A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer — the first and most famous of his books — was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences. Completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today, The True Believer is a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.
Eric Hoffer was an American social writer and philosopher. He produced ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 by President of the United States Ronald Reagan. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005.
Early life
Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1902 (or possibly 1898), the son of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, immigrants from Alsace. By the age of five, he could read in both German and English. When he was age five, his mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms. Hoffer went blind for unknown medical reasons two years later, but later in life he said he thought it might have been due to trauma. (“I lost my sight at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall.I lost my sight and for a time my memory”). After his mother’s death he was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German woman named Martha. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was 15. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could. His eyesight remained, and Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading.
Hoffer was a young man when his father, a cabinetmaker, died. The cabinetmaker’s union paid for the funeral and gave Hoffer a little over three hundred dollars. Sensing that warm Los Angeles was the best place for a poor man, Hoffer took a bus there in 1920. He spent the next 10 years on Los Angeles’ skid row, reading, occasionally writing, and working odd jobs. On one such job, selling oranges door-to-door, he discovered he was a natural salesman and could easily make good money. Uncomfortable with this discovery, he quit after one day.
In 1931, he attempted suicide by drinking a solution of oxalic acid, but the attempt failed as he could not bring himself to swallow the poison. The experience gave him a new determination to live adventurously. It was then he left skid row and became a migrant worker. Following the harvests along the length of California, he collected library cards for each town near the fields where he worked and, living by preference, “between the books and the brothels.” A seminal event for Hoffer occurred in the mountains where he had gone in search of gold. Snowed in for the winter, he read the Essays by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s book impressed Hoffer deeply, and he often made reference to its importance for him. He also developed a great respect for America’s underclass, which, he declared, was “lumpy with talent.”
Longshoreman
Hoffer was in San Francisco by 1941. He attempted to enlist in the Armed forces there in 1942 but was rejected because of a hernia. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, he found ample opportunity as a longshoreman on the docks of The Embarcadero. It was there he felt at home and finally settled down. He continued reading voraciously and soon began to write while earning a living loading and unloading ships. He continued this work until he retired at age 65.
Hoffer considered his best work to be The True Believer, a landmark explanation of fanaticism and mass movements. The Ordeal of Change is also a literary favorite. In 1970 he endowed the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize for students, faculty, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hoffer was a charismatic individual and persuasive public speaker, but said that he didn’t really care about people. Despite authoring 10 books and a newspaper column, in retirement Hoffer continued his robust life of the mind, thinking and writing alone, in an apartment.
In American Gnosis, Arthur Versluis explores the fascinating connection between the Gnostic tradition and contemporary American spirituality, politics, and popular media. Versluis surveys themes of Gnosticism and gnosis in American culture, both within the United States and in global contexts. Versluis shows that gnosis is key to understanding a wide spectrum of global syncretic religious and intellectual movements — some sensational, even wild, but all fascinating. American Gnosticism, he argues, is a defining feature of hybrid new religious forms in the twenty-first century.
C. G. Jung and the Dead: Visions, Active Imagination and the Unconscious Terrain offers an in-depth look at Jung’s encounters with the dead, moving beyond a symbolic understanding to consider these figures a literal presence in the psyche. Stephani L. Stephens explores Jung’s personal experiences, demonstrating his skill at visioning in all its forms as well as detailing the nature of the dead.
Why did the Roman Church wage a centuries-long campaign to destroy Classical culture and all previous spiritual traditions? What was the secret at the heart of these traditions that was so powerful that an organization would feel justified in torturing and murdering men, women, and children; in burning Christian gospels, Gnostic texts, Jewish texts, Arabic manuscripts; and in destroying temples, monasteries, sanctuaries, Mystery Schools and academies of higher learning?
Hoffman develops the notion of Lamed Vav consciousness—a powerful, inborn force for kindness that exists within each of us. He provides guided visualizations to call forth our Lamed Vav consciousness by drawing on themes from sacred texts like the Zohar and Jewish folklore, such as Miriam’s Well, Solomon’s Ring, and the Tree of Life. He also shares self-reflection exercises to help us recognize hidden Lamed Vav figures in our daily life and become a Lamed Vav to others by boosting our compassion, empathy, simplicity, playfulness, reverence for nature, and joy.
On May 16th, 2026, we have a New Moon at 25° Taurus.
