Citations related to PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHTS FROM HISTORY
(works cited listed at bottom):
“With upright posture come major changes not only in the hand and arm but
also in the head and face, and, with them, a reordering of the rank and
relation of the senses. Sight replaces smell as the dominant sense, and in
so doing is itself transformed, finally coming into its own as the sense
which recognizes forms and wholes:
‘In every species, eye and ear respond to stimuli from remote objects, but
the interest of animals is limited to the proximate. Their attention is
caught by that which is within the confines of reaching or approaching.
The relation of sight and bite distinguishes the human face from those of
lower animals. Animal jaws, snoot, trunk, and beak–all of them organs
acting in the direct contact of grasping and gripping–are placed in the
"visor line" of the eyes. With upright posture, with the development of
the arm, the mouth is no longer needed for catching and carrying or for
attacking and defending. It sinks down from the "visor line" of the eyes,
which now can be turned directly in a piercing, open look toward distant
things and rest fully upon them, viewing them with the detached interest
of wondering. Bite has become subordinated to sight.’"
Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature,
University of Chicago Press, 1999, pages 70-71 (The subquote is from Erwin
Straus, "The Upright Posture," in "Phenomenological Psychology," 1966):
"Though man remains a nourishing being, we now see clearly that his
being-in-the-world is oriented not solely or even primarily as eater. He
is, by natural attitude, a being whose eyes are encouraged to be bigger
than his stomach.
'Animals move in the direction of their digestive axis. Their bodies are
expanded between mouth and anus as between an entrance and an exit, a
beginning and an ending. The spatial orientation of the human body is
different throughout. The mouth is still an inlet but no longer a
beginning, the anus, an outlet but no longer the tail end. Man in upright
posture, his feet on the ground and his head uplifted, does not move in
the line of his digestive axis; he moves in the direction of his vision.
He is surrounded by a world panorama, by a space divided into world
regions joined together in the totality of the universe. Around him, the
horizons retreat in an ever growing radius. Galaxy and diluvium, the
infinite and the eternal, enter into the orbit of human interests.'
"As with upright posture itself, the contemplative gaze–or the
transformation of seeing into beholding–requires maturation, and
especially inner or psychic growth; small children do not have it and
remain largely interested only in things that lie within their grasp.
Eventually, as adults, we are able to organize the visible world into
things near and far or, alternatively, into those visible and even remote
things we are interested in prehending (by bringing them near) and those
we are content to let be and to comprehend, at a distance and in their
place, against a background totality, a world." Kass, Leon. The Hungry
Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. University of Chicago
Press. 1999. Pps 71-72 (The subquote is from Erwin Straus, "The Upright
Posture," in "Phenomenological Psychology," 1966)
“Western love has been ambivalent from the start. As early as Sappho (600
B.C.) or even earlier in the epic legend of Helen of Troy, art records the
push and pull of attraction and hostility in that perverse fascination we
call love. There is a magnetics of eroticism in the west, due to the
hardness of western personality: eroticism is an electric forcefield
between masks. The modern pursuit of self-realization has not led to
sexual happiness, because assertions of selfhood merely release the amoral
chaos of libido. Freedom is the most overrated modern idea, originating in
the Romantic rebellion against bourgeois society. But only in society can
one be an individual. Nature is waiting at society’s gates to dissolve us
in her chthonian bosom. Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But
stereotypes are the west’s stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art’s
assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth. We
may have to accept an ethical cleavage between imagination and reality,
tolerating horrors, rapes and mutilations in art that we would not
tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us
what nature is up to. Not sex but crelty is the great neglected or
suppressed item on the modern humanistic agenda. We must honor the
chthonian but not necessarily yield to it. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope
counsels good humor as the only solution to sex war. So with our
enslavement by chthonian nature. We must accept our pain, change what we
can, and laugh at the rest. But let us see art for what it is and nature
for what it is. From remotest antiquity, western art has been a parade of
sexual personae, emanations of absolutist western mind. Western art is a
cinema of sex and dreaming. Art is form struggling to wake from the
nightmare of nature.” Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Vintage Books.
1991. P. 38-9.
"What else is to be found in psychoanalysis, by those determined to find,
about the one body, the mystical body? The truth, the healing truth, the
wholesome truth, the truth that will make us whole, is not in individual
psychology, not in the currently so fashionable ego psychology, but in
what the later Freud called 'mass-psychology.' Freud said his last work,
Moses and Monotheism, was an attempt 'to translate the concepts of
individual psychology into mass-psychology.' 'Mass-psychology' is not mob
psychology, but the psychology of mankind as a whole, as one mass, or one
body." Brown, Norman O., Love's Body, Vintage, 1966, p. 85.
