Preface & Acknowledgements
Self and Transcendence
Mythogene and Mythology
A Note on Gender
My Debt
With Gratitude
Introduction – The Away and Beyond is Right
Here and Now
The Deprivations of Interaction
The Two Realities
The Core of the Self
A Note on Method
1 The Fist and the Open Hand
The Vectors
Conceptual Analogies
The Dual Orbits
The Tantalus Ratio
Growth and Decline
2 The Sisyphean and the Tantalic – An Ontological
Personality Typology
Where are the Fixations Fixated?
Object and Self: The Crucial Dichotomy
The Other Dichotomies
Some Empirical Anchors
Square Bolts in Round Holes
The Hassidim
The Men
Entropy
3 Separant and Participant Cultures – The Social
Component of the Tantalus Ratio
Patterns of Culture and Social Character
Activist and Quietist Cultures
The Tantalus Ratio and Social Character
Ten Pairs of the Composite Polar Patterns
Tool and Symbol Orientations
Welfare State versus Social Traditionalism
Scientistic or Mystic
The Carnivores and the Downtrodden
Exaltation and Lethargy
Time and the Void
Achievement and Resignation
Homo Faber and Fatalism
Nobs and Snobs
Salvation and Utopia
4 Jews and Arabs – The Relationship between
Personality Types and Social Characters
Jews and Arabs: An Illustration
East is East and West is West
Change and Stagnation
Reality and Illusion
Power and “The Children of Death”
The Ecstasy and the Lethargy
“Haste is from the Devil”
The Driven and the Lazy
A Religion of Labour
Social Mobility
Dreams and Visions
The Extreme Poles of the Separant–Participant Continuum
Social Change and Social Character
Personality Type and Social Character
5 The Twenty-First Century Kulturkampf – Fundamentalist
Islam against Occidental Culture
A Frame of Reference
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
6 Interaction, Objectlessness and the Self-Continuum
Atzmi and Ani: The Two Faces of Man
The Poles and the Bridge
Some Dynamics of the Self
The Dialectics of the Tantalus Ratio
The Ani-Skewed Self
The Interactive Self
7 Self, Choice and Uniqueness
Developmental Forms of the Self
Core Dynamics
We are the Chosen
8 Man, Others and Things – The Phenomenology
of Interaction
Communion
In Search of Dialogue
The Oppressive Dyad
The Self and Others
9 The Isaac Syndrome
The Maternal Proscription of Incest
The Isaac Syndrome
Father against Son
The Rationalization of Sacrifice
Isaac and Christ
10 Rebellion and Yearning
Defiance
The Two Faces of Rebellion
The Search for Authenticity
Being with Fear and Anxiety
Creative Rebellion
The Quest
Notes
Index
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“This is the work of a man who has undergone a crisis, who in effect tells us that the crisis opened his eyes to scientific and human truth. Shoham is an adventurer among ideas and one takes pleasure in his mixture of daring generalization and empirical exactness.” Professor ben Ami Shaarfstein, author of A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant, reviewing the first edition in The Jerusalem Post
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