Discussion

A common thread through the discussion will be the existential conditions. We humans are "irretrievably doomed to live as separate 'in-dividuals', dependent on each other, divided into two sexes and several generations, vulnerable and mortal…" (Werbart, 2000, p?) We have to

"Accept the existential conditions of man: our seclusion as separate individuals, our division into two sexes and impossibility of being both, the division into the parent and child generations, our aging and our mortality." (Werbart & N, in the foreword to Quinodoz, 1996, p.?)

"To free oneself from the weight of the scene, to escape the generation chain, to try to give life to a child without a father, or without a mother, to imagine being born of a virgin or believing himself to be God, undoubtedly represents alluring possibilities." (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1991, p.30)

"From the psychoanalytic angle, three items stand out clearly; first, we have an overarching presence of infantile omnipotence, the egocentric, unconscious belief in one's unlimited powers […]; second, we have the urge to fuse regressively with the environment, to attach oneself to the surrounding world (universe) in a way that denies, erases, cancels out the ever-present sense of separation which the cronologically mature individual must cope with during the course of his days on the planet; third, we have a longing for narcissistic inflation, the longing to go about in the belief that one is somehow magical, wonderful […] as opposed to being simply another regular person in the world.

[…]

"I regard New Age thinking as essentially regressive or infantile in nature. It is absorbed, I contend, in matters of symbiotic merger, omnipotence, narcissistic inflation, and in magical thinking and wishing generally. New Age thinking makes war on reality; it denigrates reason; it denies and distorts what I consider to be the existential facts of our human experience; it seeks to restore the past, specifically, the before-separation-world, in an idealized, wish-fulfilling form that has little or no connection to the adult estate." (Faber, 1996, pp 14-15)