Unconscious

The psychoanalytic movement is experiencing a serious crisis: its scientific consensus, social standing, and impact on practice in mental health have all been steadily declining over the last decades. This unfortunate process has been variously explained in terms of prevailing hedonistic social values, the political influence of drug companies, and cuts in health-related expenditures. Following a suggestion by Garza Guerrero, we rather believe that the sources of the contemporary crisis in psychoanalysis are to be searched for within its own development and current social and cultural life. Specifically, we think psychoanalysis has failed to bring the revolutionary contribution of interpersonal and intersubjective paradigms to its fuller consequences. Here, we review five core dimensions in which such failure is particularly apparent: (1) an unwitting reliance on the medical model of mental illness; (2) an ontological, concrete understanding of unconscious processes; (3) a manifest failure to fully appreciate the role of extratransference relationships in the patient’s life; (4) a naive and idealized view of the psychoanalyst’s person and role; and (5) a marginal awareness of the impact of group-level unconscious phenomena on the social life of psychoanalytic institutions.

Dreams about 9/11 -- Paper presented at the 19th Annual International Conference for The International Association for the Study of Dreams, Tufts University, Medford, Boston, Massachusetts; 05/2002
An analysis of trauma dreams collected after 9/11

This study present a collection of examples of verbatim language in dreams, with analyses of how this is altered relative to waking language. Grammar is well-preserved in these dreams while meaningfulness is distorted relative to waking criteria. Novel nouns receive special emphasis as do extra-vocal cues such as voice tone. Dreams with verbatim language tend to be unusually long, vivid, and emotionally salient, though this may be a byproduct differential dream recall affecting both.  The present findings will be compared to past research data on language in dreams, and discussed in relation to what's known about brain areas involved in dreaming and areas involved in different linguistic processes.

Creative problem-solving dreams virtually always occur only after the dreamer has done
extensive work on the issue awake. Most typically, a person is stuck at one particular step
of a multiple phase process and the dream solves that step. The dream of Dmitri Mendeleev
about The Periodic Table of the Elements is no exception. All accounts of this event agree
that he’d worked for years on the Table, produced other drafts, but that he attributed the
version he was most satisfied with to a dream. It is less clear whether Kedrov is correct in
his reconstruction that it was the reversal of columns vs. rows which the dream provided.
Accounts of dreams from contemporary scientists and inventors are a richer source for the
detail required to generalize about the role of dreams in problem solving.

This paper explores the content of the somniloquies of Dion McGregor, the most extensive sleep talker ever recorded, and compares these with dream content from normative male dreams on the Hall and van de Castle Content Scales (1966) and Hobson (et al., 1987) Bizarreness Scales. On the Hall and van de Castle Scales, the somniloquies contained significantly more female characters relative to males than for the norms, more familiar characters and friends, but fewer family members. The dreamer-as-character was much likelier to be either a befriender or an aggressor than in the normative dreams but much less likely to engage in physical aggression specifically.  There was less aggression, friendliness, or sex per character in McGregor’s narratives, as well as less of all three of these types of interaction total than for the norms, but much more self negativity.  There was a lower percentage of negative emotions, good fortune, and success, but the somniloquies were similar to the norms in their levels of misfortune and failure.    On the Hobson Bizarreness Scales, the McGregor somniloquies were not differentiated from dreams on 3 of 6 scales—having similar levels of discontinuity of plot, characters, object, or actions but had slightly fewer incongruities of plot, and many fewer instances of incongruity or  uncertainly of thought. These findings are discussed in terms of presumed brain activation differences—more frontal activation--and also in terms of McGregor’s (1964) personal idiosyncrasies.

The crime of the scene: My own rooms seem strange to me. Through the windows I only see myself looking in and all the corridors lead to their own beginning: This is the uncanny. Taking the topologies in Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as a starting point, this study will analyze the uncanny as a specifically spatial phenomenon, as a crime scene which is already lethal in itself. It is, however, in the arts that these spaces of the uncanny have been built, traced and theorised most radically. The different cultural spaces of the uncanny to be discussed here range from the undead ruins in the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the labyrinthic architextures in Poe, Gilman, and Lovecraft, to the dark vaults in the films of Fritz Lang and Dario Argento.

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Verbrechen des Schauplatzes:
Ein vertrautes Zimmer, das einem plötzlich fremd erscheint; Fenster, durch die man nur sich selber blicken sieht und ausweglose Korridore, an deren Ende man unversehens wieder am Anfang steht: So ist das Unheimliche beschaffen. Ausgehend von den Topologien bei Sigmund Freud und Jacques Lacan wird das Unheimliche als ein spezifisch räumliches Phänomen untersucht, als beängstigend eigenmächtiger Ort, der selber tätlich wird: ein Tat/Ort. Dabei sind es die Kunstwerke, welche diese Tat/Orte des Unheimlichen immer schon erbaut und kartographiert haben. In der Kultur und deren Medien schafft sich das Unheimliche Raum, von den untoten Ruinen in Giovanni Battista Piranesis Kupferstichen über die labyrinthischen Architexturen Edgar Allan Poes und die sumpfigen Schrift-Landschaften H. P. Lovecrafts bis zu den obskuren Kino-Kammern von Fritz Lang und Dario Argento."""

