The Quest for Gaia: A Book of Changes by Kit Pedler (review)

70 Books influence of Martin Buber, whom Farber once invited to give three addresses on guilt, distance and relation, which were later published in the book entitled The Knowledge of Man. The third and most fascinating attraction of this book is that Farber, without any fanfare, breaks one of the last remaining taboos of clinical life. He recounts, without any sensationalism or 'confession as self-deceit', anecdotes of his training analysis under two of the most influential figures in psychiatry in the U.S.A., Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. He tells of his first encounter as a young therapist with Sullivan, his supervising analyst, as a way of exploring the concept of anxiety. Sullivan, acting like a Zen Master, ended the disastrous session saying: 'I would suggest that until our next appointment you try to imagine-mind you not say, imagine-how your young man might respond if you were to ask him what he imagined his mother's reaction would be to his saying, "Mother, since you insist you are so deeply attached to me, let us go to bed together and have it over with".' He tells of Fromm-Reichmann's inviting a schizophrenic , who had sat silent during their hour together, to masturbate; and Farber tells of his own misconceptions about free association during his early days in psychoanalysis. The shortcoming of the essays is that one must winnow the gems of uncommon wisdom from the bulk of very ordinary, even conservative, common sense. Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures by Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945. Donald P. Varene, ed. Yale Univ. Press, London, 1979. 304 pp. £16.50. Reviewed by Janet Daley' This is a collection of previously unpublished manuscripts that take one quite movingly, to the very day of Cassirer's death on which some of the material in the last entry was written. (Perhaps significantly, Cassirer recalls in that entry some of his earliest interests in philosophical issues and comments on his own previous hesitancy in publishing any definitive remarks on perception. ) It is ironic, and perhaps tragic, that Cassirer died just before many of the issues that had so concerned him were to be fully and interestingly ventilated by, for example, the later Wittgenstein , Ernst Gombrich and Noam Chomsky. He would also, no doubt, have found the descriptive metaphysics of Peter Strawson an interesting strand of post-Kantian critical philosophy . Cassirer's analysis of language (in his Language and Art lectures) stands at a historical brink, anticipating, to some extent, the innateness hypothesis of Chomskyian linguistics and hinting at Wittgenstein's interpretation of language as rule-following behaviour. His predilections as a Kantian lead him rightly to reject the notion of language as a 'copy' of things (which was Wittgenstein's early model of language-the 'picture theory of meaning'-in his Tractatus) and to see instead that it is a 'condition of our concepts of things'; that the schema of our construction of reality are implicit in language and that these schema are derived from self-evident propositions. Almost uncannily, Cassirer preempts some of Chomsky's most daring and sophisticated ideas about the relationship between language and thought (revealing, perhaps, the extent to which Chomsky himself is doing Kantian 'fieldwork'): The subject-predicate relation that, Cassirer says, is fundamental to propositional language provides the 'first clue in [the human] discovery of an "objective" world, of a world of empirical things with fixed and constant qualities'. The subject-predicate relation and the concept of linguistic universals are, indeed, for Chomsky, the basic constituents of the deep structure of language. In proceeding from Kant's epistemology to specific descriptions of the role of language, Cassirer was making a step that many of us now writing in this field feel to be crucial. If some of his comments on the logic of language seem rather naive, one can only remind oneself that he did not have the advantage of a further 30 years of 'Dept. of Design Research, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU, England. analytical philosophy of language. I find Cassirer's account of art as a system of symbols analogous to language, rather unsatisfying, perhaps because it...