Plato's Silence: A Study in the Imagination by Eric Rhode

This is an extraordinary book. The author is unique in the world of psychoanalytic psychotherapy: he strides the landscape of psychoanalytic theory and of philosophy with equal felicity as though they are, for him, kindred, intimate domains. That he is capable of achieving inter-disciplinary thinking in these disciplines of such a high order is, as the title of the book suggests, a reflection of Rho's capacity for imaginative contemplation and, through this, the establishment of a mosaic of progressively deepening links in multiple directions. Paul Williams. Joint Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Paul Williams Preface PART I: ‘Shinto temples have no images within them. A mirror alone constitutes a symbol of the deity’ 1. ‘The soul writes and is written upon’: the destruction and re-creation of sequential time 2. Re-finding the theological dimension to numbers 3. Actuality as a "lighthouse dark between flashes" 4. Blindness, muteness, and spiritual inoperancy: the effects of functionalism 5. Discovering music: the movement of voices in another room 6. Soul as membrane and logic of traditional cosmology 7. The nature of intermittence 8. Preconceptions of the primal scene and Freud’s understanding of Cordelia’s silence PART II: ‘The intensification of a boundary idea’ 9. The paradigmatic nature of the sacrifice 10. Marks that appear on a plane surface and that transpire from the side that is imperceptible 11. Hypothesis in Plato 12. Without resemblance 13. The triple-eyed god and the triadic nature of the temple 14. Apocalypse as a presence in the great city 15. The shadow of a dome that floats midway on the waters PART III: The rebirth of the cosmos as· extension and duration 16. Feeling pain in a missing part of the body: Descartes and the phantom limb 17 Cézanne and the motif as phantom limb 18. ‘The pure fire which is within us flows through the eyes in a stream’: the horned lantern 19. The gnomon as a means of metaphysical ‘gazing’ 20. The granary-gnomon of the Western Sudan PART IV: The nature of the journey: generating the cosmos from night 21. An analogue for the journey of Adam's ribs through metamorphosis: the weaving and unweaving of day and night 22. The transformation of non-Being into logos 23. Sonority, reptiles, and the divine son 24. Parmenides and the cosmic orbit of the sun 25. The ‘psychology’ of conflagration: wheel of fire, pillar of fire and spatio-temporal transfiguration PART V: The tripartite nature of symbol formation 26. The gnomon-rib in transformation 27. Fixing the hours of the night: The gnomon in the cenotaph of Seti the First 28. The sun's portal: light touches the sacred mountain 29. Placenta and moon: the prince about whom no stories are told 30. ‘Men are not the authors of the magic books’: the differing status of celestial & terrestrial animals 31. Eye as cave of fire 32. The non-Euclidean space in which angels descend & ascend 33. Experience, paradigm, Plato's silence

About the Author :
Eric Rhode, formerly a writer on film, became a psychotherapist in private practice, now retired. He is the author of a number of books, including Psychotic Metaphysics, Plato's Silence: A Study in the Imagination, and Notes on the Aniconic: The Foundations of Psychology in Ontology.

Review :
‘Rhode pulls us deeply into the largest questions of existence and upwards into a coherence of thinking that enriches philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis, without our realising quite how far he has helped us to travel. This is an extraordinary book’ ‘Rhode pulls us deeply into the largest questions of existence and upwards into a coherence of thinking that enriches philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis, without our realising quite how far he has helped us to travel. This is an extraordinary book’ ‘Rhode pulls us deeply into the largest questions of existence and upwards into a coherence of thinking that enriches philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis, without our realising quite how far he has helped us to travel. This is an extraordinary book’ ‘Rhode pulls us deeply into the largest questions of existence and upwards into a coherence of thinking that enriches philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis, without our realising quite how far he has helped us to travel. This is an extraordinary book’