Marshak, Mel. (London). ‘I never knew I knew that’. Symbol, myth and art—as antecedents to human experience,  New Destinations, Spring (1976).

In this lecture, later published, Dr Marshak takes for her theme man's search for meaning in his life, and she makes her position clear at the start—that to live is to feel oneself lost—shipwrecked—and that it is only from the acceptance of a situation of desperation that one can begin to bring order into the chaos of one's life.

Human thought about meaning has always made use of symbols, imagery and mythology. Dr Marshak deplores, in the modern search for reality and facts, the current stripping away of the mystery which gives meaning.

The arts of all kinds reflect our spiritual bankruptcy. Dr Marshak expresses it neatly when she says she gets no kick out of looking at a large nut and bolt in the Tate gallery. In her opinion, artistic values are upside down, and the artist is venerated who colludes with the emotional vacuum of our time and gets caught up in the fascination of violence and barbarism. Attempts to meet the need for meaning are proliferating in educational courses self-consciously concerning themselves with studies in ‘self-actualisation’, but these things cannot be consciously sought because they are a paradox, and only he who is willing to lose himself can find himself.

A new symbol is needed and, in the shipwreck of our modern civilisation, Dr Marshak suggests that in this extremity what is called for is the emergence of the survivor, the man who clings to his human-ness above all.