Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegger. This critique has had little practical effect on the development of technology and everyday technology use. I postulate reasons for this, which include that this critique regards technology in general rather than specific technologies, overlooking the multistability of any particular technology. I then discuss a different humanistic, phenomenological ground for technology critique from the position that human beings are at home with technology, meaning that technology does not threaten disembodiment or disengagement with any other important components of humanity. I draw inspiration primarily from Don Ihde’s and Marshall McLuhan’s phenomenological, descriptive works on the ways human beings are shaped and extended by technology. I end with a discussion of embodied experience in cyberspace which serves as a model for new humanistic, phenomenological techno-critiques.

This article posits that Andy Clark’s model of distributed cognition manifests socially through the agonism of human activity, and that rhetorical theory offers an understanding of human conflicts as productive and necessary elements of collective response to situation rather than as problems to be solved or noise to be eliminated. To support this assertion, the paper aligns Clark’s argument that cognition responds to situated environmental conditions with the classical concept of kairos, it associates Clark’s assertion that language structures behavior (Being There 195) with the long-held rhetorical stance that language is constitutive, and it examines the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an enactment of what Clark and rhetorical theorists claim about productive agonism and the litigious nature of identity and cognition.

In this article, the philosophical-anthropology of St. Thomas Aquinas is examined. In particular, the non-dualistic aspects of his anthropology are explicated and shown to have the potential to provide an underpinning for a holistic approach to psychology. In the course of this examination, parallels are drawn between Thomism and existential-phenomenology. The article concludes with an exploration of the ways in which a dialogue between existential-phenomenology and Thomism might benefit both traditions of thought, particularly as regards their relevance to metapsychology.

This essay examines the implications of Jacques Derrida’s complex engagement with negative theology for the field of psychotherapy. Negative (or apophatic) theology is a long tradition which emphasizes God’s absolute otherness. This essay explores Derrida’s attempt in The Gift of Death to translate this theological language into the language of human intersubjectivity. John Caputo, the most renowned American interpreter of Derrida’s writings on religion, calls for a “generalized apophatics,” an application of apophatic thought to fields outside of religion. Caputo bases his exhortation on Derrida’s assertion that “every other is wholly other.” This essay is a preliminary attempt to sketch the outline of an apophatic psychotherapy, with an emphasis on Derridean themes such as the impossible, the secret, and translation.

The psychological character of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf is explored by way of a detailed analysis of the novel’s comic genre. This reading of Steppenwolf contextualizes its celebrated portrayal of the crisis of modern life within a story of “healing” (Hesse, 1974, p. viii) informed by the comic vision of “faith, hope, and love in a fallen world” (Cowan, 1984, p. 9). The novel’s innovative sonata-like structure (Ziolkowski, 1965) and the extensive use of double perception, along with the employment of classic comic action, themes, and stock characters are discussed. In the work’s comic vision, the dichotomies (flesh/spirit, subject/object, inner/outer) that plague the Steppenwolf give way to humor and imagination as preferred responses to the soul’s alienation and homelessness.

Lionel Shriver’s novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin fictionalises the experience of motherhood through a sensational storyline relating the events that led a teenager, Kevin, on a killing spree. Faced with the malevolence of her child, the narrator, Eva explores her internal conflicts, as her son’s perceived evilness leads her to acknowledge her ambivalence towards motherhood. Through the novel, the essay investigates how the construction and destruction of identity is inherently linked to a limitative social framework. The main protagonists’ non-conformist ambition leads them to encounter the limits of social signification, initially translated into an obsessive dedication to the de(con)struction of authority and ultimately to choose social self-effacement over empowerment.

Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper I show how thinking from this more intimate process may transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition.

Descriptions of “aesthetic arrest,” those ecstatic moments that lift the common sense subject-object dichotomy, abound in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. These special experiences, found in both artistic and mystical accounts, arise from the daily life of ordinary perception. Such experiences enable the artist, philosopher, or mystic to overturn received categories and describe phenomena in a creative way; they become dangerous when treated as the sine qua non of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic arrest, though rare in consumer society, need not be overwhelmed by the flood of information and can still provide fresh glimpses into the world as lived.

Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist portrays a world inhabited by characters whose unified, other-proof subjectivity crumbles around them to reveal the basic fibres of the biological, organicist body as this is mutated across bodies and projected across images. Such sameness and connection are primarily played out in the language and the style used. The paper examines linguistic techniques such as the use of logical conjunction (e.g., and) and causal connectives, such as because, which instead of signaling causality, constantly rephrases the same as an expanded other, thus effectively subverting our common sense perceptions. In this context, the absence of representational means of identity resulting in the redefinition of Lauren’s subjectivity on a broader biological plane also reconciles her to the grief felt at her husband’s death.