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

An introductory essay to the 3-volume work 'The Philosophy of the Unconscious' ('Die Philosophie des Unbewusstseins') of Eduard von Hartmann. Edouard d'Araille takes a brief survey of von Hartmann's life and thought, in particular the "philosophy of the unconscious" which would make von Hartmann a household name both in Germany and abroad (including in England). This ambitious work extends upon the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer's system (set forth in most detailed fashion within 'The World as Will and Representation') whilst also being inspired by the triad of Post-Kantians F.W.J. von Schelling, J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel. Hartmann transforms Schopenhauer's concept of the 'Will' into his own, related idea, of the 'Unconscious', forming an interesting bridge between the ideas of one strand German Idealism and Sigmund Freud's psychology of the Sub-Conscious. This essay only provides a brief sketch of von Hartmann's philosophy, but enough so as to appreciate its importance in the evolution of thought. The essay also touches upon the pessimism which was at the heart of von Hartmann's philosophy, which he shared above all with Schopenhauer himself. The essay is followed by a four page Bibliography of von Hartmann's major work (including translations) and reference is also made to some books and article written about him.

Psychoanalysis is said to be old. Its social success and standing have been steadily declining over the last 30 years. The object of virulent albeit often poorly motivated criticism from testimonials of biologically oriented psychiatry, psychoanalysis has reportedly been pushed at the margins (Stepansky 2009). The number of both trainees and patients is insufficient in front of an increasing number of practicing psychoanalysts (Summers, 2008, p. 413). Psychoanalytic allegiance has come to be unconventional among leaders of academic psychiatric institutions (Paris, 2005) and has substantially declined among clinical psychologists (Masling 2000). Sales of psychoanalytic books have been steadily decreasing over the last 30 years (Stepansky 2009, pp. 57 ff.). The institution we have loved so much is now despised. Any fabulous pseudo-physiological theory of the mind is warranted to get an immediate and massive media coverage which the slow development of psychoanalytic thought could never aspire at. The psychoanalytic community has long been aware a substantial crisis was on the way. While a crisis in the development of psychoanalysis has been mentioned since the 40s, at the time the word alluded to a developmental crisis, the maybe painful discontuinity implied by growth. In this vein, a core intrinsic aporia was located by Maxwell Gitelson (1964) in the conflict between the therapeutic goals of psychoanalysis and its call to widen pure knowledge of human reality, by Erich Fromm (1970) in the constraints imposed by the hegemony of the Ego psychology, by Marshall Edelson (1988) in the epistemological challenge posed by experimental psychology and by rapidly developing neurosciences. Contemporary crisis has a different, more ominous flavour. The social role of psychoanalysis, its very relevance to the field of mental health as well as its position as a basic component of western world Weltanschauung are all currently at stake. Anyone of us has experienced sometimes the urge to project on hostile others the responsibility for such decline in social standing – to blame the wicked drug corporations, the needs of a greedy money oriented social system, the immoderate ambition of leaders of biological psychiatry. Most typically, Richard Chessick (2001) explains the crisis of psychoanalysis in terms of the " abusive behavior of insurance companies regarding the payment of psychoanalysis " as well as a socially widespread intolerance for the time and expenses required by an adequate and long-lasting cure of mental disorders. A more articulated and insightful, but analogously defensive perspective may be found in Burston (2012).

""Psiche istituisce un confronto ravvicinato tra la psicologia della "Repubblica" di Platone e la psicoanalisi di Freud. Convergenze e divergenze vengono discusse in relazione sia alla concezione platonica dell'emersione onirica dei desideri repressi, che prefigura la via regia per l'inconscio di Freud, sia all'analisi delle psicopatologie correlate a tali impostazioni teoriche, sia ai due approcci diagnostici e terapeutici adottati. Altro tema cruciale è l'eros platonico - la cui disamina viene estesa anche al "Simposio" e al "Fedro" - ripreso esplicitamente da Freud in relazione al concetto di libido. L'autore affronta, infine, le due tematizzazioni, di natura metapsicologica e non solo, inerenti alla dimensione morale.

Psiche sets up a close-knit comparison between the psychology of Plato's Republic and Freud's psychoanalysis. Convergences and divergences are discussed in relation both to the Platonic conception of the oneiric emergence of repressed desires that prefigures the main path of Freud's subconscious, to the analysis of the psychopathologies related to these theoretical formulations and to the two diagnostic and therapeutic approaches adopted. Another crucial theme is the Platonic eros - the examination of which is also extended to the Symposium and Phaedrus - taken up explicitly by Freud in relation to the concept of libido. Finally, the author also addresses the two themes - of, inter alia, a metapsychological nature - inherent to the moral dimension.""

Equanimity during mindfulness meditation is considered in relation to some examples of repetitive thinking, including rumination and worry. It may not always be possible to treat the content of the automatic stream of primary process thinking with equanimity, and some implications in relation to mental health and the value of psychotherapy are noted. Aspects of the meditation state are considered in relation to some aspects of the creative process, including incubation and insight.

