ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author suggests that animistic experiences threaten to recollect in them a forgotten sensibility that he both fear and long for. He discovers intentionality embedded in the material generated by reverie, as though the thoughts and feelings and images and body sensations are dreaming, rather than the author them. It describes a world of objects that are constituted purely by matter in motion. A soulful longing and despair infuse the field with powerful charges. The potential for transformative love lives side-by-side with the threat of dismembering rejection. The animistic vitality of the child's psyche derives from the animism of the actual caregivers—their aliveness as human beings. Modernity rejects animistic experiences as irrational and primitive—as fantasies that a subject projects on to a world of lifeless objects. Post-modernity takes a softer view of animistic cultures, since it remains vigilant towards the imperialism of Enlightenment rationality.
