Theories of the Unconscious and Theories of the Self. Edited by Raphael Stern. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1987, 282 pp., 436.00.

1991 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 826-828
Author(s):  
Sander L. Gilman
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Unconscious

Kierkegaard as Physician of the Soul: On Self-forgiveness and Despair

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon D. Podmore
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Pastoral Identity ◽  
Self Forgiveness ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Divine Forgiveness

Despair (sickness of the spirit) and divine forgiveness are decisive psychological and theological themes essential to both Søren Kierkegaard's relational vision of ‘the self before God’ and his own personal struggles with guilt and the consciousness of sin. Reading Kierkegaard as both a physician and a patient of this struggle, therefore, this article examines The Sickness unto Death (1849) as an attempt to resolve the sinful ‘self’ by integrating a psychological perspective on despair with a theology of the forgiveness of sins. It is suggested that by presenting this integrative notion of self-knowledge through the ‘higher’ Christian pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard is indicting his own resistances to accepting divine forgiveness and thereby operating—via a ‘higher’ pastoral identity—as a physician to his own soul. By diagnosing the unconscious psychological and theological relationships between sin/forgiveness, offense, and human impossibility/divine possibility, Kierkegaard finally reveals faith—as a self-surrendering recognition of acceptance before the Holy Other—to be the key to unlocking the enigma of the self in despair.

scholarly journals The self-face captures attention without consciousness: evidence from the N2pc ERP component analysis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Bola ◽  
Marta Paź ◽  
Łucja Doradzińska ◽  
Anna Nowicka
Keyword(s):  
Face Image ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Face Analysis ◽  
Unconscious Processing ◽  
Familiar Face ◽  
Probe Experiment ◽  
Early Processing ◽  
Own Name ◽  
Key Questions

AbstractIt is well established that stimuli representing or associated with ourselves, like our own name or an image of our own face, benefit from preferential processing. However, two key questions concerning the self-prioritization mechanism remain to be addressed. First, does it operate in an automatic manner during the early processing, or rather in a more controlled fashion at later processing stages? Second, is it specific to the self-related stimuli, or can it be activated also by other stimuli that are familiar or salient? We conducted a dot-probe experiment to investigate the mechanism behind attentional prioritization of the selfface image and to tackle both questions. The former, by employing a backwards masking procedure to isolate the early and preconscious processing stages. The latter, by investigating whether a face that becomes visually familiar due to repeated presentations is able to capture attention in a similar manner as the self-face. Analysis of the N2pc ERP component revealed that the self-face image automatically captures attention, both when processed consciously and unconsciously. In contrast, the visually familiar face did not attract attention, neither in the conscious, nor in the unconscious condition. We conclude that the selfprioritization mechanism is early and automatic, and is not triggered by a mere visual familiarity. More generally, our results provide further evidence for efficient unconscious processing of faces, and for a dissociation between attention and consciousness.

scholarly journals Working on dreams, from neuroscience to psychotherapy

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Caviglia
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Clinical Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
Current Clinical Practice ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Psychoanalytic Approach ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aggressive Drive ◽  
Cultural Openness

Within the current clinical practice, the debate on the use of dream is still very topical. In this article, the author suggests to address this question with a notable scientific and cultural openness that embraces either the psychoanalytic approach (classical, modern and intersubjective), and the neurophysiological assumptions and both clinical research and cognitive hypotheses. The utility of dream - in the clinical work with patients - is supported by the author with extensive bibliographic references and personal clinical insights, drawn from his experience as a psychotherapist. Results: From an analysis of recent literature on this topic, the dream assumes a very different function and position in the clinical practice: from ‘via regia to the unconscious’ of Freudian theories - an expression of repressed infantile wishes of libidinal or aggressive drive nature - it becomes the very fulcrum of the analysis, a fundamental capacity to be developed, a necessary and decisive element for the patient’s transformation. The dream can also be use with the function of thinking and mentalization, of problem solving, of adaptation, as well as an indicator of the relationship with the therapist in the analytic dialogue or of dissociated aspects of the self. Finally, the author proposes a challenging reading of the clinical relevance of dream: through listening to the dream, the clinician can help the patient to stand in the spaces of his own self in a more open and fluid way and therefore to know himself better, to regulate his affects, to think and to integrate oneself.

Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology: Transcendence, Unconscious States and the Limits of Narrative Criminology

2020 ◽  
pp. 136248062091910
Author(s):  
Ben Laws
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Unconscious Processes ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Future Action ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Desistance From Crime

Notions of ‘the self’ in criminology are rarely explored or defined, which is surprising given how pervasively the term is used. According to narrative criminology, the self is generated and moulded by the stories we tell; our identity emerges through narrative scripts and these stories motivate future action. But this understanding of selfhood is quite narrow. This article attempts to widen it by separating selfhood into three categories: ‘the reflexive self’ (the person we think we are); ‘the unconscious self’ (things we do not know that shape us); and ‘the experiencing self’ (the in-the-moment, living and breathing feeling of being alive). The article begins with a critical engagement with the field of narrative criminology which tends to address ‘the reflexive self’ somewhat in isolation. Then a number of findings in criminology, psychology and theology are presented which reveal alternative notions of selfhood. This includes engaging with theological accounts that can be described as transcendent or transpersonal. Second, psychoanalytic research notes how our behaviour is often motivated by unconscious processes that are hard to reconcile with traditional notions of selfhood. There is a call to bring these different ‘selves’ into dialogue and to draw cleaner distinctions between them. Increasing our understanding of selfhood helps us to think more clearly about key criminological debates, such as the causal mechanisms undergirding adaptation and desistance from crime.

