Transiency and the Culture of Plastic

Our post-modern era is characterized by increasing dislocation and fragmentation. The sense of permanence and constancy of old, is exchanged for temporality and fluidity, i.e., a condition of transiency. Not only do cars, trains and planes carry us across continents faster than most people once could imagine – perhaps with the exception of Jules Verne and a few others, but we travel cyberspace in zero-time. Speed in the era of transiency, makes the soulful road of the wanderer seem hopelessly obsolete.

Likewise, we are over-exposed to stimuli, information and images: once upon a time we would sit down and quietly look through the pictures of the past, the reminders of our childhood, enjoy a memory, recall days long gone by, share thoughts and feelings from a time that could be brought alive by the one photo from that day. Today, we are flooded by digital photos, numbered almost into infinity. Rarely do we remain more than seconds to glance at each photo, and even more rarely do we return to them – often unaware that what warrants no return, loses its soul.

It is by reflecting on the events in which we partake that we induce them with depth and meaning, but speed and superficiality seem to supersede depth and reflection.

We are flooded with images, but the onslaught of external images disrupts the flow of internal imagery. Excessive exteriority impinges upon the imagery of interiority. Read more here, or at the Fisher King Press Newsletter.

If you are interested in reading other book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and published papers of mine, you will find a compilation at OPEN ENDS.

Certain entries require login. Username and password can be purchased by using PayPal, or at Hebrew Psychology ($15, 46.75 NIS).

Among the articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries you can access by login are:

-- Erel Shalit, Silence is the Center of Feeling
-- Jerusalem as Metaphor
-- Worship of Transiency
-- Dreams in the Bible
-- Sacrifice of Isaac
-- Jerusalem encyclopedia entry
-- Story of requiem
-- Self, Meaning & the Transient Personality
-- Recollection and recollectivization
-- lakes of memory - review of adagio & lamentations
-- Jerusalem - Psyche & the City
-- with James Hall, The complex object

Comments

Imitation and the Archetypal Adult

In The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey , I mention five pathologies that I relate to the idea of the Archetypal Adult. In this brief presentation I mention an additional one, which Jung speaks about – imitation. In the Red Book he writes, “The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship.” In Two Essays in Analytical Psychology he writes, "The human being has one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility from the collective point of view, is immeasurably detrimental from the standpoint of individuality; the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology can never dispense with imitation, for without it the organization of the masses, that of the state and of society, is quite simply impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and moral contagion." Imitation is a sh...

Rooftops and Towers of Prague

'Rooftops and Towers of Prague,' a drawing by Petr Ginz, 1928-1944 (Yad vaShem). Born in Prague, Petr spent his adolescence in the children's home in the Theresienstadt ghetto. He was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the fall of 1944. In 2003, Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut that perished in the space shuttle Columbia , took Petr Ginz's drawing 'Moon Landscape' (see below) with him from the Yad Vashem collection. I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Czech Society for Analytical Psychology, to deliver a lecture and a workshop on the Cycle of Life . Following several years of experience with the impressive Bulgarian Jung Society, as well as visiting the groups in Poland, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, I can testify to the admirable devotion and seriousness found among the analysts, therapists and students in these countries. Their thirst for knowledge is a source of inspiration, and in only a few years the therapists in these countries have g...

The Cycle of Life - an excerpt

From Chapter 3, The Puer and the Puella Who are they, the young man and the maiden, the puer and the puella? We easily recognize them in everyday confrontations with moody teenagers, when sexual desire competes with dark rage, the one setting the house on fire, the other breaking up the walls. Alternatively, and even worse, inexplicable withdrawal makes the earth quake in deadening silence. There is beauty struggling with acne, and tender sensuality trying to contain awkward clumsiness. Eros and desire break through the face of insecure constraint, mercilessly exposing their blushing flare. Hope for the future competes with anxiety of failure and apocalyptic fears. Thomas Coyle: Youth Art and poetry, mythology, music and literature, abound with tales and pictures of the pain, suffering and sorrow of young Werthers, of hidden loneliness when the birds sing out of tune in a world without love, of trying to save the child in a world characterized by alienation an...

Anxiety and the Postmodern Condition

Search This Blog