scholarly journals Historicising stress: anguish and insomnia in the middle ages

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190094 ◽  
Author(s):  
William MacLehose

While the concept of ‘stress' in the modern sense is a twentieth-century innovation, many of the symptoms we associate with the modern condition appear in historical materials going back many centuries. But how did premodern people understand and experience these symptoms and their relation to sleep? This study focuses on the rich materials from the central middle ages in Western Europe, a period during which understandings of the body, mind, emotions and sleep were radically different from the present. It analyses two examples, nightmares and insomnia, disease categories which illustrate medieval views of the impact of worries and anguish on sleep. Medical and other sources identified a number of ways in which the mind and body interacted with one another in complex ways which disrupted the humoral and mental balance of the individual.

Author(s):  
Markus Reuber ◽  
Gregg H. Rawlings ◽  
Steven C. Schachter

This chapter explores how dissociation of awareness of either the mind or the body can be experienced by everyone to some degree. It has been suggested that in Non-Epileptic Attack Disorder (NEAD), a protective mechanism of enabling individuals to detach from the difficult emotions they have not yet been able to make sense of has led to a detachment from the awareness of the body, thus resulting in physical symptoms that resemble epileptic seizures. Treatment therefore lies in improving both mind and body awareness. Working with individuals with NEAD or Dissociative Seizures introduces one to the multifaceted nature of humanity. Although there are common themes that emerge through psychological assessment—such as prior experience of illness, neurological insult or physical injury to a specific body part, difficulty recognizing stress in the body or mind, or a tendency to use unhelpful coping strategies during prolonged periods of stress,—no two persons with NEAD have the same seizures because each individual’s experience is unique, making the nature and clinical presentation of the seizure-like experiences idiosyncratic. Despite this, it is always possible to discover the reason that individuals with NEAD experience the symptoms they do, even if it is sometimes initially hard for the individual to accept or believe this.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-95
Author(s):  
Janet Maria McKee

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to inspire business leaders with fresh ideas to create a positive work environment that uplifts and motivates their employees in a manner that increases job fulfillment and business growth. Design/methodology/approach The author’s approach to discovering these solutions include putting to use ideas that she has developed over 25 years of working in the corporate environment and being an entrepreneur, with the desire to create highly positive and productive work environments to realize successful businesses and successful lives for everyone involved. Findings There are several simple but powerful things that every manager and business leader can do to promote a highly productive and motivated workforce. Mind and body wellness is a foundation for performance and motivation, with a focus on the mind. If managers and business leaders cultivate an open and encouraging work culture, the positive psychology experienced by employees will help to motivate them in both their professional and personal lives. Originality/value The author finds that people rarely understand the impact of mind and body wellness on the success of the individual and the organization overall.


Author(s):  
Chantal Jaquet

Lastly, on the basis of this definition, the author shows how affects shed light on the body-mind relationship and provide an opportunity to produce a mixed discourse that focuses, by turns, on the mental, physical, or psychophysical aspect of affect. The final chapter has two parts: – An analysis of the three categories of affects: mental, physical, and psychophysical – An examination of the variations of Spinoza’s discourse Some affects, such as satisfaction of the mind, are presented as mental, even though they are correlated with the body. Others, such as pain or pleasure, cheerfulness (hilaritas) or melancholy are mainly rooted in the body, even though the mind forms an idea of them. Still others are psychophysical, such as humility or pride, which are expressed at once as bodily postures and states of mind. These affects thus show us how the mind and body are united, all the while expressing themselves differently and specifically, according to their own modalities.


Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped — and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each chapter considers factors — demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological — that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each chapter, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Surjo Soekadar ◽  
Jennifer Chandler ◽  
Marcello Ienca ◽  
Christoph Bublitz

Recent advances in neurotechnology allow for an increasingly tight integration of the human brain and mind with artificial cognitive systems, blending persons with technologies and creating an assemblage that we call a hybrid mind. In some ways the mind has always been a hybrid, emerging from the interaction of biology, culture (including technological artifacts) and the natural environment. However, with the emergence of neurotechnologies enabling bidirectional flows of information between the brain and AI-enabled devices, integrated into mutually adaptive assemblages, we have arrived at a point where the specific examination of this new instantiation of the hybrid mind is essential. Among the critical questions raised by this development are the effects of these devices on the user’s perception of the self, and on the user’s experience of their own mental contents. Questions arise related to the boundaries of the mind and body and whether the hardware and software that are functionally integrated with the body and mind are to be viewed as parts of the person or separate artifacts subject to different legal treatment. Other questions relate to how to attribute responsibility for actions taken as a result of the operations of a hybrid mind, as well as how to settle questions of the privacy and security of information generated and retained within a hybrid mind.