Interpreting the Uninterpretable: The Ethics of Opaqueness as an Approach to Moments of Inscrutability in Fieldwork

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xymena Kurowska
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relational Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Construction Of Meaning ◽  
Narrative Practice

Abstract This paper develops what I call “the ethics of opaqueness” as a response to conceptual impasses concerning the uninterpretability of intersubjective knowledge production in narrative practice. The ethics of opaqueness sees the other as inscrutable and radically heterogenous, and confronts interpretations of the other by the self as suspicious projections. Thus, such an ethics addresses the self, not the other, as the object of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In order to conceptualize the ethics of opaqueness, I look to relational psychoanalysis, which understands the unconscious as being inherently intersubjective. This results in a reformulation of the process of recognition, and deeper acknowledgment of countertransference—that is, the partly unconscious conflicts activated in the researcher through the research encounter, which may lead to imposing meaning on the other. The apparatus of relational psychoanalysis concretizes the limits of knowing either the other or the self and supplies a vocabulary to crystallize the double quality of “uninterpretable moments” in narrative practice. They may trigger an imposition of a frame and therefore an interpretive closure; however, they also supply a potentially transformative space for the contentious co-construction of meaning, often in the form of metaphors, which subverts any claim to interpretive mastery.

Amnesia and the Externalized Personality in Early Dostoevskii

Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Tripartite Model ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Active Suppression ◽  
Classical Studies

By tracing a pattern through Fedor Dostoevskii's early stories–especially The Double, “The Landlady,” andNetochka Nezvanova–in which characters are bound to each other as interacting aspects of a larger personality, Yuri Corrigan explores the problem of individual identity. Entering into debate with classical studies of the self in Dostoevskii from Mikhail Bakhtin to Nikolai Berdiaev, Corrigan explores how the active suppression of memory and interiority in Dostoevskii's early characters gives rise to the mechanism of intersecting selves, in which the inner architecture of one personality is extended throughout numerous consciousnesses. Through an analysis of these relationships, Corrigan examines how Dostoevskii synthesizes two traditions of doubling in his early writing–the “cognitive” dualism of self-consciousness and the “psychic” dualism of the unconscious–to form a tripartite model of personality that will be important for his later novels.

Theories of the Unconscious and Theories of the Self

1990 ◽  
Vol 147 (6) ◽  
pp. 804-805
Author(s):  
HENRY J. FRIEDMAN
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Unconscious

Some words on Jung, self, and mandala

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (100) ◽  
pp. 71-76
Author(s):  
T.V. Danylova ◽  
◽  
I.M. Hoian ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Human ◽  
Natural Process ◽  
Analytical Psychology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Spiritual Unity

Trying to reconcile the continuity of being with the discreteness of consciousness, modern seekers for the truth appeal to the Eastern mystical traditions based on the idea of the unity of all things and singularity of the world. In terms of analytical psychology, to overcome the human alienation from the world and from themselves is to return to his/her Self. C.G. Jung considered the reintegration of a personality to be a prerequisite for solving the spiritual, social, ethical, and political problems humanity is facing now. This process is the basis for the integrity of the psyche. Successful reintegration requires centering, that is, unification with everything that exists into one organic whole. Observing his patients, the psychoanalyst concluded that the idea of centering was archetypal to the spiritual pole of the unconscious. His therapy was aimed at achieving the Self in the process of individuation, i.e., the reintegration of the instinctive and spiritual poles of the psyche. The process of individuation is similar to the reintegration process in Yoga philosophy, which is symbolized by a mandala that reintegrates the perception of the world and helps us to reconcile with the total cosmic reality. According to C.G. Jung, a mandala is the universal psychic image, the symbol of the Oneness, the deep essence of the human soul. C.G. Jung believed that the achievement of the Self was a natural process embedded in the individuals. The questions posed by a great psychoanalyst push us into searching for ourselves, the golden mean in ourselves, our actions, and our views. The salvation of a modern human in the contemporary world full of conflicts is to find the way to the spiritual unity with humankind, which is the highest manifestation of the spiritual unity with the universe. This becomes possible due to a return to our Self. The paper aims at analyzing the Jungian concept of the Self in the context of oriental religious and philosophical teachings.

The Self and the Soul

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omnia El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Dialogical Relationship ◽  
Divine Transcendence ◽  
Elective Affinities ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reconstructs a historical interlude between Sufism and psychoanalytic psychology in postwar Egypt. It considers how we might think through the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Islamic tradition, while respecting the “ontological stakes” of the latter, namely, the belief in divine transcendence and divine discourse. The chapter addresses this question through a detailed exploration of the writings of Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani and his mentor Muhammad Mustafa Hilmi, both prominent Egyptian intellectuals who expounded Sufi ideas for a broader reading public, beginning in the 1940s. Situating these figures within the larger intellectual and religious context of mid-twentieth-century Egypt, this chapter explores the elective affinities between Sufism and certain strands of psychoanalysis in terms of a dialogical relationship between the self and the Other, as mediated by the unconscious.

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