The New Moon is conjunct Mercury at 28° Taurus and Uranus, now freshly at 1° Gemini.
This is an out-of-sign conjunction New Moon that captures the exact moment when the long Taurus sleep begins to give way to the Gemini awakening.
At 25° Taurus, we are deep inside Taurus territory. This is the fixed, grounded, natural intelligence that knows when to stay still in order to absorb nutrients and consolidate growth.
We don’t hurry here.
We take our time because we understand that certain things need to be protected, nourished, and given enough time to develop if they are to stand any chance of survival.
Uranus in Gemini is the antithetical energy – it’s the lightning bolt that snaps us out of inertia and invites us to move, to take the first step (1° Gemini).
This marriage between the stillness of Taurus and the sudden jolt of movement of Uranus in Gemini is illustrated in the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty.
The Sleeping Beauty
A brief summary of the fairy tale, in case you want to refresh your memory.
A king and queen host a grand christening for their long-awaited newborn daughter. They invite the kingdom’s good fairies to bestow magical gifts upon the child.
An old, forgotten fairy crashes the celebration and places a curse on the princess: on her 16th birthday, she will prick her finger and fall into a deep 100-year sleep.
The prophecy comes to pass. The princess pricks her finger and falls into a deep sleep. The whole kingdom falls asleep with her, and the castle becomes surrounded by thick thorns that keep the outside world away.
When the 100 years have passed – the prince arrives, kisses Sleeping Beauty, and she awakens. And with her, the entire kingdom awakens as well.
The key thing to understand is that the 100-year sleep is not simply a frozen moment in time. It is not time wasted.
It is a symbol for the sacred gestation and unconscious development – the invisible work of roots growing in the dark, of form taking shape beneath the surface, before it is ready to meet the light.
Similarly, when something new is being born within us, or when the outer world becomes too overwhelming, the psyche naturally withdraws its energy inward in order to process the transition.
This inner process cannot be rushed. Taurus, the fixed earth sign of the zodiac, is that heavy, dense, protective matrix – the “hedge of thorns” where the soul must remain in undisturbed stillness.
During this sleep, nothing looks like it is happening on the outside, but underneath, organic gestation is taking place. This is Taurus building the literal physical and emotional substance required to sustain the next phase of life.
The princess needed the long sleep just as every one of us, when we reach the Taurus developmental stage – or Taurus phases in our life – needs to sit with something long enough for it to take root and acquire substance.
But Taurus eventually leads to Gemini, the sign of movement.
The New Moon in Taurus conjunct Uranus, now in Gemini, the next sign in the developmental sequence of individuation – is the sudden, electric shock of the kiss that instantly disrupts the 100-year stillness.
The moment the princess opens her eyes, the entire kingdom awakens with her. The silent, frozen castle is suddenly filled with movement, conversation, and activity.
This marks the transition from Taurus – immobility, silence, the patience of the earth – to Gemini: reanimation, movement, connection, and cross-pollination.
New Moon In Taurus – Sun Conjunct Moon
A New Moon is that part in the lunar cycle when the Sun and Moon come together – when the conscious and unconscious meet in the dark, before the new light begins.
The Prince and Sleeping Beauty are not separate people; they are 2 complementary parts of our own psyche.
The Prince (Sun/Animus) represents the masculine principle of will, courage, and discrimination. He arrives exactly when the 100 years are up – meaning the inner work is complete.
The Princess (Moon/Anima) represents the feminine principle of intuition, feeling, and unconscious wisdom.
The Kiss (Conjunctio/Sacred Marriage) is the ultimate Jungian goal of Individuation. When the conscious mind (Prince) bravely descends into the unconscious and embraces the soul (the Princess), the period of stillness comes to an end and a new chapter begins.
Both the princess and the prince – the Sun and the Moon – participate equally in this process. This is not a story of rescue. The prince does not save the princess.
The real work has already taken place during the sleep.
The 100-year sleep is a metaphor for the long, slow process of inner alchemy and psychological maturation, when we allow the deeper layers of our psyche to do their root-level work.
Nothing in the outside world can happen if we skip the Taurus stage.
The prince doesn’t arrive by chance – he is the natural consequence of staying in that sleep, in that introspective depth, long enough for the process to complete itself.
