The Seba library treats Prism in 5 passages, across 3 authors (including Hollis, James, Hillman, James, Levine, Peter A.).
The stimulus is immediately passed through a prism of sorts, an historic filter which asks the implicit question, ‘How have I been here before?’
Hollis posits the prism as the psyche’s complex-laden interpretive apparatus, which transforms every present stimulus into a repetition of past emotional experience.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996thesis
In his early work on light Newton had captured Iris, the mediating rainbow (and anima mediatrix), in a prism of glass and dissected her into seven colors. Iris, the Rainbow Girl, and colors themselves lost their mediating role
Hillman argues that Newton’s prism destroyed the symbolic and mediating function of color, subordinating the anima mediatrix to analytical dissection and severing the phenomenal world from the invisible.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
stinct which have been filtered through the prism of our psyche.
Hillman identifies the psyche itself as a prism that transforms raw instinct into specifically human, imaginally differentiated experience — the process he calls psychization.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
By continuing to regard black as a non-color and segregating it from the bright beauty of the Newtonian prism, our faulty cosmology remains unable to find a place for the nigredo
Hillman extends his critique of the Newtonian prism to argue that its exclusion of black perpetuates a defective cosmology unable to accommodate the nigredo and its psychological equivalents.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
Richard Held and Alan Hein had adult subjects wear special prism goggles that made everything appear to be upside down. After some time… the brains of the subjects who were free to move about actively… adapted so that they actually saw the environment as right side up again.
Levine cites prism-goggle experiments to demonstrate that active embodied engagement, rather than passive reception, is required for the nervous system to recalibrate perceptual reality.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010aside