You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book originated as a psychology dissertation at the University of Dallas where, for a short time in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there existed a complex and fertile intersection between phenomenological and archetypal psychology. Using the phenomenological method, Kugelmann examines in detail the clinical ‘facts’ known about primary glaucoma, one of the most common diseases of the eye, in an attempt to uncover the imaginal patterns informing the clinician's view of the disease and the patient's experience of it, as well as the concrete disease itself.
The first and perhaps most important point Kugelmann makes is that the human body is not a ‘thing’ or an ‘object’ (in the sense of unensouled matter), but, rather, a lived experience. However, this lived experience of the body has often been shrouded by medical and scientific language which speaks about the body as if it were an object, a lifeless cadaver, separated from human subjectivity and the soul. The first part of the book, called ‘Praxis: imaginal anatomy and imaginal physiology’, takes on the extremely difficult and important task of demonstrating the extent to which the various imaginations of the eye living in our subjectivity and the mythic images embedded in our medical language (e.g. Kore—cornea; Pupilla—pupil; Glaucus—glaucoma; etc.) affect the accuracy of our clinical studies of the ‘objective’ eye and its pathology. Kugelmann describes this dilemma, writing: ‘Our theoretical nets blanket the world, illuminating it with the light of reason…. The nets of our dreams, like those of our theories, are continually broken through when we subsequently wake up’ (p. 56). The Windows of Soul is a prolonged attempt to awaken the reader to the metaphorical and experiential dimensions of primary glaucoma. The book presents a wealth of historical, medical, mythical, personal, and etymological evidence to support his position that an imaginal element is at work in the perception, clinical description and persona