Seeing Through the Spell of Transference
is the 10th novel by Lyons. It is Volume 4 of the "My Years of Apprenticeship at Love" sextet. It is the 6th book of the sextet to be published.
The story is in 3rd person about Walker Underwood as becomes the mythic everyman of our generation applying the tropes of the old literacy to the new machines: the electron beam microlythographer, the anesthesia analyzer, a seismometer, UNIX, CASE modeling, GUI, . . . as he undergoes the shift into procedural writing.
Through omnicient author we observe the love interest Ms C in their relationship and the therapist Ms Z as she applies psychoanalysis in the speaking cure.
The narrative of the technical writer work uses each machine being documented to suggest a symbolic dimension which helps Walker to discover things like the chakras and the dream dramaturge, and phantopoeia, the computer game, the mandala, the moment tensor. And he enters these worlds to explore his own in the way they reflect mind. The cross fertilization of Jung, Pauli, Levi-Strauss, Mandelbrot, Heisenberg, Bohm gets fermented into these two most precious ways of feeling and knowing you may come to see in your Self:
1) Through the metaphors of network, database, language, matrix quantum mechanics we can see how the mind as computer allows us to feel how the neural net brain is isomorphic to the ecological net of nature; and
2) myth is personal as well as cultural, it is the matrix behind language perceiving the network of forces presented as symbols by the psyche. And this is numinous.