"We have also seen that the Devil, who did not become generally accepted
as a popular figure until the thirteenth century, played no role in the
accounts of the experiences of those who traveled by night or who
sojourned in the mountain. His figure was apparently forced on these men
and women, or the interrogator inserted it into the minutes of the trials.
"We have examined the origins of these night travelers and traced their
guides back to the 'earth mothers', in whose wombs humans once dissolved
their individuality, and 'died', in order to be born again from the place
of generation as men and women of knowledge.
"In order for them to understand their own essence, they had to descend to
that place, to return to the uterus of she who gave birth to everything,
the place of origin not only of humans, but of all creatures of nature.
"The act of insight was at the same time also an act of love, which would
have represented incest with the mother if at the place of origin incest
itself had not dissolved together with the barriers to incest. There is no
sin at the place of origin. Where there are no longer any norms, no norms
can be violated. Knowledge of the place of origin means: dissolution of
the separation of things from each other. What is involved is less seeing
and experiencing that those things over there, which at first glance
within the perspective of everyday life seem different, prove themselves
to be really one; but rather it is the dissolution of seeing and
experiencing in the place of origin.
"In later times, in the classical Greek period, people spoke of 'knowledge
as memory'. This is actually a watered down form of what in archaic times
was a factual leaving behind of the 'world of separation' and a return to
the unifying womb of things, which knew no knowledge and no object of
knowledge, no above and no below, no animals or people, no men and women."
Duerr, Hans Peter, Dreamtime; Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness
and Civilization, Basil Blackwell, 1985, p. 42.
“This joy that we could have, and renounce instead, is the later
counterpart of the early carnal joy. It is not the original ecstatic union
with the world, the early state of grace that later stands as religion’s
prototype of divine presence and universal all-pervasive love. It is,
rather, the joy of a creature who knows time and senses its own
separateness, who has become familiar with striving and with the ebb and
flow, the melting together and drawing apart, that form the living tie
between its fragile individual existence and the existence of the hurtful,
entrancing surround; it is the joy of a creature who remembers and
anticipates less primitive ways of feeling and, suspending what it knows,
what it remembers and anticipates, surrenders itself to the melting,
flowing moment. So while this joy is not the lost pure euphoria of
infancy, it does echo that euphoria clearly enough to offer us episodic,
momentary recapture of its flavor; and it therefore also echoes it clearly
enough to remind us of what we lost when we found our solitary mortal
selves.
“We largely spurn this possibility of direct recapture, then, out of lack
of strength to endure the pain that it carries. But what we give up in
doing so is the only real means we have of supplementing the indirect and
incomplete compensation that enterprise can legitimately, feasibly offer
in exchange for the early magic of the body: the pleasure in exercising
our talents for cerebration and complex effort, and in using our power to
make at least some things happen, which in part does genuinely console us
for out-growing the pre-mortal omnipotence of infancy. By spurning the
direct access we still have to more primitive delights, we lean too
heavily on this partial indirect consolation. We put too heavy a burden on
successful effort’s modest capacity to make life feel worth living. This
is what makes effort–the kind of effort we would be apt to engage in for
its own sake anyway–feel like work.” Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and
the Minotaur. Other Press. 1999. Originally Harper & Row, 1976. P. 144-5.
“The woman feels herself on the one hand a supernatural being, before whom
the man bluffs, quails, struts, and turns stony for fear of melting; and
she feels herself on the other hand a timid child, unable to locate in
herself the full magic power which as a baby she felt in her mother.”
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. Other Press. 1999.
Originally Harper & Row, 1976. P. 85.
“Because the early mother’s boundaries are so indistinct, the non-human
surround with which she merges takes on some of her own quasi-personal
quality. In our failure to distinguish clearly between her and nature, we
assign to each properties that belong to the other: We cannot believe how
accidental, unconscious, unconcerned–i.e., unmotherly–nature really is;
and we cannot believe how vulnerable, conscious, autonomously
wishful–i.e., human–the early mother really was.” Dinnerstein, Dorothy.
