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>of “The Withdrawal of Human Projection”
>Return to Emptiness: free copy of The Withdrawal of Human Projection
>COLLEGE INSTRUCTORS may receive a free copy for use in teaching and
>research.Simply respond to this email indicating you will request that your
>library order a copy.
> Pages: 118 pages
>Publisher:
> Library of Social Science
>Author:
> M. D. Faber
>Date of Publication:
> June 1, 2013
>Paperback:
> List Price $34.95
> ISBN: 091504207X
>Hardcover:
> List Price $39.95
> ISBN: 0915042088
> For information on ordering this book through Amazon, click here.
>
>Because we believe The Withdrawal of Human Projection is an important book—and
>wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are
>offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your
>library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to
>[email protected]—providing your name and the name of your
>college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire
>book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).
>
> Professor emeritus of English at the University of Victoria, M. D. Faber is a
> renowned authority on the psychology of religion and author of nine books,
> including Culture and Consciousness, The Psychological Roots of Religious
> Belief, and The Magic of Prayer: An Introduction to the Psychology of Faith.
>
>We are immersed within culture
>like fish in the sea
>We experience culture as if air that we breathe. Or one may say that human
>beings are like fish within water—embraced, encompassed and incorporated by
>“society.” In many post-modern theories, there is barely a concept of a self
>prior to or separate from the symbolic order. Some theorists contend that our
>psyche is constituted by nothing more or less than the “discourses that push
>and pull us.”
>Scholars focus on the inescapable power of discourse, yet rail against the
>dominating, oppressive dimensions of society. The term “hegemony” conveys the
>idea of culture and its ideologies as an omnipresent—and potentially
>destructive—force.
>But what is “culture?” Why is there such an intimate connection between our
>minds and society? In The Withdrawal of Human Projection, M. D. Faber departs
>from conventional approaches—providing a psychological analysis of our need or
>desire for culture. What motivates us to bind ourselves to the symbolic order?
>How is it possible to separate
>from beloved objects?
>Faber begins with the child’s attachment to mother and family. We experience a
>deep, profound tie to early love objects. Simultaneously, we are compelled to
>separate from these objects and move into reality—a place that does not
>contain the mother. How is it possible to achieve separation from that to
>which we are so deeply attached? This is the subject of Faber’s book.
>Separation from our mother and families, Faber says, generates a “life-long
>mourning process,” triggering an endless “search for replacement, for someone
>or something to fill the gap.” The child deals with separation by choosing
>“transitional objects”—blankets, teddy bears, story books—that afford the
>magical or illusory belief that one is “staying with the caretaker at the same
>time he or she is moving away from her or giving her up.” We bind to objects
>that “symbolize and evoke the comforting presence of the mother.”
>Our relationship to culture, according to Faber, derives from our relationship
>to transitional objects. Cultural objects are glorified, puffed-up
>transitional objects. We bind ourselves tightly to the cultural domain as part
>of a ceaseless struggle to come to terms with separation and loss; to solidify
>and stabilize the self.
>Ambivalence
>Faber hypothesizes that we are tied to the institutions of society out of the
>tie that binds us to parental figures within. Our struggle to establish “dual
>unity” binds us to the objects of our inner world, and hence to an
>overestimation or attachment to cultural objects that become “projective
>exemplifications of either acceptance or rejection; in other words,
>psychological symbols.”
>At the same time that we seek to maintain the tie to mother, we struggle to
>separate. Insofar as cultural objects symbolize mother, our relationship to
>these objects is inherently ambivalent. We simultaneously seek to fuse with
>these objects and to differentiate—separate—ourselves from them. We come feel
>dominated and oppressed—tormented— by the very ideologies, ideals and cultural
>objects to which we have become deeply attached.
>Because we believe The Withdrawal of Human Projection is an important book—and
>wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are
>offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your
>library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to
>[email protected]—providing your name and the name of your
>college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire
>book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).
>Contemporary scholarship views the power of culture to shape the self as
>inevitable and nearly inescapable. Lacanians state that “is no other but the
>other.” Submitting to culture, we become “subjects of the symbolic order.”
