A Dostoevskian Dialogue Structure for the Presentation of the Unconscious

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-97
Author(s):  
Yael Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
Ambiguous Word ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Dialogue Structure

Abstract In this article, I demonstrate that in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872), Dostoevsky uses a specific type of dialogue—which I term “the about-face dialogue”—to present the displacement of a young man’s unconscious rage against his mother on to society while hiding it from the awareness of both protagonist and reader. In this type of dialogue, the protagonist interprets his interlocutor’s unwittingly ambiguous word or phrase as a scathing rebuke of his rage against his mother, and his reaction constitutes a displacement of this rage on to the outside world. Our awareness of the interplay between the unconscious and the outside world in this type of dialogue enables us to understand the protagonist’s sudden about-face from compassion to apathy, or even animosity, which is incomprehensible on the purely rational level.

scholarly journals Psychoanalysts of the first quarter of the 20th century about “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-165
Author(s):  
Svetlana A. Gornostaeva
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Alfred Adler ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
General Direction ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Direction Of Movement

The article examines the judgements of representatives of psychoanalysis of the early 20th century on the life and work of Fyodor Dostoevsky and, in particular, his novel "Crime and Punishment". The works of such famous psychoanalysts and followers of psychoanalysis as Alfred Adler. Jolan Neufeld, Sigmund Freud and Erich Seligmann Fromm are analysed. In the article "Dostoevsky" Adler, noting the contradictory nature of the characters, points to the general direction of movement for them towards finding inner peace, which, in turn, reveals a similarity with the nature of the writer himself. The researcher's particular attention is drawn to the theme of the boundaries of what is permitted and what is not permitted in Dostoevsky's work. Neufeld in his work "Dostoevsky" indicates that the basis of artistic depiction in the work of Dostoevsky is the emotional experience of the writer himself, whose personality makeup the psychoanalyst assesses as hysterical, which, in turn, turns out to be characteristic of his heroes. The researcher also notes the writer's increased attention to the category of the unconscious and highlights a number of features characteristic of Dostoevsky's poetics. In the well-known work of Freud "Dostoevsky and Parricide", the influence of "unconscious impulses" in the work of the Russian classic on the structure and peculiarities of plot lines in his works is indicated. The founder of neopsychoanalysis, Fromm, also draws attention to the category of the unconscious, but he is more inclined to interpret the behaviour of the heroes taking into account social and worldview factors. On the whole, the considered studies of psychoanalysts laid the foundations for a close study of the features of psychologism in Dostoevsky's work.

scholarly journals EFFECT OF ASYMMETRY OF SEMANTIC ACTIVATION IN UNCONSCIOUS AWARENESS OF AMBIGUOUS LEXIS

2017 ◽  
pp. 158-163
Author(s):  
A. P. Kryukova ◽  
A. Yu. Agafonov ◽  
D. D. Kozlov ◽  
Yu. E. Shilov
Keyword(s):  
Priming Effect ◽  
Quantitative Difference ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Ambiguous Word ◽  
Semantic Activation ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Ambiguous Information ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Conscious Level

The article addresses the issue of perception and processing of ambiguous information. Experimental effects of understanding of polysemantic stimuli (homonyms, reversed figures) on conscious and unconscious levels have been analyzed. It is shown that implicit awareness of several meanings occurs before the explication of one meaning of stimulus take place. The aim of the current research is to discover the effect of asymmetry of semantic activation in unconscious perception of ambiguous information (in homonyms). The  procedures  and  results  of  the  two  conducted  studies  are  fully  described. In Experiment 1, technique of priming was used, in which ambiguous words were used as prime stimuli. Participants were randomly divided into four groups (two experimental and two control groups). Unconscious primes with visual mask were demonstrated to participants of experimental groups. Then, two words were demonstrated, only one of which had semantic relation to one meaning of the prime stimulus. The sets of stimuli in the experimental groups differed only in the words that were semantically related to the meaning of the ambiguous prime. The words that were not semantically related to the prime stimuli were identical. Then all partici pants (including participants in control groups) were told to choose as quickly as they could one word of two, using keys “left” or “right”. The results supported the hypothesis about the asymmetry of semantic activation in general. Participants did choose words related to particular meaning of prime stimuli more often.In Experiment 2, participants were asked to write down associations with the same words that were used as primes in Experiment 1. The results have shown that stronger association between prime and ambiguous stimuli facilitates priming-effect, while weaker association makes priming-effect insignificant.The present research supports the proposition that all alternative meanings of ambiguous words are more or less actualized implicitly, which influences further cognitive activity. The described phenomenon was labeled as the effect of semantic activation asymmetry. On the unconscious level, this asymmetry shows up as quantitative difference between priming-effects. On the conscious level, this asymmetry shows up as easiness  and  accessibility  of  verbal associations  on  corresponding  meaning of the ambiguous word.

