Abstract

Reviews the book, Technology as symptom and dream by Robert D. Romanyshyn. This book is an empassioned call to reexamine the history of technology and to remember the desire that propelled it. Faced with the atom bomb and space flight, we can no longer ignore, Romanyshyn argues, the possibility of the final destruction of our planet. True to his vocation as a psychologist, Romanyshyn finds that the path toward preventing the suicide of mankind lies in re-examining, reflecting and retelling the story of our past and in understanding how it shapes our present and our future. He offers us a shift in perspective: maybe we have misunderstood what technology is all about. "Perhaps technology has been part of the earth's long history of coming to know itself, and perhaps in that effort we have been its servant. On a dry African plain, in the silence of the early morning, one can still imagine technology as vocation, as the earth's call to become its agent and instrument of awakening. But in the shadows imagination falters and technology seems less the earth's way of coming to know itself and more the earth's way of coming to cleanse itself of us". Romanyshyn's book is biased, but biased in a positive way: he refuses the detached view of the uninvolved observer. The book speaks with passionate insight for the abandoned body and the repressed soul. Informed by the phenomenological critique of the scientific attitude, Romanyshyn attempts to recover the cultural history of consciousness and the lived body. He weaves a fascinating story that resonates with profound echoes from the past. He challenges the reader's presuppositions and our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing space, body and self. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)