The Body As Shadow

Although contemporaries, Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich, two giants in the field of psychoanalysis, never met. What might have happened if they had is the inspiration behind this detailed investigation. Jung and Reich succinctly outlines each man's personality and compares their lives and their work, emphasizing points of convergence between them. John Conger provocatively puts Jung's mystical and psychological approach to spiritual disciplines on the same plane as Reich's controversial theories of "genitality" and character armor. The result is a heady "what if?" bound to intrigue and inspire readers.

“The Body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard,” wrote Carl Jung, “and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing.” Through the symbolism of illness and physical symptoms, our bodies reflect the darkness and the light the shadow holds for us until we are ready to accept it. It is the shadow-face of our souls that holds the light and the darkness until we are strong enough to face and heal what we have previously denied or rejected about ourselves. Our bodies and their ailments are not our enemies, and neither are our shadows. The shadow reveal the negative ego patterns we had previously rejected or denied, through the messages of our illnesses, so we can recognize, forgive, and heal them. The shadow is the ally of our true self and the enemy of our negative egos.

"The Body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard," wrote Carl Jung, "and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing." Through the symbolism of illness and physical symptoms, our bodies reflect the darkness and the light the shadow holds for us until we are ready to accept it. It is the shadow-face of our souls that holds the light and the darkness until we are strong enough to face and heal what we have previously denied or rejected about ourselves. Our bodies and their ailments are not our enemies, and neither are our shadows. The shadow reveal the negative ego patterns we had previously rejected or denied, through the messages of our illnesses, so we can recognize, forgive, and heal them. The shadow is the ally of our true self and the enemy of our negative egos.

A meticulously observed and macabre tale of hell on earth from the revolutionary German author of the famous play Marat/Sade Peter Weiss’s first prose work, The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s stunning translation, Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of inert objects in a dismal boarding house—stones, buttons, hooks, needles, chairs, newspapers in an outhouse, clinking tin cups, celestial orbs, sewing machines, an overwound windup music box—which have oblique characters’ shadows as their supporting cast. Described by Weiss as a “micro-novel,” The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body can be obscene, trivial and brutal, and yet it is also peculiarly intimate and offers endless possibilities—like a telescope and kaleidoscope rolled into one.

Discusses the mythological properties assigned to geometric forms, and covers the Golden Section, gnomonic spirals, music, and the squaring of the circle.

Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow. Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.

Shadow and Substance is the first book to present a sustained examination of the relationship between Eucharistic controversy and English drama across the Reformation divide. In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Jay Zysk contends that the Eucharist is not just a devotional object or doctrinal crux, it also shapes a way of thinking about physical embodiment and textual interpretation in theological and dramatic contexts. Regardless of one’s specific religious identity, to speak of the Eucharist during that time was to speak of dynamic interactions between body and sign. In crossing periodic boundaries and revising familiar historical narratives, Shadow and Substance challenges the idea that the Protestant Reformation brings about a decisive shift from the flesh to the word, the theological to the poetic, and the sacred to the secular. The book also adds to studies of English drama and Reformation history by providing an account of how Eucharistic discourse informs understandings of semiotic representation in broader cultural domains. This bold study offers fresh, imaginative readings of theology, sermons, devotional books, and dramatic texts from a range of historical, literary, and religious perspectives. Each of the book’s chapters creates a dialogue between different strands of Eucharistic theology and different varieties of English drama. Spanning England’s long reformation, these plays—some religious in subject matter, others far more secular—reimagine semiotic struggles that stem from the controversies over Christ’s body at a time when these very concepts were undergoing significant rethinking in both religious and literary contexts. Shadow and Substance will have a wide appeal, especially to those interested in medieval and early modern drama and performance, literary theory, Reformation history, and literature and religion.

While working on a project translating letters from sixteenth-century Prague, high school senior Nora Kane discovers her best friend murdered with her boyfriend the apparent killer and is caught up in a dangerous web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all searching for a mysterious ancient device purported to allow direct communication with God.