The Coself, or Primary Syntheism

Abstract

In all cultures and mythologies an allusion can be found to a primordial, chaotic state from which the world emerged, structured along clear-cut splits: sea-continent, day-night, earth-sky, man-woman - as if the collective unconscious tried to render intelligible and describable some universal secret, linked to conception and encrypted at once in the spirit of nature and the human psyche. In this article, I will try to defend the idea that every group situation provokes the immediate and massive emergence of a chaotic state, a pre-objectal stage where no clear distinction yet exists between subject and object, you and I.