The Seba library treats Lens in 8 passages, across 8 authors (including Hollis, James, Kalsched, Donald, Schwartz, Richard C).
How can one choose clearly, prudently, when the lens through which one sees the world is itself provisional and distorting? How could one not choose wrongly when one cannot see anything but through such a lens?
Hollis argues that the lens of unconscious personal and cultural history structurally distorts perception, making mistaken choice virtually inevitable and reframing hamartia as wounded vision rather than moral failing.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001thesis
he does this with crushed glass from a 'polarized' lens – the fragmented remnants of the ocular lens which allows him to see 'out' but no-one to see 'in.' Given that consciousness means literally 'knowing with another,' our octopus-killer might be thought of as a kind of anti-consciousness factor in the psyche.
Kalsched reads a dream's shattered polarized lens as a symbol of the trauma-defense structure that enforces one-way opacity, blocking the mutual exposure constitutive of consciousness itself.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis
Through the lens of multiplicity there are no jihadists, addicts, white supremacists, narcissists... Instead, there are protective parts who, in their efforts to manage pain, shame, and fear, became locked in extreme roles. Through the lens of IFS we see the exiles behind our own scary, destructive protectors.
Schwartz positions the IFS lens of multiplicity as a paradigm-shifting perceptual frame that dissolves reductive identifications and discloses the exilic pain underlying extreme protective behavior.
, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995thesis
We may read the fear of parasites in three ways. First, through the lens of compensation... Second, through the lens of ego-psychology, the parasites present the hungry unlived life that also needs food at your table.
Hillman demonstrates that 'lens' functions as an interpretive posture within archetypal psychology, with different lenses yielding incommensurable but equally valid psychic meanings for the same image.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
Looking at touch through the autonomic lens, and keeping that frame when using touch, brings safety into the powerful experience of connection created through physical contact.
Dana employs 'the autonomic lens' as a clinical frame that translates the embodied experience of interpersonal touch into polyvagal terms, making physiological safety the organizing principle of therapeutic contact.
, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018supporting
Berlin's omnipresent street art—portrayals of ecstatic dancers or odd, dreamlike beings—may lead you to see the city through the lens of awe... Art is a door of perception and can function as a lens of awe.
Keltner proposes that visual art can reorient perceptual set such that the lens of awe becomes a sustained mode of apprehending the world, making wonder a cultivable epistemic disposition.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
he picked up a lens, put a lot of paper underneath, and let the rays of the tropical sun pour through the lens... the heat that had been diffused had been brought together to bear on one point through the lens. This is more or less what we do in the practice of meditation.
Easwaran uses the lens as a physical analogy for the concentrating function of meditation, illustrating how one-pointed attention transforms diffuse mental energy into transformative psychic force.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting
the cameraman now worries about the state of the lens. Could it be dirty and so cause the fuzziness? Yet, the lens turns out to be fine, too, and perfectly clean.
Damasio invokes the cinematic lens as a narrative device within his discussion of consciousness, using the search for the source of perceptual distortion as a figure for the investigation of subjective experience.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999aside