The Mermaid and the Minotaur. Other Press. 1999. Originally Harper & Row,
1976. P. 108.
“In sum, human ambivalence toward the body of woman arises from, and at
the same time helps perpetuate, incompetence to reconcile our inevitable
mix of feelings for the flesh itself. The unreconciled mix is projected
onto the first parent. Worse still, much of the positive side of this
ambivalence is suppressed and what has been suppressed is converted into
an obscene preoccupation; this means that even the love that is part of
the prevailing attitude toward woman’s body is to some degree a dirty
love. The shame that for many people tinges carnal attraction is made
possible by, and at the same time deepens, woman’s general human
degradation.”
“Both this failure to integrate our feelings toward the flesh and this
debasement of what is positive in these feelings express our helplessness
to cope with carnality, a helplessness that has so far permeated the
death-denying, and therefore death-dominated, life of our enterprising
species. Woman’s status as scapegoat-idol is maintained by, and at the
same time works to maintain, this helplessness. And what keeps her
available for this status is her child rearing, not her child bearing,
contribution.” Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. Other
Press. 1999. Originally Harper & Row, 1976. P. 148.
“The point is, humans are by nature unnatural. We do not yet walk
‘naturally’ on our hind legs, for example: such ills as fallen arches,
lower back pain, and hernias testify that the body has not adapted itself
completely to upright posture. Yet this unnatural posture, forced on the
unwilling body by the project of tool-using, is precisely what has made
possible the development of important aspects of our ‘nature’: the hand
and the brain, and the complex system of skills, language, and social
arrangements which were both effects and causes of hand and brain.
Man-made and physiological structures have thus come to interpenetrate so
thoroughly that to call a human project contrary to human biology is
naive: we are what we have made ourselves, and we must continue to make
ourselves as long as we exist at all.” Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid
and the Minotaur. Other Press. 1999. Originally Harper & Row, 1976. P. 22.
“They therefore make an implicit bargain with men: shakily posturing in
the mother-goddess role that has been thrust upon them, and trying hard to
persuade themselves that they can indeed fill it, they are in no position
to quarel with men’s claim on a make-believe grown-up arena of their own.
What we have worked out is a masquerade, in which generation after
generation of childishly self-important men on the one hand, and
childishly play-acting women on the other, solemnly recreate a child’s-eye
view of what adult life must be like.” Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid
and the Minotaur. Other Press. 1999. Originally Harper & Row, 1976. P. 87.
"...we
must now turn to the question of the words which Homer employed to speak
of the body and the intellect. Aristarchus was the first to notice that in
Homer the word soma which subsequently came to mean 'body' is never
used with reference to a living being; soma is the corpse. But how
does Homer refer to the body? Aristarchus expressed the opinion that for
Homer demas was the live body. That is true in certain cases. 'His
body was small' appears in Homer as ... demas, and 'his body
resembled a god's' is demas.... Demas, however, is but a
poor substitute for 'body', seeing that the word occurs only in the
accusative of specification. It means 'in structure', 'in shape', and
consequently its use is restricted to a mere handful of expressions, such
as: 'to be small or large, to resemble someone', etc. And yet Aristarchus
is right: in the vocabulary of Homer demas comes closest to playing
the same role as the later soma.
"But Homer has some further expressions at his disposal to designate the
thing which is called 'body' by us, and soma by fifth century
Greeks. Our phrase 'his body became feeble' would be the Homeric ...
guia; 'his whole body trembled' would appear as guia.... Where
we might say: 'sweat poured from his body', Homer has ... melea;
'his body was filled with strength' is ... melea.... Here we have
plurals where our linguistic tradition would lead us to expect the
singular. Instead of 'body' Homer says 'limbs'; guia are the limbs
as moved by the joints, melea the limbs in their muscular
strength....
"Let us continue with our game of translating our speech into the language
of Homer, instead of the reverse which is the usual practice. We find that
there are several other ways of rendering the word 'body'. How would we
translate: 'He washed his body'? Homer says chros.... Or how would
Homer say: 'The sword pierced his body'? Here again he uses the work
chros:... On the basis of passages like these some scholars have
contended that chros is the equivalent of 'body' rather than
'skin'. But there is no doubt whatever that chros is the skin, not
the skin as an anatomical substance, the skin which can be peeled
off--that is derma--but the skin as surface, as the outer border of
the figure of man, as the foundation of colour, and so forth. In point of
fact, however, chros is often used in the place of 'body':..., he
place his armour about his body--or literally; about his skin.
