Summarizing The Desire for Mutual Recognition Introduction

Introduction

The introduction first seeks to capture briefly the core idea of the book: the conflict between the desire for loving human connection and "fear of the other" that colors the world that we are born into. The introduction then shifts to a focus on method, emphasizing that the book as a whole seeks to grasp the social world as a living psychospiritual field rather than as an "entity" outside of us that we study from a withdrawn space outside of lived experience itself. Then, the introduction seeks address concerns the reader may have with the words "spiritual" or "spirituality," clarifying that neither a religious use nor a "new age" private-seeker use of these terms is intended. Finally, the introduction emphasizes that the book as a whole is a work of social theory rather than psychology, and that what could be understood as merely psychological ideas are intended to describe the flow of large scale-social process emanating from each person toward all others in a circulating or rotating fashion. An example is then given of how to apply the thinking in this book to understanding a historical period like feudalism, contrasting a traditional Left or Marxist socio-economic perspective with the intersubjective, psycho-spiritual perspective that the book foregrounds. 

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