Remembering the Evolutionary Freud

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Young

ArgumentThroughout his career as a writer, Sigmund Freud maintained an interest in the evolutionary origins of the human mind and its neurotic and psychotic disorders. In common with many writers then and now, he believed that the evolutionary past is conserved in the mind and the brain. Today the “evolutionary Freud” is nearly forgotten. Even among Freudians, he is regarded to be a red herring, relevant only to the extent that he diverts attention from the enduring achievements of the authentic Freud. There are three ways to explain these attitudes. First, the evolutionary Freud's key work is the “Overview of the Transference Neurosis” (1915). But it was published at an inopportune moment, forty years after the author's death, during the so-called “Freud wars.” Second, Freud eventually lost interest in the “Overview” and the prospect of a comprehensive evolutionary theory of psychopathology. The publication of The Ego and the Id (1923), introducing Freud's structural theory of the psyche, marked the point of no return. Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance. Explanations one and two are probably correct but also uninteresting. Explanation number three assumes that there is a fundamental difference between Freud's evolutionary narratives (not credible) and the evolutionary accounts of psychopathology that currently circulate in psychiatry and mainstream journals (credible). The assumption is mistaken but worth investigating.

Author(s):  
Alexander Kluge

This chapter focuses on fantasy and reaches back to Alexander Kluge's days as an honorary professor lecturing on film and television at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1973. Kluge explains that fantasy is a divided product in the society. He then looks at what Karl Marx has to say about the original concept of labor. Marx mentions it twice, for example, when he explains that a craftsman, when making something like a chair, first forms an image of the chair in his mind and makes a plan before then setting to work with his hands to make this plan a reality. This is an example of the unified path of labor between the activity of the mind and the activity of the hands. Kluge also discusses the imaginative capacity. Sigmund Freud described this imaginative capacity not only in terms of psychoanalytic theory or out of a specific therapeutic interest. Rather, Freud described it and pursued it on account of a general theoretical interest. Freud said that the law of this imaginative capacity exists in people. It is the law of the human mind. Freud said not only that it is influenced by libidinal control and the negotiation of reality, but also that the brain triggers the perception of actual circumstance and then remembers something from the past, a conflict, a desired situation, or a wish. From there, a projection of a concrete action is cast onto the future.


The research incorporated encircles the interdisciplinary theory of cognitive science in the branch of artificial intelligence. It has always been the end goal that better understanding of the idea can be guaranteed. Besides, a portion of the real-time uses of cognitive science artificial intelligence have been taken into consideration as the establishment for more enhancements. Before going into the scopes of future, there are many complexities that occur in real-time which have been uncovered. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the brain and its procedures. It inspects the nature, the activities, and the elements of cognition. Cognitive researchers study intelligence and behavior, with an emphasis on how sensory systems speak to, process, and change data. Intellectual capacities of concern to cognitive researchers incorporate recognition, language, memory, alertness, thinking, and feeling; to comprehend these resources, cognitive researchers acquire from fields, for example, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, semantics, and anthropology. The analytic study of cognitive science ranges numerous degrees of association, from learning and choice to logic and planning; from neural hardware to modular mind organization. The crucial idea of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."


Author(s):  
Pascual F. Martínez-Freire

The mind is a collection of various classes of processes that can be studied empirically. To limit the field of mental processes we must follow the criteria of folk psychology. There are three kinds of mind: human, animal and mechanical. But the human mind is the paradigm or model of mind. The existence of mechanical minds is a serious challenge to the materialism or the mind-brain identity theory. Based on this existence we can put forward the antimaterialist argument of machines. Intelligence is a class of mental processes such that the mind is the genus and the intelligence is a species of this genus. The capacity to solve problems is a clear and definite criterion of intelligence. Again, like in the mind, the human intelligence is the paradigm of the intelligence. There are also three kinds of intelligence: human, animal and mechanical. Searle’s Chinese room argument is misleading because Searle believes that it is possible to maintain a sharp distinction between syntax and semantics. The reasonable dualism in the brain-mind problem defends the existence of brain-mental processes, physical-mental processes, and nonphysical-mental (spiritual) processes. Constitution of the personal project of life, self-consciousness and free volitions are examples of spiritual processes. Usually the intelligence has been considered the most important quality of human beings, but freedom, or the world of free volitions, is a more specific quality of human beings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Benjamin Hutchinson ◽  
Lisa Feldman Barrett

In the last two decades, neuroscience studies have suggested that various psychological phenomena are produced by predictive processes in the brain. When considered together, these studies form a coherent, neurobiologically inspired program for guiding psychological research about the mind and behavior. In this article, we consider the common assumptions and hypotheses that unify an emerging framework and discuss the ramifications of such a framework, both for improving the replicability and robustness of psychological research and for renewing psychological theory by suggesting an alternative ontology of the human mind.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 14-19
Author(s):  
VIKAS K. SHARMA ◽  
PRAGYA SAHARE ◽  
MANASVI SHRIVASTAV