In his écrit L’étourdit, Lacan develops a tripartite definition of the equivocal, distinguishing between the homophonic, grammatical, and logical. Psychoanalysis, being the praxis of alleviating unconscious symptoms via the semblance that is language, depends upon the equivocity of language. This paper elucidates these three forms of ambiguity in their relevance to the clinic and the end of analysis.

How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We see the problem in stark form if we ask how we can tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: Find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases -when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their authority -and look to see whether those neural natural kinds exist within Fodorian modules. But a puzzle arises: Do we include the machinery underlying reportability within the neural natural kinds of the clear cases? If the answer is "Yes," then there can be no phenomenally conscious representations in Fodorian modules. But how can we know if the answer is "Yes"? The suggested methodology requires an answer to the question it was supposed to answer! This target article argues for an abstract solution to the problem and exhibits a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility. I argue that we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if we assume that the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified (other things being equal) by the explanations it allows.

This paper starts from Tractatus, 6.53, and ask how one could show someone ‘that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’.  Once one has fully mastered the ‘austere’ conception of nonsense – that nonsense has neither meaning, form, content, nor logic – the difficulties of the enterprise become evident.  It is not clear how one could be in a position to conclude much about an utterance without first finding a meaning in it.  Suggestions made by Guy Robinson, Edward Witherspoon and Hans-Johann Glock are considered but it is concluded that the last, best hope for nonsensicalism lies in a therapeutic approach.  I end with a plea for someone who is sympathetic to this aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to make a serious attempt to work out the details.

'Definition of Heterology' illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of 'attraction and repulsion' at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the laws of attraction and repulsion that animate heterology find their polarized foundations in the laws of the socius, which are also the laws of imitation understood in its heterogeneous – anthropological, ontological and psychological – manifestations. Paradoxically, heterology, while being the 'science' (logos) of the 'totally other' (hetero), may point toward an abyssal experience of a communicative homology that has the power to transform impure matters into pure spirits, angelic souls into material bodies.

Dream interpretation during early psychoanalysis elicited associations from the patient but also involved authoritarian interpretations focused on whatever the analyst believed to be the key human drives—sex, power, transcendence, etc. Modern dream interpretation relies on non-leading questions to help the dreamer through an associative process to discover their own meaning for the dream. Research finds that patients rate therapy sessions utilizing dreams more highly in terms of session quality, mastery, and insight gained.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) provides an integrated
theorization of learning without having
written specifically on education. He was a philosopher
who worked for the majority of his life as
an intellectual and university academic. Deleuze
was propelled into the public eye in 1972, after the
success of his first collaborative work with Félix
Guattari, called Anti-Oedipus. He did not write a
book on learning, so one must piece together his
ideas on learning from comments interspersed
from within the oeuvre. Despite this apparent
lack of direct information and analysis of learning,
Deleuze’s ideas have gained traction in many
educational and creative circles (Cole 2011).

On where the Cutting Edge of the Western Tradition might be found with respect to the development of Fundamental Ontology within Continental Philosophy

-- Key Words:  Continental Philosophy, Ways of Being, Fragmentation of Being, Time, Cutting Edge

The 88th volume in the series Contributions to Phenomenology – Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis deals with the unconscious as a phenomenological concept. The volume, edited by Dorothée Legrand and Dylan Trigg, contributes to the discussion of how different interpretations within phenomenology deal with unconsciousness. The focus is on the manifestation of an unconscious within the phenomenological tradition, both explicit and implicit.

Published on:
http://reviews.ophen.org/2018/07/27/dorothee-legrand-dylan-trigg-eds-unconsciousness-between-phenomenology-and-psychoanalysis/

Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors: killers, junkies, drunkards, the paranoid, the depressed, the suicidal, the abandoned or the simply alienated. Literature inhabits and is inhabited by the pathological, or so it must have seemed to the armies of psychoanalytic critics who repeatedly turned to it. We seek to deconstruct this particular binary view of literature-as-madness, psychoanalysis-as-saneness by showing how a critic's preoccupation with the pathology of an author can sometimes expose his/her own unconscious complexes, desires or fears. With this in mind, we thus momentarily turn the examiner into the examined.

This paper presents an overview of the key neuroscience studies investigating the neural mechanisms of self-initiated movements that form the basis of our human consciousness. These studies, which commenced with the seminal works of Benjamin Libet and colleagues, showed that an ensemble of brain areas — localized to the frontal and medial regions of the brain — are involved in engendering the conscious decision to commit a motor act. Regardless of differences in neuroimaging techniques, these studies commonly showed that early neuronal activities in the frontal lobules and supplementary motor areas, interpreted by some to be reflective of unconscious processes, occurred before one was conscious of the intention to act as well as the act itself. I examine and discuss these empirical findings with regard to the need to analyze the contents and stages of awareness, and devise paradigm-specific models or theories that could account for inconsistent findings garnered from different experimental paradigms. This paper concludes by emphasizing a need to reconcile the principles of determinism with the notions of free will in future development of consciousness research and theories. © The Institute of Mind and Behavior, Inc., P.O. Box 522, Village Station, New York City, New York, 10014. URL: https://umaine.edu/jmb/