"We find it difficult to conceive of a mentality which made no provision
for the body as such. Among the early expressions designating what was
later rendered as soma or 'body', only the plurals guia,
melea, etc. refer to the physical nature of the body; for chros
is merely the limit of the body, and demas represents the frame,
the structure, and occurs only in the accusative of specification. As it
is, early Greek art actually corroborates our impression that the physical
body of man was comprehended, not as a unit but as an aggregate. Not until
the classical art of the fifth century do we find attempts to depict the
body as an organic unit whose parts are mutually correlated. In the
preceding period the body is a mere construct of independent parts
variously put together. Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind.
Translated by Rosenmeyer, Dover, 1953, Pp. 5-6.
“Watts, for example,
insists that these two systems of liberation and healing also lead to a
kind of resurrection of the body, that is, to a type of polymorphous
eroticism for which he cites both Asian Tantra and Norman O. Brown’s Life
Against Death. For Watts, writers like Brown are more Freudian than Freud
to the extent that they embrace the id as fundamentally good (the central
thesis of the Freudian Left). We are not ill because of our illicit
desires, as Freud is often understood to be saying. Rather, we are ill
because our societies repress these energies in unhealthy and excessive
ways. Sex doesn’t make people sick; society does.” Kripal, Jeffrey. Esalen:
America and the Religion of No Religion. 2007. University of Chicago
Press. Pp. 146-7.
“In a fascinating move, Naranjo suggests instead that, ‘blasphemous as it
may sound,’ the felt experiences of energy movements so common in so many
types of psychospiritual experience (from Reichian therapy to the shakti-pat
initiations of gurus) are in fact ‘an ever-shifting tonus dance that takes
place in our muscle system in the situation of ego-dissolution.’ One might
feel that there is a literal flow, but ‘the anatomical fact is one of
coordinated volleys of nerve impulses that follow preestablished patterns
(according to the organization of our nervous and muscle systems).’ But
the key is not the metaphysical status of the subtle energies. It is the
very real spiritual state of which all of this is a bodily response, that
is, the spiritual state of surrender and ego-dissolution. In the end,
then, there is no literal Tantric transmission. There is the enlightenment
of the universal body through the surrender of the social self.” Kripal,
Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. 2007. University
of Chicago Press. Pp. 176-7.
“Grof’s system, however, should not be confused with Freud’s or Jung’s. It
certainly incorporates both, but it also goes way beyond them,
particularly in its metaphysical conclusions. Grof draws a number of these
from his years of research with both LSD and Holotropic Breathwork, which
we might summarize as follows:
• ‘Consciousness is not a product of the brain, but a primary principle of
existence,’ and ‘it plays a critical role in the creation of the
phenomenal world.’
• ‘The psyche of each of us is essentially commensurate with all of
existence and ultimately identical with the cosmic creative principle
itself.’
• The material universe is ‘a virtual reality created by Absolute
Consciousness through an infinitely complex orchestration of experiences.’
• As a virtual reality, akin to a kind of cosmic movie or theater, the
universe is ‘a cosmic game’ that we should delight in playing in the
spirit of the Tantric branches of Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, all of
which have ‘a distinctly life-affirming and life-celebrating orientation.’
• As these same ancient Tantric texts suggest, ‘the human body literally
is a microcosm that reflects and contains the entire macrocosm,’ thus ‘if
one could thoroughly explore one’s own body and psyche, this would bring
the knowledge of all the phenomenal worlds.’
• Finally, the universe is not moral in any normal social sense of that
term; rather, it is, to use a Nietzschean phrase (itself reflective of the
Indian Upanishads), ‘beyond good and evil,’ hence ‘aggression is woven
into the natural order and ... it is not possible to be alive except at
the expense of other living creatures’; this in turn forces us to
acknowledge that ‘the creative cosmic principle ... is directly
responsible for all the suffering and horrors of existence.’
Kripal, Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. 2007.
University of Chicago Press. P. 260.
“Heider is not particularly impressed with the sexual solutions of his own
generation, which he frankly admits have not led to sexual bliss but to ‘a
floating world in which many people, relentlessly aging, drift from
pseudo-spouse to pseudo-spouse. What Heider hopes for, then, is not a
return to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but a ‘new covenant,’ ‘a new
Law’ derived not from Paul or Christianity, which has always more or less
‘regretted that we [have] bodies with carnal impulses,’ but from the Asian
Tantric traditions and their use of sex ‘to help people become
increasingly married to one another and to the cosmic whole.’ Heider
points out that this Tantric turn was anticipated in the West by Reich,
who ‘specifically said that when sexual union is free from blocks, the
energy fields of the two partners become one unified energy field.’”
