This book argues that a silent axis of the unconscious world rests largely undiscovered. It recasts foundational concepts in the psychology of Freud, Jung, Carol Gilligan and R.D. Laing, as well as in cognitive science, to highlight this hidden unconscious axis: primordial spaces of diametric and concentric structures. The author generates fresh approaches to understanding the philosophy of early Heidegger and Derrida, with the idea of cross-cultural diametric and concentric spaces fuelling a radical reinterpretation of early Heidegger's transcendental project, and challenging a postmodern consensus that reduces truths and experiences to mere socially constructed playthings of culture.
The book, which also examines projected structures in modernist art, suggests a systematic refashioning of many Western assumptions, but it is more than a deconstruction. It also attempts to offer a new interplay between structures and meaning, as a spatial phenomenology. This significant expansion of the boundaries of human subjectivity opens alternative pathways for imagining what it means to be human, in order to challenge the reduction of experience to instrumental reason.

Paul Downes is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University.

Contents: The Common Blind Spot - Cross-Cultural Projections of Concentric and Diametric Space Underlying: Repression, Attachment, Transitional Objects, Freud's Eros and Thanathos - The Central Archetype of Jung's Collective Unconscious - The Phenomenology of Psychosis - Gilligan's Ethic of Care - Yin/Yang - Modernist Art's Crisis of Meaning - Heidegger's Angst, Authenticity and Being-in-the-World - Derrida's Deconstruction and Cognitive Science.