New Moon In Taurus – The Beauty Of The Sleep
The New Moon in Taurus reminds us we can’t rush life into life.
At the same time, the New Moon in late Taurus suggests that we are getting close to the edge of the hedge – to the end of the incubation period, and that the awakening is just around the corner.
The invitation of this New Moon in Taurus is not to rush the process – this is still a Taurus lunation. It’s to stay there long enough until the message, the insight, has no choice but to reveal itself.
Many of our struggles – especially in a world of constant connectivity, nonstop stimulation, and instant gratification – come from trying to jump too quickly to Gemini.
We want THE insight, and we want it now. We watch the 30-second reel instead of sitting with a single thought for an hour with no distractions.
We chase the next fleeting insight that will reveal the ‘secret formula’ we hope is the answer to our restlessness, our confusion, our longing for direction – when in truth, the answer can only emerge through the process of sitting with the question long enough.
At a larger level, this Sleeping Beauty New Moon in Taurus speaks of the redeeming quality that beauty and love – when awakened – have on everything around us.
When the Beauty (Venus) awakens, the whole world awakens with her.
When we live from beauty and love, the world has no choice but to respond in kind.
Merlin Holland has spent decades dismantling the myths that grew up around his grandfather. He hopes his new book may finally settle the record.
“So much after his death was invented one way or another,” Merlin Holland says of his grandfather, Oscar Wilde. Credit…Clara Watt for The New York Times
By Elizabeth Winkler
April 10, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
On the evening of Nov. 30, 1994, Merlin Holland sat in a dim side aisle of the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Paris church where, in 1900, Oscar Wilde had been given a quiet, almost clandestine funeral. Holland had spent the day tracing his grandfather’s final, penniless years in exile for a BBC documentary, and it had disturbed him. That evening, several dozen candles were already burning at the entrance to the chapel, far more than on his previous visits. Working out the day, he realized it was the anniversary of his grandfather’s death.
The fans had remembered; he hadn’t. He sat there with his unlit candle, resenting what felt like the intrusion of strangers on a private moment.
Then something shifted. “Blood and history flowed together,” he writes in a new book, “and I found myself the unwilling conduit for a century of unwept family grief”: for Wilde’s two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, who were raised to forget him; for his wife, Constance, who stood by him through scandal and imprisonment for “gross indecency,” dying within a year of his release; and for Wilde himself, who never saw his family again after prison.
“For the first time,” Holland wrote, “I felt it was part of me, not just cold, bare facts from the past.”
The book, “After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal” (Europa Editions), charts Wilde’s posthumous reputation, but it’s really an investigation into how scandal reverberates, how narratives calcify, how erasure operates. What do we inherit when we inherit shame? And what does it mean to spend your life as both custodian and captive of someone else’s legend?
“He caused more trouble after his death than he ever did alive,” Holland said by Zoom from his home in France. “In spite of himself.”
The book (which came out in the U.S. on April 7) was published in Britain last fall. In a roundup of 2025 books of the year, the Times Literary Supplement called it “not only a fascinating work of family history that induces sorrow and anger,” but also “a highly detailed and extremely valuable refutation of the many fabrications about Wilde that have been unquestioningly repeated by generations of biographers.”
It is, Holland said, the book he has spent his writing life working toward.
As literary executor, he has for 40 years been the family’s chief authority on Wilde: coediting the complete letters, publishing the first uncensored transcript of the 1895 libel trial that eventually led to his imprisonment, creating an illustrated pictorial biography.
“After Oscar” is something different: not an edition or a scholarly apparatus but a 700-page reckoning — with the myths, the distortions, the family damage and his own complicated place in the story.
Among the artifacts that Holland keeps at home are his grandfather’s shirt and a pillow showing him at his flamboyant best.Credit…Clara Watt for The New York Times
Holland was born in 1945, into a family that had spent half a century not saying Oscar Wilde’s name. Where his grandfather was theatrical, Holland, now 81, is the opposite: composed and understated. The flamboyance didn’t travel — whatever Wilde passed down, it was not the fur coats or the green carnations.
As a boy, walking down Shaftesbury Avenue with his father, Holland spotted a billboard advertising a musical based on one of Wilde’s plays.
“Was Oscar Wilde your father?” he asked. His father recorded the exchange in his diary: “Fortunately I said ‘yes.’ Fortunately, he left it at that.”