Author(s):  
Michael A. Kornienko ◽  

The author analyzes the prerequisites for the formation of a theological and philosophical school, founded in 990 by Bishop Fulbert in Chartres, which flourished during the years of the Episcopal ministry of Yves of Chartres (1090–1115), a recognized intellectual center of Western Europe. The role of the Chartres Cathedral School as a citadel of metaphysical, cosmological and natural-scientific Platonism in the era of early scholasticism is revealed. The philosophical orientation of the Chartres school (orientation to the ideas of Neoplatonism), as shown in the work, is the result of a combination of the ideas of Plato, aristotelism, stoicism, pythagoreanism, Eastern and Christian mysticism and religion. The body of ideas characteristic of the Neoplatonism tradition is analyzed, the account of which is essential in understanding the specifics of the Chartres school ideological platform: the ideas of a mystically intuitive knowledge of the higher, the stages of transition from “one and the universal” to matter, the idea of comprehension of pure spirituality. The thesis is substantiated that the time of the highest prosperity of the Chartres school, its highest fame is the XII century, which went down in the history of civilization as the era of the cultural renaissance taking place in France. The specificity of the 12th century renaissance, as shown in the study, lies in the growing interest in Greek philosophy and Roman classics (this also determines the other name of the era – the Roman Renaissance), in expanding the field of knowledge through the assimilation of Western European science and the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. The thesis in which the specifics of the entry of Greek science into the culture of Western Europe is also identified. This entry was carried out through the culture of the Muslim world, which also determined the specifics of the cultural renaissance of France of the XII century. Radical changes are revealed that affect the sphere of education and, above all, religious education; the idea of reaching the priority positions of philosophy and logic is substantiated – a situation that has survived until the end of the Middle Ages. This situation, as shown in the work, was facilitated by the rare growth rate of the translation centers of Constantinople, Palermo, Toledo. It is shown that scholasticism in its early version is oriented towards religious orthodoxy. In the teaching of philosophy, the vector turned out to be biased towards natural philosophy, which was due, as shown in the work, to the spread of the ideas of Aristotle and Plato. In its educational program, the school synthesized the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Elements of natural philosophy are inherent in the works of Bernard of Chartres, Gilbert of Poitiers, Thierry of Chartres representing the Chartres school. Deep studies on the problem of universals ensured the invasion of logic in the field of metaphysical constructions of the Chartres school.


2020 ◽  
pp. 171-214
Author(s):  
Sarah Waters

Chapter five examines a series of suicides at car manufacturer Renault, situating them in the transition from an industrial model to a knowledge economy, in which value is expropriated from the resources of the mind. Suicides did not take place in the emblematic spaces of the factory, where cars were once mass produced, but in a state-of-the art research centre, where cognitive workers conceptualised and designed cutting-edge cars of the future. In the knowledge economy, the mind is treated as an endlessly productive resource that reproduces itself continuously and is unencumbered by the physical limitations of the body. I argue that suicides were the end point of a form of vital exhaustion that transcends the corporeal defences of the physical body and depletes the mental and emotional resources of the self. Suicides do not reflect a deterioration in formal or material conditions of work, but rather a transformation in forms of constraint, as the individual worker internalises modes of discipline and becomes his or her own boss. Suicides affected workers who experienced a phase of chronic overwork in which the quest to achieve productivity targets pushed them to work continuously and obsessively.


Author(s):  
Lauren Mizock ◽  
Zlatka Russinova

Chapter 1 reviews the history of psychiatric treatment of people with mental illness in the United States and Western Europe, highlighting past perspectives in care, such as ancient trephination and exorcism during the demonology era, humorism in early Greek and Roman thought, a return to demonological perspectives in the Middle Ages, as well as mesmerism and psychoanalysis in the 19th and 20th centuries. The 20th-century biological perspective is described, including the use of insulin shock therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and lobotomy. Next, the development of more humane treatment approaches is discussed, such as the moral treatment movement of the 1800s. The ex-patient’s movement of the 1970s is reviewed, leading up to the contemporary recovery-oriented and psychosocial rehabilitation models of care. The impact of stigma on the acceptance of serious mental illness is explored throughout this history. Discussion questions, activities, and diagrams are also included.


Author(s):  
Richard E. King

In the West, meditation has been particularly associated with Asian religions and seen as illustrative of the mystical nature of eastern culture. This chapter explores the impact of the colonial encounter between Europe and Asia. In this context, Asian meditative practices became abstracted from their traditional cosmological, ritualistic, and cultural contexts and reframed in terms of key conceptual binaries and assumptions deriving from modern Western culture. These include a Cartesian distinction between mind and body (with mind being associated with meditation and Buddhist mindfulness, and the body linked to “Hindu” yoga and its modern postural forms). Asian forms of meditation were translated according to a modern psychological framework and encountered in relation to the dichotomies between science and religion on the one hand and religious tradition and a de-traditionalized notion of spirituality on the other. The approaches taken in the Western encounter with Asian meditation tell us as much about the intellectual grooves of the modern Western episteme as they do about the Asian meditative traditions to which they relate.


2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Giordan

The distinction between religion and spirituality, as it is increasingly understood in the contemporary sociology of religion, has led to a reconsideration of the relation between the individual and his/her own body. In the Christian ambit, and especially in the Catholic sphere, the traditional religious attitude has always been that of emphasizing the dichotomy between soul and body, setting a hierarchy that puts the soul in a position superior to the body's, according to an ascetic approach that, particularly in the Middle Ages, foresaw the “mortification of the body”. In the contemporary spiritualist perspective, body and soul are seen as profoundly united, and the previous dichotomy seems to leave room for a more serene and less conflictual connection with one's body: spirituality relates to the sacred by leaving room for (and deriving from) emotions, feelings, the physical and the sexual, and takes a holistic view of human nature. Such a shift from the religious dimension to the spiritual dimension in the relationship with one's body can be observed not only in popular culture but also within Catholicism itself.


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