Christoph Turcke and Susan Gillespie
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780300188400
- eISBN:
- 9780300199123
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300188400.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology
Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? This book offers a new answer to these time-worn questions by ...
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Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? This book offers a new answer to these time-worn questions by scrutinizing the phenomenon of the dream, using it as a psychic fossil connecting us with our Stone Age ancestors. It argues that both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response. Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then, automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition, whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new global forces of distraction, the book argues, are producing a specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between dreams and waking consciousness. The book ends with a sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social and economic deregulations that have accompanied it.Less
Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? This book offers a new answer to these time-worn questions by scrutinizing the phenomenon of the dream, using it as a psychic fossil connecting us with our Stone Age ancestors. It argues that both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response. Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then, automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition, whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new global forces of distraction, the book argues, are producing a specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between dreams and waking consciousness. The book ends with a sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social and economic deregulations that have accompanied it.
Rhodri Hayward
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074141
- eISBN:
- 9781781700778
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074141.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
Both mysticism and the new psychology are techniques for transforming hidden, introspective knowledge into public language. The mystics had communicated the inner presence of the divine through the ...
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Both mysticism and the new psychology are techniques for transforming hidden, introspective knowledge into public language. The mystics had communicated the inner presence of the divine through the body. In the new psychology of religion, the sacred—which had once stood outside the individual—was relocated within the field of memory. The new psychologists tried to reveal the lost or subliminal inner life of man, but in place of hidden processes of growth and ideas obscured from the waking consciousness, the new psychologists substituted a body of knowledge constructed through statistical techniques and experimental investigation. The new psychology based its appeal to pedagogy on a presentation of the child as a complex of historical forces demanding expert interpretation and control. The most straightforward of these forces, the individual's habits, had long been a concern of British psycho-physiologists, who presented habit as a mechanism through which action and emotion could be physically inscribed upon the nerves.Less
Both mysticism and the new psychology are techniques for transforming hidden, introspective knowledge into public language. The mystics had communicated the inner presence of the divine through the body. In the new psychology of religion, the sacred—which had once stood outside the individual—was relocated within the field of memory. The new psychologists tried to reveal the lost or subliminal inner life of man, but in place of hidden processes of growth and ideas obscured from the waking consciousness, the new psychologists substituted a body of knowledge constructed through statistical techniques and experimental investigation. The new psychology based its appeal to pedagogy on a presentation of the child as a complex of historical forces demanding expert interpretation and control. The most straightforward of these forces, the individual's habits, had long been a concern of British psycho-physiologists, who presented habit as a mechanism through which action and emotion could be physically inscribed upon the nerves.