Behavior in the Brain

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin M. Monti ◽  
Adrian M. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Motor Behavior ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Motor Output ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Brain Responses ◽  
Minimally Conscious ◽  
Brain Insults ◽  
Brain Behavior

Recent evidence has suggested that functional neuroimaging may play a crucial role in assessing residual cognition and awareness in brain injury survivors. In particular, brain insults that compromise the patient’s ability to produce motor output may render standard clinical testing ineffective. Indeed, if patients were aware but unable to signal so via motor behavior, they would be impossible to distinguish, at the bedside, from vegetative patients. Considering the alarming rate with which minimally conscious patients are misdiagnosed as vegetative, and the severe medical, legal, and ethical implications of such decisions, novel tools are urgently required to complement current clinical-assessment protocols. Functional neuroimaging may be particularly suited to this aim by providing a window on brain function without requiring patients to produce any motor output. Specifically, the possibility of detecting signs of willful behavior by directly observing brain activity (i.e., “brain behavior”), rather than motoric output, allows this approach to reach beyond what is observable at the bedside with standard clinical assessments. In addition, several neuroimaging studies have already highlighted neuroimaging protocols that can distinguish automatic brain responses from willful brain activity, making it possible to employ willful brain activations as an index of awareness. Certainly, neuroimaging in patient populations faces some theoretical and experimental difficulties, but willful, task-dependent, brain activation may be the only way to discriminate the conscious, but immobile, patient from the unconscious one.

“The Unconscious” in Current Psychology

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Norman
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Verbal Report ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Operational Definition ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Apparent Lack ◽  
Unconscious Processing ◽  
Unconscious Processes ◽  
Intermediate States ◽  
Definition Of

A series of vignette examples taken from psychological research on motivation, emotion, decision making, and attitudes illustrates how the influence of unconscious processes is often measured in a range of different behaviors. However, the selected studies share an apparent lack of explicit operational definition of what is meant by consciousness, and there seems to be substantial disagreement about the properties of conscious versus unconscious processing: Consciousness is sometimes equated with attention, sometimes with verbal report ability, and sometimes operationalized in terms of behavioral dissociations between different performance measures. Moreover, the examples all seem to share a dichotomous view of conscious and unconscious processes as being qualitatively different. It is suggested that cognitive research on consciousness can help resolve the apparent disagreement about how to define and measure unconscious processing, as is illustrated by a selection of operational definitions and empirical findings from modern cognitive psychology. These empirical findings also point to the existence of intermediate states of conscious awareness, not easily classifiable as either purely conscious or purely unconscious. Recent hypotheses from cognitive psychology, supplemented with models from social, developmental, and clinical psychology, are then presented all of which are compatible with the view of consciousness as a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. Such a view of consciousness would open up for explorations of intermediate states of awareness in addition to more purely conscious or purely unconscious states and thereby increase our understanding of the seemingly “unconscious” aspects of mental life.

Dreamwork as a Window to the Unconscious

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (8) ◽  
pp. 721-722
Author(s):  
Rafael Art. Javier
Keyword(s):  
The Unconscious
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