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.
The writing Psyche, Self and Soul is in the first person: Gargiulo's personal, informal style exemplifies a refreshing, growing trend in contemporary psychoanalytic writing. While the author's arguments are intelligently, even passionately developed, the text leaves considerable room for the reader's imagination. In this respect Gargiulo's text becomes both performative and informative. Performative, inasmuch as it evokes in the reader the experience the author describes as deriving from apophasis which suggests denying or disclaiming. This style of discourse apparently was prevalent among Western mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, who influenced the author. Sells (1994) describes this form of discourse as a “language of unsaying.”
The text presented as here is also informative inasmuch as Gargiulo's narrative provides a generous sharing of information and experience, skillfully delivered in a manner that does not oversaturate psychic space. In these diverse ways, the text integrates important features that reflect the distinction between mystical and scientific models, which becomes apparent immediately. However, considering that his writing marks a culminating point of widely ranging ideas spanning 35 years, it is clear that Gargiulo is a pioneer. This becomes further evident in his forthright comments from the outset, such as the observations that psychoanalysis is an art and that psychoanalysts are born, not made.
While many themes are elaborated, one major theme centers on the lived and breathed relationship between psychoanalysis and the spirit. Gargiulo identifies the experiential emphasis of mystical traditions and of psychoanalysis as a major connecting point between these two “disciplines that attempt to explore internality” (p. xv). There has been much written on the relationship between psychoanalysis and spiritual disciplines, centering on the issue of internal awareness, as, for example, in discussions of how specific forms of Hindu and Buddhist meditatio