An imprint of Rune Press Ltd.

Parmenides was the first philosopher and the first poet of physics. Parmenides Books is an imprint of Rune Press Ltd. (London) and publishes cross-overs between science and poetry, body and mind, physics and neuroscience.

The first two Parmenides books are by Seán Haldane, poet and neuroscientist. Future books will include Neurodynamic Psychotherapy by Jose Ignacio Xavier, a consultant neuropsychiatrist based in Rio de Janeiro.

From Wilhelm Reich to Neurodynamic Psychotherapy

This book aims to place pulsation where it belongs, as definitive of life. Understanding our human pulsation has huge implications in understanding issues of health and illness, pleasure and pain, happiness and despair. But understanding how pulsation functions in the context of a non-pulsating universe, and how its presence distinguishes the living from the non-living, also has huge implications in understanding nature at large.

Pulsation

Seán Haldane

Wilhelm Reich identified pulsation as the basic life function, experienced most intensely in orgasm, and his therapy worked to dissolve emotional and physical blocks to full pulsation, through ‘character analysis’ and a focus on the breathing. He also believed pulsation was a function of a ‘universal life energy’ which he called ‘orgone.’ This book examines Reich’s work in the light of neuroscience and proposes that although pulsation is definitive of life, the concept of a specific ‘life energy’ is unnecessary and mistaken. However the term ‘orgone’, though not as ‘life energy’, may add to a valid description of the ‘cosmic ocean’ of equal-phase pulse waves within which the unequal-phase pulsation of life occurs. This book also proposes a ‘neurodynamic psychotherapy’ (Alexander Luria’s term) in which Reichian pulsation therapy can be integrated with neuroscience.

Time / No Time

The paradox of poetry and pysics

Seán Haldane

Modern physics questions the absoluteness of time. Yet the cosmological theories of Mach, Einstein and Barbour are no more testable, given the scale of the universe, than those of the first theoretical physicist, Parmenides, who was also a poet. He described how change cannot logically exist yet it observe ly exists. This kind of paradox is the stuff of poetry. Since the arrival or quantum physics it is the stuff of modern physics too.

Poetry is inclusive of many levels of meaning, among the rational meaning, but it is also supra-rational. Traditionally science and logical argument must be exclusive of distractions and stick to a single line of thought. But perhaps physics can only advance, and poetry can only maintain what Thomas Hardy called its ‘sustaining power’, if each is open to the thinking of the other. This book explores the findings of neuroscience as well as the experience of poets and physicists when faced with the paradox of Time / No Time.