Is it still possible to speak of the West as a well-defined culture? If you ask people living in Western countries, which started out as nation-states in the nineteenth century, they themselves appear not to know anymore. The European identity is under considerable pressure. Is a myth being punctured, or does this identity crisis point to a new awareness that old structures in the world can no longer be described using a maritime compass perpetually aligned with the north? Some consider Christianity as the historical-moral glue that kept ‘the West’ together — with the division into an eastern and western part coinciding with the contours of the Roman Empire. But ‘the West’ has for hundreds of years also been the Wild West of the United States. As a result, the ‘Western’ narrative has for a long time had a globalising perspective on the world, with all the ambivalence towards a core identity as a consequence. We will discuss this ambivalence in more detail later in this book because it has given rise to certain analytical approaches to culture.

The emergence of modern analytical models goes back to the insights gained in the nineteenth century in the field of human culture, which is governed by natural instincts. It is for this reason that Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is still important — implicitly and explicitly — for the analysis of art, film, music, and literature. The analytical ambivalence that Western scientific culture carries within itself — both suggestive and analytical in nature — was once described by Freud by means of Leonardo da Vinci, the homo universalis: