What would human existence be like if we did not bind so desperately to the Symbolic Order?  M. D. Faber explores this question in his exciting book—just released by Library of Social Science. CLICK HERE for information on getting your copy. The Withdrawal of Human Projection is a work of fundamental significance. To assure this book achieves the widest possible circulation, we are providing college instructors with a free copy if you will simply ask your library to order a copy. Please respond directly to this email or write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com saying that you will request that your library order  The Withdrawal of Human Projection. When you respond, provide 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 hard copy, including the front and back covers. 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 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. Is there a domain of reality separate from the Symbolic Order? Asserting there is “no such thing as a pre-discursive reality,” Lacan claims that “every reality is founded and defined by a discourse.” According to this view, the child—before becoming a “speaking being”—possesses or contains no reality. This postulate on the nature of reality excludes physical sensations, bodily feelings, emotions and fantasies—an entire gamut of human experience that occurs before or separate from discourse. Descartes contra Buddha Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Buddha countered: “I do not think, therefore I am.” In the academic world, French theorists won the argument. Yet even if we do not meditate, we know that we exist when we are not thinking. We possess feelings and fantasies, bodily sensations and erotic excitements, aches and pains—that exist below the level of language and discourse.

Binding Our Selves to Culture

Cultural theory for the past 40 years has been dominated by categories such as language, discourse and the symbolic order. Like fish in water, we are so profoundly immersed within culture that we are barely able to reflect upon it—as something separate from our selves.

In The Withdrawal of Human Projection: Separating from the Symbolic Order, M. D. Faber analyzes the psychological roots and meanings of attachment: why we bind ourselves so desperately to the symbolic order. Faber begins with Géza Róheim’s famous quote: “Civilization originates in delayed infancy, and its foundation of security. It is a huge network of more or less successful attempts to protect mankind against the danger of object-loss: the colossal efforts made by a baby who is afraid of being left along in the dark.”

We attach to society as a response to separation and separation anxiety. As we move away from our parents and family, we simultaneously link our identities to symbolic objects in culture. Each step toward autonomy, Faber says, holds the threat of loss, triggering an “endless search for replacement—for someone or something to fill the gap.” Our relationship to culture is rooted in the desire to attain a state of “dual-unity:” a magical condition in which one exists “on one’s own—separate and detached from the object”—and yet, at the same time, “united with the object on the unconscious, affective level.

Ordinary Consciousness

Faber writes about “ordinary consciousness”—our normal way of being in the world. As we struggle to separate and individuate, we simultaneously begin a ceaseless quest to unite with objects. We achieve separation by connecting to “transitional objects” in the domain of culture. Ordinary consciousness represents a perceptual condition in which we strive to “maintain our tie to the inner world by discovering substitute objects in the ‘reality’ of our cultural realm.”

Academic focus on culture and the symbolic order is matched by its preoccupation with concepts such as domination and oppression. Society is understood as both the ground of being and the source of suffering. Faber claims that the experience of oppression stems from domination by the “objects within,” whose persistent, implacable influence “stands squarely behind those forms of domination that eventually characterize the social world.”

Lacan writes about the symbolic order as the fundamental structure supporting our existence and identity, without which we could not be human. Yet the symbolic order also is the source of ideologies that generate inhumanity: totalitarian tyranny and mass murder. Lacan speaks of the “Law of the Father” that supposedly liberates us from being trapped in the maternal matrix. Yet the Twentieth Century gave us father-figures like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao—who set forth their own “laws.” Connection to society—sought as a form of liberation—may become the source of radical forms of oppression.

Within academic discourse (emanating from the symbolic order), there is no place to go. One ideology struggles against another. One discourse is pitted in opposition to an alternative discourse. Theorists embrace “the truth:” one can be neither more nor less than a “subject” of the symbolic order. Given the inability or refusal to imagine existence apart from the symbolic order—there is no escape.

Concentrative Meditation

Faber proposes “concentrative meditation” as a technique to moderate the tie to the internalized object “upon which one’s ordinary perception of the world is based.” Withdrawal of human projection means “breaking” from our fetishistic attachment to society and symbol systems; moderating our tendency to project existence into culture; emptying the self of its objects.

Faber suggests that one focus on the “direct, non-symbolic awareness of one’s body from the inside.” Indeed, we have witnessed a revolution of the body—manifest in practices such as running, body-building and dancing. As grand narratives died, the center fell apart: human beings turned to the body as a new center of being.

Embodiment became a hot topic. But most research and writing on the topic revolves around “discourses of the body” rather than the body itself. Conventional arguments begin with the postulate that existence and reality are entirely dependent upon language, discourse and the symbolic order— then tautologically conclude that there can be no such thing as existence or reality apart from language, discourse and the symbolic order.

Asserting there is “no such thing as a pre-discursive reality,” Lacan claims that “every reality is founded and defined by a discourse.” According to this view, the child—before becoming a “speaking being”—possesses or contains no reality. This postulate on the nature of reality excludes physical sensations, bodily feelings, emotions and fantasies—an entire gamut of human experience that occurs before or separate from discourse.

Descartes contra Buddha

Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Buddha countered: “I do not think, therefore I am.” In the academic world, French theorists won the argument. Yet even if we do not meditate or come from an Asian background—we know that we exist when we are not thinking. We possess feelings and fantasies, bodily sensations and erotic excitements, aches and pains—that exist below the level of language and discourse.

Faber’s Withdrawal of Human Projection proposes that we interrogate the nature of our relationship to the symbolic order rather than take it for granted. Why do we so vehemently assert that language and discourse constitute the ground of being? Faber also suggests that we consider pathological dimensions of our relationship to society. Culture may constitute reality, but at the same time our need to bind ourselves so profoundly to symbolic objects may reflect a flight from reality.

In order to achieve a sense of stability and power, we connect with society and embrace the symbolic order. We assume “we are that.” Simultaneously, we feel dominated and oppressed by the objects to which we have turned for salvation. What would existence be like if we did not bind so desperately to the symbolic order? In The Withdrawal of Human Projection, M. D. Faber asks us to imagine such a path.