Reviews / Excerpts
Acts of Will
Art and Artist
Das Trauma der Gerburt
Psychology and the Soul
Esther Menaker’s contributions
Other contributions
New Translations, Research, and Academic Links
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Carse, James P., Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. Free Press, 1986
Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.
There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been–and therefore of all that we are.
Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished in the past. Societal convention, on the other hand, requires that a completed past be repeated in the future. Society has all the seriousness of immortal necessity; culture resounds with the laughter of unexpected possibility. Society is abstract, culture concrete. [Sec. 35; p. 44].
….Since culture is itself a poiesis, all of its participants are poietai–inventors, makers, artists, storytellers, mythologists. They are not, however, makers of actualities, but makers of possibilities. The creativity of culture has no outcome, no conclusion. It does not result in art works, artifacts, products. Creativity is a continuity that engenders itself in others. “Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects” (Rank). [Sec. 44, p. 55]
James Carse is emeritus professor of Religion at NYU and is the author of The Silence of God and other books.
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Reed, Edward S., From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James. Yale, 1997. 290 pp., index, bibliographic essay.
With this important book Prof. Reed (psychology, Franklin and Marshall Coll.) follows up two of his own (Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology [Oxford, 1996] and The Necessity of Experience [Yale, 1996] which “suggest how modern psychology might overcome its legacy of narrowness.” (xv). Here he makes over the stodgy, fragmented histories of psychology in a pastiche of philosophy, poetry, fiction, and science. E. T. A. Hoffman and the Shelleys figure in this process, since “thought police” kept the more challenging psychological ideas under wraps. Thus Frankenstein (1818) carried banned ideas of E. Darwin and W. Lawrence into the mainstream. The text reads like a good academic whodunit as Reed traces lines of influence obscured by authors themselves as well as by their enemies. Both academic and general readers will find stimulation, challenge and order in this kaleidoscope of neglected 18th and 19th century thinkers.
–Reviewed in Library Journal by E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. School of Medicine, Washington DC.
Edward S. Reed died suddenly before this book appeared. He was in his 40s, but had already made major contributions to psychology and history. Although he does not refer to Rank, I was glad to be able to refer to this as an important new perspective in the introduction to Rank’s Psychology and the Soul. –ejl