ABSTRACT
The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit attention of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. In parataxis, experience does have a before and after, but the meanings of this experience cannot be specified. The meanings are what Sullivan described as “private” or “autistic.” This is a profound kind of privacy, because the meanings are private even to oneself. For Sullivan, parataxic experience is the form in which the hidden meanings of interpersonal relations exist. Sullivan did not use the term “transference.” The vague, potential tendencies that make up unformulated experience, though, would be no more than conventional stages in the development of a thought or a feeling if the outcome—that is, the eventual form of the articulated experience—were predetermined.