Later, at school, a classmate called Wilde “an old poofter.” Holland thumped him, was hauled before a prefect, and caned.
Still, he doesn’t like to call himself Oscar Wilde’s grandson. “That gives me more importance than I’m due,” he said. “He is the important one in this whole story.”
The ‘second tragedy’
In 1895, Oscar Wilde was the most celebrated wit in London, the author of a string of hit comedies as well as the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” He was also conducting a flagrant love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.
Wilde’s ill-conceived decision to sue Douglas’s father for calling him a “sodomite” backfired, and led to a trial of his own. Convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labor, he stood in handcuffs on a rain-soaked train platform while a crowd jeered and spat at him.
His plays were pulled from the West End. His wife took their sons abroad and changed their surname to Holland, an old family name on her side. They never changed it back.
“There’s an element of hubris, of pride — of thinking he’s above the law, that society thinks he’s wonderful,” Holland reflected. “And there’s an element of wanting to please this young man who he loves.”
But Wilde didn’t know it would be the end of his creative life. Holland reached for a line from “De Profundis,” the letter Wilde wrote to Douglas from prison, in which he describes his art as the great passion of his life. Had he anticipated the consequences, Holland said, he never would have walked into that courtroom.
Wilde was released in 1897, crossing immediately to France. He hoped to be reunited with Constance and their sons — but her family couldn’t stomach taking back a convict and known homosexual.
“It was the second tragedy,” Holland said. Wilde never saw his sons again.
Bankrupt and broken, Wilde died at 46 of cerebral meningitis. For decades, biographers promoted a theory that he had died of syphilis, fitting the narrative of a life destroyed by sexual transgression. Holland has spent years dismantling it. “There’s absolutely no evidence for it at all,” he said.
The myth was typical: gossip hardening into biography, biography hardening into fact. “So much after his death was invented one way or another,” Holland said. “I felt I needed to give him a posthumous voice. There was always a sense of the injustice of people using him for their own ends — to sell books, to sensationalize. It needed a little bit of family help to set things right.”
Matthew Sturgis, the author of a full-bore, 800-page Wilde biography, praised Holland for his way with detail. “The points are often small — friendships denied, acquaintanceship overemphasized, gifts and bon-mots invented — but they have a cumulative force,” he wrote by email.
Wilde’s sons responded to their inheritance differently. Cyril was determined “to wipe that stain away,” as he put it, by being unimpeachably masculine. Rejected by the Navy likely because of his paternity, he became a soldier and was killed on the Western Front in 1915, at 30. Vyvyan, Holland’s father, wanted to go to Oxford — Wilde’s university — but the family vetoed it, fearing the connection would be made.
A newspaper placard announces the marriage of Merlin Holland’s father, Vyvyan.Credit…via Merlin Holland
He went to Cambridge instead, where his entry in the college admissions register was the only one without a father’s name: “Father deceased.” He drifted for years before finding his footing as a translator, man of letters and collector of erotic literature. “Vyvyan’s almost overstated heterosexuality was his way of trying to right the family wrong,” Holland said.
Vyvyan eventually wrote a memoir, “Son of Oscar Wilde,” which his son spent years fact-checking, discovering false memories and embellishments.
“I take down ‘Son of Oscar Wilde’ from the bookshelf, and see the inscription ‘For Merlin with fondest love from his Daddy September 1954,’ ” Holland writes, “and I feel a jolt of perfidy at what I’m doing though I know it has to be right.”
When Holland turned 21, his father suggested he take back the Wilde name. “He was asking me to do something by proxy. Something he would have liked to have done himself but couldn’t.” Holland demurred.
“One can’t change history,” he said. “It’s not going to make my father’s childhood any happier. The fact that the family never changed it back is a permanent rebuke to Victorian morality.”
Vyvyan died in 1967, two months before homosexuality was decriminalized in England. His wife, Thelma, went on a crusade to sanitize the family image, visiting the biographerRichard Ellmann to insist Wilde had been “basically heterosexual” and excising pages from Vyvyan’s 19-volume diary with a razor blade. (She didn’t end up persuading the scholar.)
“She felt it was her duty to protect us,” Holland said. “It’s sad, it’s funny, but it’s understandable.” She still visits him in dreams, he said, in full argumentative flow about his grandfather: “It’s all part of the collateral damage of what happened all those years ago.”