>However, there are other perspectives. Books like Freud’s Civilization and Its
>Discontents suggest a clear distinction between society, on the one hand, and
>the individual, on the other. The fact that human beings suffer from—and can
>perform a critique of—civilization implies that there is a part of the self
>that is not bound to civilization. Many social movements subsequent to Freud’s
>book built on the assumption that liberation entails “throwing off” the yoke
>of society.
>Return to emptiness
>Faber turns to Buddhism as a method for achieving a "break" from the symbolic
>order. Whereas Descartes said, I think therefore I am, Buddhist tradition
>embraces an idea that is precisely the opposite of this French conception.
>Buddhism—Asian philosophy, generally—contends that thinking impedes discovery
>and understanding of the self. One becomes who one is by abandoning
>thoughts—returning to the space of emptiness.
>Indian philosopher Rajneesh explains: “Thoughts are like clouds in the sky;
>they have no roots in you. They come and go. You’re just a victim, and you
>unnecessarily become identified with them.” The self, according to this view,
>is not the thinker, but the being who experiences and observes thoughts.
>Because we believe The Withdrawal of Human Projection is an important book—and
>wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are
>offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your
>library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to
>[email protected]—providing your name and the name of your
>college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire
>book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).
>Within the symbolic order, identity is achieved through “identification.” We
>find it natural and normal to define our selves in terms of our relationship
>to cultural ideas and objects. People identify with nations, with a political
>position (“left” or “right”), with an ethnic group, a baseball team (becoming
>a “Yankee fan” or a “Met fan”), religious belief systems, a musical performer
>(becoming a Lady Gaga fan), with an actor or actress, or an ideology
>(libertarianism or socialism).
>Identifications are the foundation for what Faber calls “ordinary
>consciousness.” We define ourselves by projecting existence into cultural
>objects. Our attachment to these objects replicates attachment to infantile
>love objects. Living through identification, human beings imagine that they
>cannot do without—live without—these beloved cultural objects.
>Buddhism seeks separation from the symbolic order: abandonment of cultural
>objects: return to our “original nature.” The idea of “emptiness” lies at the
>heart of Buddhism. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki explains that emptiness is not
>merely a state of mind, but the “original essence of mind which Buddha
>experienced.” Emptiness is the pure, inner space where language, discourse and
>society cannot enter.
>Liberation from the Symbolic Order
>Buddhism—separation from the symbolic order—implies the possibility of
>liberation from ideologies and hegemonic societal structures. Charlotte Joko
>Beck states that the purpose of Buddhist practice is to “die slowly, step by
>step, gradually disidentifying with wherever we’re caught in.” As we identify
>ourselves with less and less, we can “include more and more in our lives.”
>Disidentification means withdrawing psychic energy from cultural objects to
>which we had been attached. Many of us are so deeply invested in culture that
>we can hardly conceive or imagine such a state of being. We all are
>“fans”—people who are fanatically committed or devoted to cultural objects.
>We imagine that we benefit enormously by virtue of our relationship to
>society. Yet, we often feel tormented. Culture (e. g., the mass-media)
>presents an endless, eternal stream of gratification. We feel that we are
>energized by this connection.
>Perhaps, however, an image from The Matrix depicts the true state of affairs.
>Human beings are batteries—perpetually feeding the symbolic order. We are tied
>to society by an umbilical cord, precisely as an unborn child is tied to its
>mother. We feel we are being nourished by the images that enter from the
>Matrix. In reality, we are feeding the Matrix with the substance of our bodies.
>Because we believe The Withdrawal of Human Projection is an important book—and
>wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are
>offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your
>library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to
>[email protected]—providing your name and the name of your
>college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire
>book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).
>
>EXCERPTS FROM THE WITHDRAWAL
>OF HUMAN PROJECTION
>
>M. D. Faber on Money, Capitalism and Consumerism
>The drive for wealth is closely bound up with the drive for omnipotence. Money
>denies dependence. Because money functions as an agent of control at the deep
>psychological level, providing the dependent personality with the dream of
>unlimited power, wealth becomes in the transitional mode a means of
>accomplishing one's total independence. Were one to possess the object
>entirely one would not need the object any more.