Kripal, Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. 2007.
University of Chicago Press. Pp. 362-3. [Referring to John Heider and some
essays from Life on the Group Room Floor: An Introduction to Human
Potential Theory and Practice]
“History is ‘the shock wave of eschatology.’ Something at the end of time
is acting as an attractor, drawing us all toward its final galactic wisdom
and our ‘ingression of the novel into the plenum of being.’” Kripal,
Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. 2007. University
of Chicago Press. P. 374. [Quoting Terence McKenna]
“Corporately and ideally speaking, then, the religion of no religion
promises a sexual orientation of no sexual orientation, a gender of no
gender, that is, a polyamorous eroticism, a culture ‘beyond gender’ that
refuses to be dogmatic about desire. And this is an enlightenment of the
body that goes well beyond anything that ever existed in Asia or the West.
This is an enlightenment that depends directly on Western history and
critical theory, on Freud, Foucault, and feminism, that is, on the
enlightenment of reason, liberty and equality.”
“Such an egalitarianism, of course, is never perfect, never complete.
Gender imbalances, socioeconomic injustices, and essentialist assumptions
of all sorts remain. Men and women in this history disagree, fight, and
divorce. Women are abused and taken advantage of by powerful charismatic
men. Women picket and debunk symposia featuring only men. Race and class
remain troubling categories. Colored bodies are not well represented on
the grounds, and most bodies simply cannot afford an Esalen massage or a
trip to Big Sur.” Kripal, Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No
Religion. 2007. University of Chicago Press. Pp. 462-3.
“To turn to another curious feature of human hair, when did you last see a
chimpanzee getting a haircut? Human head hair differs from that of apes in
that it never stops growing. If the hair follicles on the human head
behaved like those on chimpanzees, they would follow an orderly cycle in
which each would grow a hair for several weeks; the hair, after reaching a
certain length, would then be shed, and the follicle would grow another
hair. With people, this cycle has been lengthened from weeks to years.
“The reason that uncontrolled hair growth was favored by natural selection
may have been that it offered a means of signaling copious amounts of
social information. In every society in the world, people spend an
inordinate amount of time in cutting, shaping, braiding, plaiting,
curling, straightening, decorating and otherwise gussying up the
appearance of their hair. Much the same is true of men’s beards and
mustaches. To let one’s hair grow unkempt is a sign of the outcast, or
that one is in deep mourning. Trimmed hair sends a variety of important
signals about the wearer’s health, wealth and social status. But for all
this social signaling activity to occur, humans had first to abandon the
self-maintaining hairdos of other apes and acquire hair that required
continual attention.” Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost
History of Our Ancestors. 2006. Penguin. P. 26.
“The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different
from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a
newly appearing character, or even a newly appearing object or implement,
though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and
origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he
last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene;
indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be
traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms
perceptible to the senses....”
“... the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a
fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and
completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations.” Auerbach,
Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1953.
Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton University Press. Anchor Books
Edition. 1957. Pp. 3-4.
“But any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a
foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the
depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric
style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly
objective present.” Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of
Reality in Western Literature. 1953. Translated by Willard Trask.
Princeton University Press. Anchor Books Edition. 1957. P. 5.
“God gives his command in direct discourse, but he leaves his motives and
his purpose unexpressed; Abraham, receiving the command, says nothing and
does what he has been told to do. The conversation between Abraham and
Isaac on the way to the place of sacrifice is only an interruption of the
heavy silence and makes it all the more burdensome. The two of them, Isaac
carrying the wood and Abraham with fire and a knife, ‘went together.’
Hesitantly, Isaac ventures to ask about the ram, and Abraham gives the
well-known answer. Then the text repeats: ‘So they went both of them
together.’ Everything remains unexpressed.
“It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those
of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand,
externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a
definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual
foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place
in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand,
the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for
the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive
points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is
nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation;
thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence
and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most
unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal, remains mysterious
and ‘fraught with background.’” Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1953. Translated by
Willard Trask. Princeton University Press. Anchor Books Edition. 1957. Pp.
8-9.
Authors & Works
cited in this section; bolded entries have extensive citations:
Auerbach, Erich.
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
Brown, Norman O.,
Love's Body
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur
Duerr, Hans Peter. Dreamtime; Concerning the Boundary between Wildness
Kass, Leon. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature
Kripal, Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae
Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind
Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our
Ancestors