It is well known that human mind possess unbounded power. It has numerous extrasensory potentials like precognition, psychokinesis, extrasensory perception etc. According to Sriram Sharma Acharya, human mind is indeed a miracle of consciousness that can visualize and traverse anywhere in the infinite expansion of the cosmos in nanoseconds. It can acquire unlimited knowledge and is endowed with super natural potentials. In this study, it is theorized that supernatural powers of the mind can be attained by activating some extrasensory centers of human body with the help of some yogic exercises such as meditation and sadhanas. According to yogic texts, Agya Chakra referred as the ‘third eye’ or the ‘sixth sense’. The yoga shastras describe the position of the Agya Chakra in the inner core of the brain deep behind the bhru-madhya (center between the two eyebrows). The view of the expert of yoga, clairvoyance, telepathy, extra-terrestrial communication etc. can be bestowed by the activation of agya chakra. The exponents of dhyan-yoga regard Agya Chakra as the core of self-realization and the centre for the linkage of individual consciousness with the omnipresent supreme-consciousness. Indian rishi-munis who, by has deep contemplation of yogic sadhanas, they had awakened the supernormal powers of their mind and become the masters of many ridhi-siddhis. In this paper, researchers have made an effort to explore the techniques that one could attain the superhuman siddhis from the dedicated yoga sadhanas through activation of agya chakra, these sages of yore had done.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Taheri ◽  
Farid Semsarha ◽  
Fateme Modarresi-Asem

Mind-body interaction and its manifestations at the brain level has been studied extensively in the field of consciousness research. Fara-darmani Consciousness Field, as claimed by Mohammad Ali Taheri (the founder), is a method of connecting with the Cosmic Consciousness Network through human mind and his brain has a detective role in this process. As a result of this connection, the scanning process of the state of a being, e.g., the health status of the cells and consequently organs is performed. This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the Fara-darmani Consciousness Field connection on electroencephalogram (EEG) features as an important biomarker of the brain functioning. The results showed that there was a significant increase in the gamma2 frequency band (35-40 Hz) power in the frontal lobe in medial frontal gyrus (BA6) and paracentral lobule (BA31) of the brain during the task condition compared to the rest condition in a Fara-therapist population. Considering the cortical electrical activity of Fara-therapist’s brain during Fara-darmani Consciousness Field connection, characterizing increase in the power of gamma wave and the activity of the areas affecting on memory, attention, perception and default mode network intrinsic activity. This manifestation distinguishes Fara-darmani Consciousness Field connection from other known methods dealing with the mind-body interaction criterion mainly different types of mediation.


Literature has influenced the lives of human beings. In the human mind, there is a space for memories, introspection, foreshadow, flashback and awful remembrances that are coloured by pain, wound, and trauma. Psychological trauma is a sort of harm to the mind that happens because of a seriously upsetting occasion. It is much the same as other psychosomatic ideas in medicinal history, for example, stun and stress. It has been exposed to an assortment of translations crosswise over orders since it rose in the nineteenth century as a thought to catch mental encounters and conditions in current society and societies. Psychological traumatic experiences often involve physical trauma that threatens the survival of human beings and the sense of security. Sigmund Freud is an eminent figure in the literary studies of trauma. The connecting of injury hypothesis and artistic content reveals insight into contemporary fiction as well as focuses on the inborn associations between injury hypothesis and the abstract which have been disregarded. Paul Auster, an American writer, blends absurdism, existentialism and crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning. He creates his own postmodern form in his writings. His, Man in the Dark, is a staggering novel about the numerous substances we possess as wars fire surrounding us. By investigating 'Man in the Dark' through Lacanian thought of a divided subjectivity, the injury for Brill is no nostalgic return of the past. It is depicted as the inconceivable experience with the missed reality which is brought about via 'machine' or reiteration. The paper analyses the function of the traumatized protagonist and discusses the influence of place in the reformulation of the self


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Mariusz Wojewoda

We use the term “person” when we want to point out that human existence is unrepeatable and unique. The assumption that man is a person constitutes a basis for the belief in the dignity, efficacy, and responsibility of the human individual. Karol Wojtyla built his conception of the person in the context of theological and philosophical discussions. Even though Wojtyła’s conception has been given a great deal of scholarly attention, it is worthwhile to juxtapose it with contemporary anthropological theories that derive from cognitive sciences. Cognitivists usually base their theories on biological and sociological premises. Some conclusions arrived at in the area of the cognitive sciences lead to mind-brain reductionism, a theory in which the human being is regarded as a body endowed with the function of the brain and as an entity whose individual traits are shaped by its social and cultural environment. This position undermines the ideas of free will and the substantial singularity of the human person. However, debates with this position have worked out a non-reductionist alternative, a theory known as emergentism. This theory treats the human mind as a distinct faculty, one which emerges as a phase in the brain’s development. Emergentists base their reasoning on the assumptions that the body is a unity and that the mind is not identical with it. It is my belief that emergentism can be fruitfully applied to the dynamic understanding of the person put forward by Wojtyła in the middle of the 20th century.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Ehrlich

This book contains the first English translation of the lost dream diary of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934), the Nobel Prize-winning “father of modern neuroscience.” In the late nineteenth century, while scientific psychologists searched the inner world of human beings for suitable objects of study, Cajal discovered that the nervous system, including the brain, is composed of distinctly independent cells, later termed neurons. “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” he romantically called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” Cajal was contemporary with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), whose “secrets of the mind” radically influenced a century of thought. Although the two men never met, their lives and works were intimately related, and each is identified with the foundation of a modern intellectual discipline—neurobiology and psychoanalysis—still in conversation and conflict today. In personal letters, Cajal insulted Freud and dismissed his theories as lies. In order to disprove his rival, Cajal returned to an old research project and started recording his own dreams. For the last five years of his life, he abandoned his own neurobiological research and concentrated on psychological manuscripts, including a new “dream book.” Although his intention was to publish, the project was never released. The unfinished work was thought to be lost, until recently, when a Spanish book appeared claiming to feature the dreams of Cajal, along with the untold story of their complex journey into print.


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