‘Monkey in a cage’
At a 1980 production of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in a borough of London, the mayor’s wife turned to Holland and said: “You must be so proud of your grandfather.” But pride was not quite what he felt.
“I had plenty of other feelings about him,” he writes. “Admiration, envy even, for his remarkable facility with words; bewilderment sometimes tinged with anger at the recklessness which destroyed his family’s life as well as his own; and a curious, almost possessive sense of protection about this man whom I had never known; but pride?”
Holland at home, with a painting of his father behind him.Credit…Clara Watt for The New York Times
It took decades. Holland wrangled French authorities to protect Wilde’s tomb at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, where fans pressed lipstick kisses into the stone, layering tribute on top of tribute until the stone itself needed protecting.
And he participated in Moscow’s first Pride celebration, where neo-fascists disrupted his lecture on his grandfather and he was pelted with eggs and potatoes in the streets. He thought of Wilde being spat on in the rain.
The inheritance stopped feeling like a burden and started feeling like a choice. He is still asked what it’s like to be Oscar Wilde’s grandson.
“It’s like being a monkey in a cage,” Holland said. “Once I had found the way out of that cage, and could stand with the rest of the spectators — that was one of the great ghosts laid to rest. If I have to be in the cage occasionally, I don’t mind. But I’ve got the key to let myself out.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 10, 2026, Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Profile / Merlin Holland. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
The TaurusNew Moon of Saturday, May 16th, at 25° and taking place at 1:00 PM PT, is quite an interesting one, with a depth of reckoning leading to transpersonal transformation. This is mainly due to an extremely powerful placement of Chiron, the Wounded Healer, combined with an Out of Bounds Moon and outer planet interactions between Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The potent New Moon also features Saturn and Uranus in combination, Neptune at the midpoint of Uranus and Pluto, and a strongly placed Mercury in semi-sextile with an Out of Bounds Venus – in mutual reception – also tied to Sun, Moon, and Mars. That’s a lot to unpack, and leads in the direction of inner work that may be more to the point, as far as where we might want to be striving to put our energy, than any outer world consideration or attempted solution, at least in this particular timing.
It does seem true at the moment that real world problems, while looming, are just going around in circles, so that what we think and feel – and what troubles us – might be more productively addressed within the depths of our psyche. We might remember, along with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that “Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And the kind of depth research that empowers us from the inside out is what the planets seem to be calling for now, as well.
To begin with, there is the overriding combination of transpersonal archetypes in which the 20th century modern outer planets are involved, all three, with consequences for our ultimate individual progress. This would be by means of in-depth evolution along the lines intended by our innermost soul purpose – or we could say our dharma. We find Uranus, newly re-entered into Gemini, lying near the 1° mark, in a four-degree trine with Pluto at 5 1/2° of Aquarius, with their midpoint of 3° 19’ Aries, which is where we find Neptune, within 20’ or so, at 3° 43’ Aries. This is of cosmic consequence over the coming thirty days to mid-June and gets stronger thereafter. Pluto is moving in retrograde, now, toward a closer trine, as Uranus gets closer too, by moving forward. This is a lot of detail, for which I apologize, and the gist of it is that these intense planetary combinations get stronger through the coming weeks leading to the summer months of July and August. I do fear that it will be a rather stressful 250th birthday for the US.
The Chiron configuration in this New Moon is also rather dramatic; and its exaggerated potency now speaks to the unending pain of the international situation, unbearably stuck on suffering, as the Iran war drags on with no end in sight while we have the global economy remaining ever more its victim. We find Chiron at 28° 24’ Aries, with Mars, Aries’ ruler, at the very same degree and minute, and the two in partile (same degree) semi-sextile with Mercury, plus sextile Venus as well. This is a powerful planetary alignment indicating quite a lot of strain on our mental faculties, as we both confront our own inner wounding and try to make sense of the outer situation in which we find ourselves. This does involve our initiative (Mars) and our relationships (Venus). On an individual level also, the stress is growing, and with the ratcheting-up pressure we are all being tested. We must try to find a way to rise above. When we include the Out of Bounds Moon and Venus, this is a heavy and uncertain planetary stew, crying out for a better way of seeing the world around us, and ourselves internally. These inner realms are where we can yet somehow make progress, remembering that it’s what we do with what we’ve got (or get handed to us) that counts. By seeking results inside, at least there we are tackling a field of activity where we have something that we can concretely do for ourselves. The recipe is to find and accept internal complexes that might be plaguing us and reach down with the loving and grounded recognition that we are inevitably scarred by whatever occurred in our childhood to create the original wound. We can make huge long-term progress by thoughtful acknowledgement of everything, together with our faith in the universe to see us through.
