or the depersonalisation of Fernando Pessoa.

What is more: everything, or nearly everything, in culture has lost its cosmic resonance, its moral messaging and its transcendental reach, so present, for instance, in the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripedes and Sophocles, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare’s tragedies, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in Racine’s Phèdre, in Corneille’s L’illusion comique, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, Goethe’s Faust or Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

This vast and intense metaphysical impetus has been lost, traded in for existential melodrama, conjugal psychodrama, the individual microcosm, the family novella, sentimental kitsch, sexual econometrics, aesthetic anxiety, bodily care, fetishistic sport, worldly ambition, financial cupidity, superficial success, easy fame, cultural insignificance, communicational saturation, an affective desert, social tiffs, psychological insecurities, minor domestic disasters, professional fiascos and social failings.

If we look, with due attention and discernment, at how the ‘laboratory for the end’ which was the Vienna of Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Georg Trakl, Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Adolf Loos, and, later, of Elias Canetti, Karl Popper and Ernst Gombrich, responded to the crisis of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and at how the culture of our time has responded to the crisis we are experiencing, especially in the West, we can quickly identify the causes and reasons for what is happening to us.

Byung-Chul Han, a philosopher whose work may be seen less as a revelation of powerful and original thinking, and more as displaying a talent for bringing together and communicating the thoughts of others, correctly understood and correctly explained, has given his books titles which form a highly eloquent catalogue of the alarming situation in which we find ourselves: The Burnout Society, The Disappearance of Rituals, Saving Beauty, The Agony of Eros, The Crisis of Narration, In the Swarm, Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative, What is Power?, Faces of Death, The Expulsion of the Other, Topology of Violence, Psychopolitics, The Palliative Society, Capitalism and the Death Drive, Infocracy. This catalogue is also a poster for the entertainment society which caters for our leisure and depression, and which never stops shouting: ‘The Show Must Go On!’

In Vienna, the response to a major crisis was unprecedented and lasting – rising up over a tragic decline, a new dawn ensued. In a surprising parallel with Genesis, this thinking was like primatial gold of miraculous value extracted from an exhausted mine close to its end. This had enormous consequences for the furtherance of creativity, knowledge and consciousness. It had huge effects on how we subsequently looked at the world, at language, love, hatred, sexuality, dreams, beauty, ugliness, the human being, philosophy, history, politics, the economy, culture, art, literature, science, the city, society, religion, life and death.

Now, in this time, which we are not even entitled to call our own, in which a crisis, made up of many, repeated crises, every day, before our sleepwalking eyes, shows its cavernous face, the response we give is timid, mediocre, superficial, irresponsible and ephemeral. We may therefore say that the response to this crisis, deep in its roots and vast in its consequences, reveals those tremendous and humiliating weaknesses which triggered, or were unable to prevent, the crisis to which they seek to respond and the sickness they desire to cure.

Marguerite Yourcenar displayed an aversion to over-reliance on psychological thinking in literature and in life. She preferred a more ancient and more universal wisdom. As she said, with raw, cruel and cutting lucidity, in a magnificent essay on the Historia Augusta and the decadence of the Roman Empire:

Such an astute reading of a work and of a past era is also a warning and a wake-up call for our present time.

In devoting the dossier of this edition to the theme of the psychologisation of the world and of life, Electra sets out to observe, examine and interpret, from different points of view and with contributions from a variety of authors, a fundamental symptom of the age in which every day we live a life traversed by a river of words which name this – for which prolix process of naming, the plague of which Freud spoke has gradually expanded its potential for classification and characterisation.

‘Omnipsychologisation’ can exclude and falsify ethical judgments. A psycho- analyst recently said that if we call a powerful man crazy for grotesquely exploiting his power over his country and the world, we are saying that he is unaccountable. If we say that he is a psychopath, we are accusing him and holding him to account for what he does and what is done at his bidding.

We never tire of speaking about what is crazy and what is normal, but there is an equally urgent need to speak of good and evil, as only then will we be able to assess and judge whether to accept or refuse it.