What ever happened to silence? Actually nothing, and Harry Wilmer takes great pains to show how we have submerged it under a toxic barrage of noise. Using both clinical examples of the power of silence from his case histories, and cultural values of silence, he uncovers a astonishing theme in the Japanese idea of MA as silence. Wilmer points out how silence gives meaning to words, dreams, thought, action and music. From his long experience as a Jungian analyst, he weaves his ideas into an eminently practical treatise on the phenomenology of silence. With many references to literature as well as his personal life experiences and crises, he offers a readable and important new story of the universal and spiritual significance of silence in a world of jackhammer noise.

This Symposium resulted from a linkage of interests of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Dental Research, and the Fogarty International Center. The Perinatal Biology and Infant Mortality Program of the NICHD sponsors investigations of pregnancy, maternal health, intrauterine growth and infant development. A major role is in the instigation and the support of research pertinent to the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The NIDR Section on Oral and Pharyngeal Development studies the infant performances of feeding, vocalization, and positioning, relating these to changes in local sensory resources. The FIC, through its Conference and Seminar Program, furthers international research pertinent to medicine. This conference of developmental anatomists and physiologists with clinicians concerned with the developmentally calendared entity of SIDS resulted in a productive and provocative exchange. We learned from each other and with each other. This volume is composed of chapters which were prepared after the conference, based in varying degree on the typescript of the spoken presentations. The questions and comments of the discussions were edited by the contributors and the responses by the chapter authors.

Therapists often encounter people who have suffered severe emotional damage resulting in feelings of psychological fragmentation. Sandplay therapy, which combines the physical actions of play with observation and understanding through the use of symbolism, can be a useful method of treating this kind of damage. This book focuses on the theoretical aspects of sandplay therapy, presenting Dora M. Kalff's ideas and drawing out the significance of Kalffian sandplay for therapists. Building on Kalffian ideas of the integration of Eastern and Western thought in relation to healing through sandplay, the author explores theories in quantum physics and Eastern philosophies. Her theoretical insights are illustrated with clinical examples, and her book will be of great interest to arts therapists and to students of related disciplines.

It’s Silence, Soundly, It’s Nothing, Seriously and It’s Absence, Presently, continue The ‘It’ Series published by Matador since The Book of It (2010). They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. In their aesthetic form the books are a decentred trilogy united together in a new concept of The Bibliograph. All three present this new aesthetic object, which transcends the narrow limits of the academic bibliography. The alphabetical works also share a tripartite structure and identical length. The Bibliograph itself is characterised by its strategic place within each book as a whole as well as by the complex variations in meaning of the dominant motifs – nothing/ness, absence and silence – which recur throughout the alphabetical entries that constitute the elements of each text. It’s Nothing, Seriously, for example, addresses the amusing paradox that so much continues to be written today about – nothing! The aleatory character of the entries in the texts encourage the modern reader to reflect on each theme and to read them in a new way. The reader is invited as well to examine their various inter-textual relations across given conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical & social reproduction.

Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye are two of Canada’s central cultural figures, colleagues and rivals whose careers unfolded in curious harmony even as their intellectual engagement was antagonistic. Poet, novelist, essayist and philosopher B.W. Powe, who studied with both of these formidable and influential intellectuals, presents an exploration of their lives and work in Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy. Powe considers the existence of a unique visionary tradition of Canadian humanism and argues that McLuhan and Frye represent fraught but complementary approaches to the study of literature and to the broader engagement with culture. Examining their eloquent but often acid responses to each other, Powe exposes the scholarly controversies and personal conflicts that erupted between them, and notably the great commonalities in their writing and biographies. Using interviews, letters, notebooks, and their published texts, Powe offers a new alchemy of their thought, in which he combines the philosophical hallmarks of McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” and Frye’s “the great code.”

This title was first published in 2001. Is there such a thing as "Tudor literature"? The question is the theme that binds the essays in this collection. Scholars from around the world address the question of whether there is a sense of continuity in the literature of the Tudor century. The volume begins by looking at early Tudor writers, such as Thomas More, and then moves on to look at Elizabethan poetry and prose, ending by covering the late Tudor dramas, and Shakespeare.