There is also quite a bit of intuitional mental perception now, through the close parallel declination and conjunction Mercury makes with Uranus. Mercury and Uranus are in a 3-degree conjunction and there, Jupiter is also involved, septile to each, and exact to their midpoint. Saturn, too, comes into this, making an additional septile to Uranus and a bi-septile to Jupiter. This is another heady stew, with optimism and yet with the limitations of Saturn slowing things down, including even our thoughts, and providing startling lessons when we can open our inner gaze to see them.
All in all, we are over these next few months truly in for it. And yet, we can continue somehow to have faith and to carry on. Astrology after all gives us the confident understanding that this all according to some kind of larger plan that applies to our long-term continuing evolutionary journey into greater authenticity – as we go. Therefore, we do what we can in this regard. In spite of everything, we may be able to trust in the ability of the universe to guide us through. We could perhaps align ourselves with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom I like to quote, and who wrote some two centuries ago:
Let us then be up and doing With a heart for any fate. Still achieving, still pursuing. Learn to labor, and to wait.
(Image from mooncalendar.astro-seek.com)
Chart for the New Moon on May 16, 2026
Dates given for astrological events are based on U.S. Pacific Time. Add or subtract hours as appropriate for your actual time zone; for example, East Coast, add 3 hours; Western Europe add 8 or 9.
San Francisco Symphony Premiered Apr 4, 2020 Almost a hundred years ago, Igor Stravinsky shocked the Western world with his ballet score, The Rite of Spring, a highly charged and confrontational piece. Michael Tilson Thomas goes behind the scenes in St. Petersburg and Paris to discover the spirit in which it was written and the drama of the opening night that shook the music world to its foundations. Bonus Features: Full-length concert performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and music from The Firebird by the San Francisco Symphony originally filmed in high-definition 16:9 widescreen and 5.1 surround sound.
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims.
In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context.
Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims’ own words as well as those from classic literary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.
Judith Lewis Herman is an author, psychiatrist, researcher, and teacher whose work has dealt with understanding and treating the effects of traumatic stress and incest.
MZ: Can there be being without consciousness of it?
ChatGPT: Yes — at least most philosophical traditions would say there can be being without consciousness of it. But the question opens one of the deepest divisions in philosophy.
At the ordinary level, it seems obvious:
mountains existed before humans,
stars burned before life evolved,
your liver functions while you sleep,
other people continue existing when you stop thinking about them.
So being appears to exceed consciousness.
But some philosophers have challenged that assumption.
For example, George Berkeley argued that existence is inseparable from perception:
esse est percipi — “to be is to be perceived.”
He resolved the problem by saying everything is continuously perceived by God.
Later, phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl asked a subtler question:
We can talk about “being without consciousness,” but can we ever know being except as it appears within consciousness?
That shifts the issue from:
whether reality exists independently, to:
whether independent reality can ever be accessed outside experience.
Then thinkers like Martin Heidegger distinguished between:
particular beings (objects), and
Being itself — the mysterious fact that anything exists at all.
For Heidegger, humans are the beings for whom Being becomes a question. Consciousness doesn’t necessarily create being, but it opens a clearing in which being can appear.
There’s also a mystical side to your question.
Some traditions suggest:
consciousness is not a property inside beings,
rather, beings arise within consciousness.
Certain forms of:
Vedanta,
Buddhism,
idealism,
and mysticism move in this direction.
Others argue the opposite:
consciousness is a late evolutionary product emerging from unconscious matter.
So the debate becomes:
Is consciousness inside the universe, or is the universe inside consciousness?
Your question touches the exact fault line between:
materialism,
idealism,
phenomenology,
and mysticism.
And there’s another twist: Even if being exists without consciousness, can “being” as a concept even arise without some conscious entity asking the question?
That may be why the problem never fully goes away.
