In this far-reaching, deeply personal book, by careful use of the refracting lenses of Philosophy, Mythology, Fine Art and Psychoanalysis, shepherds the reader towards an inexpressible and infinite world of silence and contemplation that experience and thought cannot understand. He contrasts experiential tenets for living an active life of memory, anticipation and knowledge with the ‘breakdown’ entailed by the unveiling of the magnitude of the immeasurable within silence, such that it can disorder all tongues, and where the influence of the past and future on the present tense are without meaning. In the active life, I can measure silence negatively as an interruption. In the contemplative life, I am without any measure. In the active life, the concept of experience is meaningful because I can suppose the existence of a subject and an object. In the silence of the sacrifice, the one object that exists must disappear and in this way must invalidate the idea of selfhood. Only with the ceasing of any exchange between subject and object does imminence as a way to transcendence take the place of experience. Immanence has a resonance that the concept of experience can never have. Table of Contents: Foreword by Gilead Nachmani, PhD PART I: The Caesura as Transparent Mirror: W. R. Bion and the Contact Barrier 1.The Definitions of Mind and Body 2. A System that Continues to Function However Damaged it May Be 3. ‘The Powerful Inanity of Events’ 4. The Relationship of the Beta Screen to the Theory of Catastrophic Change 5. Bion, Lévi-Strauss, and Hallucination as ‘Pure’ Culture PART II: Optic Glass: The Nipple-Tongue as Preconception 6. The Role of Hallucination in a Mother-Infant Observation 7. ‘The Cosmos is a Mirror in which Everything is Reflected’ 8. The Disappearing Tennis-Net 9. From a Paternal to a Maternal Conception of the Transference 10. The Paranoid-Schizoid Version of the Imaginary Twin 11. Transition Concepts PART III: Transformation in Hallucinosis and the Institution of Divine Kingship 12. Annihilation and Transformation in Hallucinosis 13. Catastrophic Fusions: Kings and Diviners Among the Moundang of Chad 14. The Dread of Verticality that Underlies a World of Space and Time 15. The Body as Cosmic Impress 16. The Divine King and the Macrocosm of Destruction 17. The Divine King as Microcosm of Creation 18. The Double Labyrinth 19. The Duration of the Body and the Reverberation of the Image 20. The Fetish as Substitute for the Organ of Psychic Perception PART IV: The Play Shakespeare Did Not Write 21. The Gifts of the Saturnalian King 22. The Opening and Closing of Shutters on a Window 23. The Hidden God 24. The Relationship of Swallowing and the Prehensive Object 25. Absence of Breath and Cordelia’s Mirror 26. The World’s Deep Midnight About the Author: Eric Rhode, formerly a writer on film, became a psychotherapist in private practice, now retired. He is the author of a number of books, including Psychotic Metaphysics, Plato’s Silence: A Study in the Imagination, and Notes on the Aniconic: The Foundations of Psychology in Ontology.
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