The Ego And The Flesh

This book criticizes theories, dominant today, that reduce the self to a simple illusion, proposing a new theory of the ego that allows us to better understand our existence and our relations with others.

What is a woman? What is a man? How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for "wholeness" refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh. Silverman shows that analogy, so discredited by much of twentieth-century thought, offers a much more promising view of human relations. In the West, the emblematic story of turning away is that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the heroes of Silverman's sweeping new reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, the modern heirs to the old, analogical view of the world, also gravitate to this myth. They embrace the correspondences that bind Orpheus to Eurydice and acknowledge their kinship with others past and present. The first half of this book assembles a cast of characters not usually brought together: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Lou-Andréas Salomé, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wilhelm Jensen, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. The second half is devoted to three contemporary artists, whose works we see in a moving new light:Terrence Malick, James Coleman, and Gerhard Richter.

Doug Reed uses important insights from scripture, the historical context of Jesus's day, and personal experience to prove God's fervent passion to give Himself to us. When we understand God's purpose, we begin to see His presence in places we thought He was absent. We come to know God not as one who occasionally visits but as one who abides, always giving His gift, even when we suffer defeat, weakness, and loss. God is a Gift is invaluable for overcoming fear and finding a life filled with God's presence. It reveals how grace revolutionizes our relationship with the Lord. Topics include understanding the New Covenant, living in the gift of righteousness, abundant life, worship, and intimacy with God.

The Ego And Its Hyperstate is a unified theory of psychological and ethical egoism which posits self-interest. The dialectical dream theory sets its sights against capitalist notions of the self-interest contra the other, not simply with moralism, but with a more accurate analysis of the subject of self-interest than has been provided by capitalists and anarchist theorists alike. Through the lens of psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectical logic, the process of self-interest as the ground of all human existence reveals itself. Eliot Rosenstock has a symptom he wants you to know about: he wants you to know how the nature of self-interest strikes through the notions of pure duty and state worship, he wants to bring in psychoanalyis and redeem dialectics in its power to reveal the universe rather than be a simple rhetorical tool, and he wants to reveal to you how the material conditions of the world, as well as psychological processes of mankind, work together to bring about all that is brought into the universe by humanity.

We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain - an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is ''a virtual self in a virtual reality.'' But if the self is not ''real,'' why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.

Discover your true identity in Christ. Many of us live for the approval of others. We let the world decide who we are, or we look to those around us to discover who we think we’d like to be. The problem is that living for what people think of you is the quickest way to forget what God thinks of you. In Altar Ego, pastor and author of Winning the War in Your Mind Craig Groeschel will show you how to sacrifice your broken ideas of approval-based identity on the altar of God’s truth and become who you were meant to be in Christ. You'll learn how to: Expose false labels and selfish motives. Live according to God's higher values with a deeper confidence in His calling. Trade in your broken ego and unleash your “altar” ego as a living sacrifice to Him. Understand how God continuously shapes you into His vision of you. Once you know your true identity and are growing in Christ-like character, then you can behave accordingly with bold behavior, bold prayers, bold words, and bold obedience. Altar Ego reveals who God says you are, and then calls you to live up to it. Rather than living a timid, halfhearted, shallow cultural Christianity, you'll boldly live in the confidence of the God who believes in you.

A phenomenological approach to questions of the body, ego, temporality and intersubjective relations with the 'other' by a leading French thinker and Husserl scholar.

“Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born in the twentieth century,” Freud said late in his career, “but it did not drop from the skies ready-made.” And in his speculative theories of modernism, Bruno Latour argued that “no science can exit from the network of its practice.” Deploying Latour’s model of scientific theory production, this book argues that the historical emergence of psychoanalysis depended on nineteenth-century scientific practices: laboratory experimentation, medical transmission of research findings along collegial or social networks, and medical representation of illness—including case studies, amphitheatrical demonstration of cases, hospital records of symptoms, and laboratory graphology and photography of patients. The author shows how hysteria enabled Freud to appropriate medical and scientific concepts from neurology, sexology, gynecology, psychiatry, and existing rest cures and psychotherapies. His new model eschewed physiological determinism, linking unconscious ideation with counterwill and reproduced memory, psychosexual experience, and affect-laden images of object relations (usually with family members). Constructing around himself a psychoanalytic circle and establishing training institutions, Freud translated this new psycho-physical body and hybrid subjectivity to other research sites. Just as in the 1890’s he had used the figure of the hysteric to mobilize theory production, by the 1920’s he had replaced the hysteric with a modernized figure, the homosexual. Freud used autobiography, summary, and outline to stabilize his concepts and control the dissemination of his new science. Psychoanalysis had successfully created new scientific “plausible bridges” between psyche and soma, nature and the social, to produce a modern theory of hybrid subjectivity that was rooted in yet conceptually separated from the body.

Rudolf Steiner's teachings of Christ are unique. Christ, he says, is an objective universal force, existing independently of Christian churches and confessions, and working for the whole of humanity. The impulse that Christ brought to earth acts for the advancement of all people, irrespective of religion, creed or race. Among the myriad other themes that emerge here are the introduction of the 'I' (or self) in human development and its connection to Christ and the meaning of the Ten.

The rebellious Valen has spent his life trying to escape his family legacy. But his fate is sealed when he winds up half-dead, addicted to an enchantment-which leads him into a world he could never possibly imagine...