MINUS THE MORNING

Minus the Morning is concerned, primarily, with a primeval hunger for knowledge about the world -- a hunger that the author is happy to say has now been satiated by writing her PhD. THE KEY to my book is that it doesn't employ ego psychology.

This doesn't mean, by the way, that I lack an ego, or that I am unaware that ego psychology exists, and that it facilitates most of the social interactions in contemporary Western culture (although it doesn't appear to be quite as prominent an orientation in many African cultures).

I didn't write the book on that level of demonstrating ego. The book explores, rather, a kind of pre-oedipal psychology and psychological relations (as I have given hints concerning in the introduction). What I have done is ripped off the skin of ego, and shown you something very different -- another layer of psychological interactions going on underneath the surface of consciousness. This is a level of an interchange of psychological forces, across the boundaries of individual egos.

Therefore, in order to see causality in this book, you have to think not in terms of individual egos and their manner affecting each other, but in terms of dyadic (pairing) relationships, whereby one element of the dyad affects the other one directly but unspokenly (to be precise, unconsciously).

Once you start to think in these dyadic terms, you can see a lot of causality in terms of relationships and how they pan out. You can even start to decipher a narrative within the text. Unless one changes one's level of thinking, from an oedipal perspective to a pre-oedipal one, a narrative will be hard enough to read.

Mine is an experimental piece of writing -- I'd like to emphasise that point once and for all. It is far from the case that I deny that ego exists. Ego psychology is a great way to respond to the world, more often that not. We should proclaim our individual existence for all that it's worth!



It is important to note that being able to experience the world in non-egoistic terms if vital for our psychological health:  according to Anton Ehrenzweig, a lack of access to consciousness where the ego is de-differentiated signifies schizophrenia.