If we want to take perspective reversal seriously, we have to revise some of the language we use. Rather than saying, for instance, I “had” a dream (or fantasy) we should say “I was in a dream”; similarly, when we describe our experience, we should say “in my dream I saw …”. In other words, we would speak about our dream experience as if it happened to us when we (metaphorically) went there...
I want to dwell a little longer on the belief in a “supernatural” kind of necessity. My guiding example throughout this series of postings has been Vertigo; and Vertigo shares this characteristic — which I have called an intimation of an inevitability — with other narratives of a certain design, including the “appointment in Samarra” and ancient tragedies such as that of Oedipus, where “[t]hings...
In my previous post I did not distinguish sufficiently between two lines of thought I introduced. One, the main topic of that post, was the element of recurrent death; the other (which I should have kept separate) that of inevitability. In my guiding example, the haunting experience in Vertigo, the intimation of an inevitability plays a significant role. In the first half of the film, we get a...
When I left off this line of thought in my previous post, I concluded that ghosts are a different sort of thing than persons. They are better seen as psychological patterns, appearing in a narrative around a personification. 3. Now all this talk about psychological “patterns” may sound a little vague. Patterns are forms or dynamics that occur repeatedly (and recognizably so). But whether we see a...
When I was in my late teens, I became haunted by a ghost. The experience was sudden and hit me unexpectedly. After a while, it faded away. But then it popped up again irregularly over the course of several years: whenever that happened, it was suddenly entirely present in bright, nuanced images and invariably gave me shudders of a peculiar and very intense quality. To this day, I’m not entirely...
In my previous post, I have contrasted interactions that run in the person-world direction (actions and behavior) with those that run in the world-person direction (perceptions); and I have noted that interactions of both kinds can be taken over by unconscious forces: behavior can be disrupted or hijacked, and similarly (though perhaps more rarely) so can perceptions. Synchronicities can be seen...
In our lived experience we navigate both an external world of objects and a subjective stream of psychological states. This is how the surface of reality presents itself to us. But both the external world of objects and the subjective stream of psychological states have a certain depth to them: they exhibit recurring patterns.
Today’s notion of “narcissism” as self-love, i.e. a conscious exclusion of any other as love object would fit, strictly speaking, the ancient Narcissus not after, but before gazing into the mirror.
In case in which coincidences are explainable by someone’s (hidden agenda), the sense of “meaningfuless” vanishes, and thus we no longer see them as synchronistic. Such cases are often described using the phrase “not a coincidence”.
What is the implication when we say, of a coincidence, that it is “just” a coincidence?
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.