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This book is an outgrowth of the ‘Facing Apocalypse’ Conference held at Salve Regina College in the USA in 1983. There are ten contributors, including two Jungian analysts, Wolfgang Giegerich and James Hillman. The purpose of the book is ‘to illuminate our obsession with world endings’, for the nuclear arsenals have brought to consciousness mankind's ancient images of the end. Mike Perlman, who has published several articles on archetypal psychology, has brought together various accounts of the Apocalypse from different cultures. The philosopher Norman O. Brown looks at Sura XVIII, from the Koran, which is quoted in full in his chapter and has been called the Apocalypse of Islam. He compares Sura XVIII to the ‘Book of Revelation’ and, interestingly, to Finnegan's Wake. David Miller, a theologian who was brought up in the Church of the Brethren which, along with other sects was subjected to oppression and persecution, points out how in this tradition there is often a sense of the imminence of the end.
Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry at New York School of Medicine, has an interesting chapter on the ‘Image of the end of the world’. He interviewed survivors of a small natural catastrophe, survivors from Hiroshima, and a number of schizophrenics and found their imagery surprisingly similar. He believes that it is the process of schizophrenia that is the key to grasping the dangers inherent in our end of world imagery. He points out that one of the characteristics of a schizophrenic is his inability to symbolise, and that like him we are in acute danger of a concrete acting out of our phantasies. This fear of the acting out of a phantasy of apocalypse is echoed throughout the book and becomes one of its most powerful and important themes.
There are three women writers: Joanna Macey, who writes about how, in her ‘Despair Workshops’, people are enabled to confront their numbness; Mary Watkins, a clinical psychologist, who emphasises the importance of moral imaginat