In The Bridge to Nothingness, author Shlomo Giora Shoham explicates myth as a projection of human experience. Human development dynamics, according to Shoham, are represented by myths and reflected in religious creeds. Myths constitute projective evidence of the development of psychic processes at early orality; they at once reveal and conceal their psychological content. In this work, Shoham deals with ideas that are common to Gnosticism, Kabala, and existentialism, irrespective of their historical interrelationships. He compares the Heideggerian notion of the thrownness of the individual into the world with the Gnostic teaching of the divine descent and incarnation, the incarceration of the divine in objects and life forms. All three ideologies speak of God as the spiritual core of human being. Union with God is unachievable, but one can achieve symbiosis with God and humanness through creativity and revelation. The author's integration of psychology and mythic symbolism is stimulating: The Bridge to Nothingness is filled with deep psychological and spiritual insights. His portrayal of kabalistic thought is perceptive and erudite. He makes use of the latest scholarship, and more importantly, what he says will contribute to the field and provoke discussion and debate. His sensitivity to the dynamics of mystical experience enables him to see clearly its positive dimension. Very little has been written on the interface between Gnosticism, Kabala, and psychology. Shoham's work is original, provocative, and insightful; The Bridge to Nothingness will break new ground in these studies, and enrich the understanding of psychological and religious symbolism.

The Bridge to Nothingness: Gnosis, Kabala, Existentialism, and the Transcendental Predicament of Man

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Shoham, Shlomo Giora

Psychology & Counseling

UNKNO

This is not a work on physics, nor is it a tract on personality, but rather an effort to link them together in order to examine the cognitive relationship of humans with their surroundings. We explore the interaction between the human mind and energy-matter; the adoption of quantum mechanics allows us to bridge the distinction between physics and psychology. We invoke here the principles of quantum mechanics, symbols, and great myths - from Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Prometheus, through the Kabbalah and the Gnostic religions, to great historical figures in art and literature. Our personality theory, first expounded in The Myth of Tantalus (1979), is expanded here into truly interdisciplinary research, examining the relationship of humans with God and the universe. We claim that myths reflect the human mind more profoundly than any other means available: they serve as a bridge to unknown parts of the human psyche and history, and form the basis for human behavior for centuries. We therefore use a method we call myth-empiricism. It is, indeed, amazing to see the connection between the structure of the human mind and that of energy-matter, as it is reflected in the mytho-empirical context.

The Promethean Bridge

de Sitter Publications

There is an unbridgeable controversy between the functionalist sociologist who anchors his theories on society and the group, and the existentialist who bathes his thoughts on the individual. Durkheim and Parsons, as well as many contemporary American sociologists, are adjustment-based in the sense that all those individuals who rock the boat, even if they are creative innovators, would be labeled deviant or mad. The existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Buber, regard the individual as the focus of life. They see philosophy and society as, at best, a curbing control-structure and, at worst, coercing, stigmatizing, and ostracizing. This volume treads in the giant footsteps of Albert Camus who saw the absurd as the conflictual encounter between the individual and society. Society and the Absurd attempts to overcome this deep sociological controversy by investigating absurdity through the prism of an interdisciplinary theory of personality.

Society And The Absurd: A Sociology Of Conflictual Encounters

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Sussex Academic Pr

There is an unbridgeable controversy between the functionalist sociologist who anchors his theories on society and the group, and the existentialist who bathes his thoughts on the individual. Durkheim and Parsons, as well as many contemporary American sociologists, are adjustment-based in the sense that all those individuals who rock the boat, even if they are creative innovators, would be labeled deviant or mad. The existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Buber, regard the individual as the focus of life. They see philosophy and society as, at best, a curbing control-structure and, at worst, coercing, stigmatizing, and ostracizing. This volume treads in the giant footsteps of Albert Camus who saw the absurd as the conflictual encounter between the individual and society. Society and the Absurd attempts to overcome this deep sociological controversy by investigating absurdity through the prism of an interdisciplinary theory of personality.

Society and the Absurd: A Sociology of Conflictual Encounters

Liverpool University Press

The publication of The Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism is to be saluted. Shoham sheds light on religious and philosophical-religious traditions - Gnosticism, Kabbala and existentialism - for which, as stated by the book's subtitle, The Centre Does Not Hold. The result is one of those rare books in which the newness of the view is accompanied by penetrating insights into the already familiar. The Gnostic traditions, examined in their great historical variability, reveal some surprising similarities. Born in a profound situation of crisis, from the destruction of the Second Temple up to the destruction of the European Jews during World War II, they have demonstrated their capacity to strike root. Gnostic traditions, with their capability of feeding a twofold politics of desire, are explained by the author in the context of two great Greek mythical models - the Sisyphean and the Tantalic....In reality, the mythogenes, in the penetrating psychoanalytical rereading offered by Shlomo Shoham, represent - imaginatively - life's fundamental phases: commencing with the trauma of birth; passing on to the constitution of a separate self via separation from the maternal bosom; to a phase where complex mechanisms of desire-repulse are formed, which will thereafter accompany the infant throughout his or her life. But it is not only individuals who engage in desire-repulse formations and dichotomy. It is the author's penetrating insight that demonstrates how a religious history may be retraced through the study of the great mythogenes.

Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism: Triumph of the Vanquished

Religion & Spirituality

This book traces the influence of Gnosis in European culture. Gnostic roots can be traced to the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Willkiam Blake, the romanticism of Novalis, the symbolic poetry of Gerard de Nerval, the dualistic writings of Herman Hesse, and to Heideggerean existentialism. Gnostic alternations between grace and damnation permeate the work of Luis Bunuel, and many others. The idea that the body is the prison of the soul was expounded by Pythagoras, Plato, and the Orphics. Yet with the Gnostics the dualism of soul-spirit/body-matter became complete. Objects and life forms were created by an evil diety whereas the souls embedded in them are particles chipped from an alien, boundless and eternal divinity. This extreme dualism corresponds to the abrupt transition from nonbeing IN UTERO to the conflictive existence outside the womb; it is investigated in terms of a theory of personality based on the existence of two opposing vectors- participation and separation - which are discussed in terms of their attitudes toward spatio-temporality and psycho-sexual development phases. The mytho-empiric value of the Gnostic WELTANSCHAUUNG Is not confined to the early centuries of the Christian era. It is ever contemporary. The Faustian myth is Gnostic insofar as it depicts the infernal nature of the manipulation of space-time and the demonic source of the knowledge governing the universe. In Hesse's MAGISTER LUDI, Gnostic undercurrents are manifest by its hero, Joseph Knecht, who conceives of a dualistic world of routine existence and a quest for revealed knowledge; Ivan Karamozov is a Gnostic when he refuses to reject God, but condemns the created world; as is Samuel Beckett, when he expresses his feeling of being immersed up to his neck in a universal heap of excrement. The book is truly interdisciplimary, combining personality theory, mythology and theology. This is the first book to integrate ontological/ideological philosophy in bio-psycho-sociology. The claim is that Gnosis Kabbala and Existentialism are the specific disciplines linking the dualities of human existence. Finally, an anthroponcentric theory of religion is presented, which links history and transcendence through the mediation of the human.

Art, Crime and Madness: Gesualdo, Carravagio, Genet, Van Gogh, Artaud

Art, Crime and Madness explores the relationship between creative innovation, deviance and morbidity by historical case studies of the madrigalist Don Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa, the painter Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, Jean Genet the homosexual thief, Vincent Van Gogh, and Antonin Artaud, the revolutionary cinema director.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

ART, CRIME, AND MADNESS explores the relationship between creative innovation, deviance and morbidity. To innovate, one has to be able to view the medium and the object of creativity in a different, hitherto unexplored manner. The essence of art is creative innovation, coupled with an ability, in varying degrees, to transcend the boundaries of consciousness. But this "ability" is also the prerogative of the mentally deranged. Likewise, the criminal and the deviant are more likely to transcend normative barriers while creating, hence the wide range of criminal and deviant behavior in society. Although the inverse hypothesis does not hold - the mere existence of deviance or morbidity does not predispose the individual to creativity - nevertheless criminal and mad behavior are often very innovative. This thesis is illustrated by historical case histories of creative deviance and genius madness, and contemporary observations. Don Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa, was a sadomasochist who insisted on being flogged. He killed his beautiful wife and her lover in a fit of rage, yet was one of the greatest innovators in the art of the Madrigali. The painter Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio killed a man while still a teenager, and a second victim during a ball game. In his lifetime he was considered degenerate, but today he is considered the greatest painter of the Italian Settecento, and his portrait adorned the Hundred-Thousand Lira note. Jean Genet the homosexual thief was born out of wedlock and as a teenager he transgressed almost all the paragraphs of the French criminal code. But he became a famous French playwright, the mouthpiece for criminals and deviants. His plays built up a philosophical apology for the raison d'Ã?Â?Ã?Âªtre of the criminal group. Vincent Van Gogh was mad, but in his lucid years he revolutionized painting by his innovative use of wide brush strokes and "rainbows" of colors. Antonin Artaud was also hospitalized, and like Van Gogh he committed suicide. But he revolutionized the cinema theatre and the visual arts.

This fully revised second edition provides a detailed explanation of personality developmental dynamics, taking into account mysticism and religious experience as psycho-sociological phenomena, and using empirical anchors ranging from the topical issue of Arab-Jewish relationships to the divergent personalities of the founders of the Hassidic movement. These psychological dynamics are presented by way of the developmental and relationship experiences we have with the outside world - alternations between conflict and a striving to revert back to earlier developmental phases. At any given moment of our lives there is a gap between our desires for participation and our subjectively defined distance from our participatory aims. This gap is called the Tantalus Ratio, after the Olympian demigod. Transcendental longings and quests are explored in their actual structuring of the human personality. This new Theory of Personality also explores the mytho-empirical manifestation of the normative sacrifice of the young, called the Isaac Syndrome. The author pays homage to Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus by recognizing the absurd drudgeries of man's existence, the maddening routines, the pointlessness of being, the silence of god, and the cruelty of man to man. Examples from literature and myth demonstrate that if man can find a creative modus vivendi with his pitiful "stone" burden, then the vicissitudes of existence can become punctuated with meaning, satisfaction and even happiness. Like Camus, the author concludes that it is only through creative rebellion that man can find authenticity.

Myth of Tantalus: A Scaffolding for an Ontological Personality Theory

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shoham, Shlomo Giora. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shoham, Shlomo Giora

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shoham, Shlomo Giora. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Bridge to Nothingness: Gnosis, Kabala, Existentialism, and the Transcendental Predicament of Man

The Promethean Bridge

Society And The Absurd: A Sociology Of Conflictual Encounters

Society and the Absurd: A Sociology of Conflictual Encounters

Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism: Triumph of the Vanquished

Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism: Triumph of the Vanquished

Art, Crime and Madness: Gesualdo, Carravagio, Genet, Van Gogh, Artaud

Art, Crime and Madness: Gesualdo, Carravagio, Genet, Van Gogh, Artaud

Myth of Tantalus: A Scaffolding for an Ontological Personality Theory