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it. In some situations, a logical view contends with a more irrational, magical one.
Today, the morning group praying, evening hymn singing, Christian Republican
Right Wing feed their feelings of being on the side of God by dividing people into
those that are like them and good and those that President Bush and Attorney
General John Ashcroft calls the evil doing “bad guys.” As noted previously,
psychoanalytic theory posits that the evil doing others may represent the projected
repository of our own unacceptable impulses and inclinations. It became quite clear
in my own psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training that it is in healing our split
and knowledge of our own unacceptable things that will lead to our understanding
and forgiveness of others.
As we dig deeper into global brain-mind dynamics of emergent high-energy
fixation, stuck repetitiousness and splitting, we encounter their universality in the
structures of mathematical thought. Did we just make them fit? Do these thought
forms map onto internal and external physical reality? Are these abstract concepts
and operations simply products of our biological brains manifested as psychological
mechanics and used to explain to ourselves what we perceive and think? Does a
square have external reality or is it a universally imagined something, and, as such,
represented only in our minds and the pictures of it we draw? Is mathematical
understanding simply inborn perceptual skills combined with developed and
practiced logical cognition? Or, do we take the Platonic view of mathematical
relations: these abstractions are the ultimate realities, antedating and persisting
through the past, present and future of the universe and omnipresent.
Where can the conceptual boundary be drawn between the physical reality of
the Babylonian surveyors use of the Pythagorean theorem to calculate distances,
that the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two legs of a right triangle is equal
to the square of the length of its hypotenuse, and its abstract, pencil-marks-on-
paper, algebraic development as in the definition of Pythagorean numbers, a,b, and
c such that a*+ b*= c*. The dichotomy between the abstract and concrete,
consistently blurred in our work, is between a natural science with ideas that can be
disconfirmed, directly or indirectly, by experimental observation and the thinking of
mathematics as an a priori field in the sense of Kant. The modern Platonic view
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