Pierre de Maere Apr 15, 2026 Ecouter le titre : https://PierreDeMaere.lnk.to/jepensea… En concert à l’AB (Bruxelles) et à L’Olympia (Paris) : https://pierredemaere.lnk.to/Bruxelle… En tournée : https://pierredemaere.lnk.to/tour Réalisatrice : Edie Blanchard Concept et direction artistique : Jack Rexhausen Production : HK Corp Productrice : Nora Mimoun Producteurs exécutifs : Baptiste Farinazzo Producteur Octopods Belgique : Benjamin Honoré Directrice de production : Astrid Issaverdens Régisseur général : Florent Mola Régisseurs : Corrado Matta Mascia, Gael Marion 1ère assistante réalisation : Louise Blachère 2e assistant réalisation : Gaspard Magain Directeur de la photographie : Gwendal Peron 1er assistant caméra : Romain Roobaert 2e assistant caméra : Thomas Schohier Chef machiniste : Jim Goosens Machiniste : Arnaud Berghmans Steadicam : Charly Vandedrinck Chef électricien : Theo Fernandez Électriciens : Syméon Verbeke, Axel Meernout Stagiaires électricité : Maxime Husson, Lou Lange Lagadec, Tadéo Knockaert Cheffe décoratrice : Vanessa Van De Werve Assistant décor : Baptiste Rinaldi Stylisme figurants & rôles : Sarah Josis Styliste : Jonathan Hayden Habilleur : Pol Fasy Chef coiffeur : Christian Degeynst Chef maquilleuse : Maeli Daubioul Hair & Make-up (Pierre de Maere) : Fabien Giambona Chorégraphe : Chiara Corbetta Chef monteur : Jérémie Brivet Etalonnage : Inès Henry-Manceau Casting / Interprétation : Justine Cascaro Alexia Lobo Thibaut Woitrin Arsène Woitrin Gwendal Schroeder Prunelle Irène NHGB Zhu Wenjen Dimitri Carême Isabella Ciaccia Angélique Sangermano Ivan De Saedeleer Marie-Anne Eloy Jean-Claude Van Houten Corinne Olix Jacqueline Planche Emilie Debroux Francesco Capacci Noah Flabat-Chantrain Wendy Derwidué Théa De Boeck Musiciens : Batterie : Olympia Boyle Guitare : Gaston Falisse Clavier : Maximilien Vizzini Basse : Thibaut Woitrin Remerciements : Bvlgari Fursac, Paul Smith, Prada Je pense à vous Composition : Pierre de Maere, Xavier de Maere, Jean Castel Texte : Pierre de Maere, Elodie Charmensat Guitare : Benjamin Porraz Basse : Vincent Degosse Claviers : Alexis Croisé Enregistré par Xavier de Maere Mixé par Xavier de Maere Produit par Pierre de Maere, Xavier de Maere, Jean Castel Mastering: Remy Lebbos (P) & (C) Wagram Music – Cinq7. Editions : Wagram Publishing.
TranslationEnglish
I’m thinking of you
I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you All guys and girls my age Look at me like I’m raging I’ll play with or without you Oh, I don’t care I envision all your pretty faces It puts me in a strange state I don’t need anything at all It’s between me and me I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you I don’t need anything But my six-shooter I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you Life, fire, blood I control it all I’m the idol and the fanboy There’s no role I just can’t play I have a knack for disguises Deep down I have a hand in details I choose the rhythm and movements All guys and girls my age Look at me like I’m raging People say I’m crazy And that it’ll pass I’ve got a fever all over It burns in my fingertips I don’t need anything at all It’s between me and me I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you I don’t need anything But my six-shooter I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you Life, fire, blood I control it all There’s a kind of poetry in my actions There’s a hint of vendetta in my actions There’s a kind of poetry in my actions There is, there is, there is, there is I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you I don’t need anything But my six-shooter I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you Life, fire, blood I control it all I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you I don’t need anything But my six-shooter I come and go, it’s building up And I’m thinking of you Life, fire, blood I control it all
“The happiness or unhappiness of a man does not depend upon the amount of property or gold he owns. Happiness or misery is in one’s soul. A wise man feels at home in every country. The whole universe is the home of a noble soul.”
Democritus (c.460 – c.370 BCE) Greek Philosopher
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