>The capitalist, in his insatiable greed, is willing to sacrifice human beings,
>the very "flesh and blood, nerves and brains" of working people in order to
>maximize his profit, which is derived from human labor. Like the Aztecs of
>old, the owners of industries, of mines and factories, are "prodigal with
>human lives," casual about "wasting" the men and women to whom they believe
>they have some sort of natural right. "When profits are at stake," writes
>Marx, "killing is no murder," just as in the religious sacrifice of human
>beings killing is also no murder but a "religious" action.
>Because interest leads to money after a period of waiting—and because money is
>a symbol rooted in the drive to control and reunite with the internalized
>object—interest becomes a psychological scheme to fill time with the magical
>presence of the maternal figure. One is making money as time passes, and to
>this extent the emptiness of time is denied, the absence of the object is
>denied; indeed, the emptiness of time and the object's absence are only
>illusions.
>Time is not simply passing, it is breeding money, which makes one secure in
>its passing. Thus the interest in interest attests to the individual's desire
>to be imaging unconsciously the object of one's security all the time, just as
>the child has the mother all the time at the level of his primary,
>internalized holding. The feed of cash proceeds uninterruptedly at the level
>of transitional need. One "goes through life" with his lips at the breast.
>Our passionate chase after goods is, first. our attempt to discover new forms
>of attachment" in our alienated, kin-less culture, our paradise lost. We shop,
>buy, consume, feed ourselves "products," in a pathetic, obsessive struggle to
>deny the absence of those flesh-and-blood contacts that formerly tied people
>together and provided them with precious compensation for the loss of the
>object. Second, we make our obsessive economic activity, our endless oral
>frenzy, a part of the "national purpose," or indeed the national purpose
>itself ("the richest country in the world!")—in an effort to convince
>ourselves that we do in fact live in a genuine society, a truly cohesive
>group, a shared community of emotion and purpose. We know deep down, however,
>that loneliness and isolation are the rule.
>
>The Withdrawal of Human Projection:
>Separating from the Symbolic Order
>Table of Contents
>Foreword by Richard A. Koenigsberg
>
>Acknowledgements
>
>Part One: The Transitional Nature of Ordinary Consciousness
> 1. The Process of Mind-Body Conversion
> 2. From the Cradle
> 3. The Internalization of the World
> 4. The Mirror
> 5. The Dark Side of the Mirror: Splitting
> 6. The Agony of Differentiation
> 7. The Sands of Time and the Container of Space
> 8. The Stimulus Itself
> 9. The Ward
> 10. The Tie to the Culture
> 11. The Oedipus, and After
> 12. Notes and References Part One
>Part Two: The Cultural Sphere
> 1. Some Background
> 2. The Religio-Economic Realm
> 3. Money and Magna Mater
> 4. The Sacrificial Way to the Object
> 5. Sacred Lucre
> 6. Psychodynamic Extrapolations
> 7. The Metaphors of Marx
> 8. The Interest in Interest
> 9. The Vicious Circle and the Bad Parent
> 10. More Opiates, More Anxieties
> 11. Lurking Ambivalence
> 12. Goods and More Goods
> 13. Notes and References Part Two
>Part Three: Disrupting the Tie to the Inner World
> 1. A Glance Backward, A Glance Forward
> 2. The Meaning of Non-Ordinary Moments
> 3. The Emergence of the Non-Ordinary World
> 4. Solidifying One's Change
> 5. Transforming the Past at the Mind-Body Level
> 6. Notes and References Part Three
>
>Because we believe The Withdrawal of Human Projection is an important book—and
>wish to assure that it achieves the widest possible circulation—we are
>offering a free copy to college instructors if you will simply ask your
>library to order a copy. Please respond to this email—write to
>[email protected]—providing your name and the name of your
>college or university. We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire
>book (identical to the physical copy, including the front & back cover).
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